Common Values of Peer Specialists
Each individual has their unique value and value system
The Original Peer Support Recovery and Coping Skills Workbook & Curriculum
Ushering in a ‘Post-Pat Deegan’ era in recovery rhetoric.
What is the connection between mental illnesses and violence?
Humans kill people for a diversity of reasons.
SCHIZOPHRENIA HAS NOT ROBBED ME OF LIFE’S JOYS
Joy comes in all forms and feels transcendent wherever I experience Life, with or without a mental illness.
The Brazil-United States Center for the Promotion of Mental Health
The American School of Human Rights will promote the Mental Health Project in all regions of the world
The intersection of the Law, Justice, and Mental Health
Law affirms the sense of Justice to be innate
Establishing the 1st International Treaty for Rights and Duties in Mental Health
Experience makes us see the importance of seeking standardized protocolsRead More
Deputy Director of South American Affairs
Mental Health Affairs has always been an international mission atRead More
CELEBRATING MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS MONTH
There are significant reasons for having Mental Health Awareness Month.
2 responsesGOOD SUPPORT IS VITAL FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
People battling extreme conditions need support in their lives
Managing Your Mental Health on the Job
How does this factor into managing your mental health on the job?
Help! Mom and Dad Didn’t Teach Me How to Live in This Crazy World
Religious writing offers emotional and spiritual guidance
SELF MANAGING DELUSIONAL SYSTEMS
Delusions put the ‘crazy’ in madness. Delusions can carve outRead More
RETHINKING TREATMENT FOR NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER (NPD)
Psychotherapy’s primary focus should not be symptom management
HOW TO BENEFIT THE MOST FROM YOUR MENTAL HEALTH THERAPY
The ‘work’ or doing ‘work’ in therapy makes the difference in treatment every time
TREATMENT FIT WITH MENTAL HEALTH PROVIDERS
When I arrived at their E&R, I was taken into a room and told I was no longer welcome at the clinic and needed to go elsewhere for services.
How do social workers define help
Social work means answering questions in people’s lives without clear resolution.
The Fear of Self-Disclosure🗣
Share, feel free to disclose all aspects of your lived experience and mental health history.
1 responseWinter can be challenging when you have a mental health condition
This article explores the importance of maintaining wellness during the cold winter
New Freedom, The Manifesto of J. Peters
J.Peters came with his brave experiment. And we all became more human.’
Psychotic ‘Break’ Survival Skill Kit
Most people don’t realize something is wrong with their thinking
When Person-Centered Care takes a WRONG turn
I’ve been in treatment for severe mental illness my entire adult life.
Issues of Longevity and Mental Health
Issues of Longevity and Mental Health There is no questionRead More
Language and Mental Health: Living and Communicating our Lived Experience
There is tectonic shift in mental health language
The Communication and Support That Allows Progress in Treatment
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- Diagnosis
- Fighting against Mental Illness
- health issues
- identity
- Reform
- Systems Issues
- THEORY
Patients are triggered by treatment providers without empathy
Inside the mindset of defeat
Operation Clausewitz was the German solution to the military situation in Europe in 1945
Going to Social Work school with a Schizophrenia diagnosis
- ACADEMIA
- BELIEFS
- Diagnosis
- HEALTH HOMES
- Independent Living
- Self-Management
- social worker
- Student
- symptoms
Careful about managing my schizophrenia symptoms
This is a PRO Tobacco Use Argument in Mental Health Settings
This trend defies the age-old image of ‘mentally ill’ folks pacing around outside their treatment center or a hospital smoking like chimneys
Until when? (Full Translation Espanol/Portugues)
We can learn together that we are stronger even in the face of natural catastrophes—human response and action triumphs in the end.
Partying with a Mental Health Disorder
I told him, point-blank, that Medicaid doesn’t pay for out-of-state trips to the ER
RELATIONSHIP ABUSE and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Relationship abuse occurs across a broad spectrum of the population
Targeting the clinical grey areas in mental health treatment
Treating clinical ‘symptoms’ is not the biggest clinical issue
SPECIAL REPORT: Re-thinking ‘Extended Care’ units in State Hospital Centers
Remaining patients in the long-term state psychiatric centres must be discharged and released from the eternal holding
How to Define Recovery A Radical Idea
Here’s the thing: having a normal life shouldn’t be the barometer of how well a person is doing in recovery.
How a brain injury through an accident enabled the help, I deserved but wasn’t getting
I had been searching for 4 years starting in 2003 for a treatment that could help my whole sense of being.
I am a mental health advocate, but still feel shame about my own struggles at times.
Sometimes, I felt guilty about keeping my mental health to myself.
Vitor Sallys Story according to His siter Vitoria Sallys
- Change
- CLINICAL
- complicit
- Crisis
- FASCISM
- Fighting against Mental Illness
- Future
- health issues
- human rights issues
- Intervention
- LONG TERM CARE
- Reform
The mental health system brutally violated Vitor’s rights.
Human Rights Coalition for Latin America Mental Hygiene & Social Justice
- Abuse
- ACADEMIA
- Change
- Crisis
- Diagnosis
- Health
- help
- human rights issues
- Intervention
- Reform
- Systems Issues
The OBDH (Observatorio Brasileiro de Diretos Humanos) have been working intensively ever since its creation helping and supporting all Brazilian peopl
The Impact of Words on our Psyches
- BELIEFS
- Change
- Craig Lewis
- Fighting against Mental Illness
- J.PETERS
- Muse
- Peer
- positive thinking
- PROSUMER
- REALITY TESTING
- Stress-free
This is about you doing you, because no one else can do you better.
Peers betraying Peers, and Relapse
The reasons are so multifaceted and nuanced, flagrant, and most assuredly un peers like
Gross Violence Against People with a Mental Health diagnosis in Brazil
- Abuse
- brazil
- Change
- Crisis
- Diagnosis
- Fighting against Mental Illness
- Health
- health issues
- human rights issues
- Independent Living
- Politics
- Reform
- Systems Issues
On June 17, 2021, in Brazil, Police invaded a homeRead More
Human Rights Violations in Brazil: The Case of Vavá
Vavá is a young man with the mental disorder Schizophrenia
Crisis Interventions: Cops. Peers. What is the right path forward?
The issue that hinges on the docket is Emergency Mental Health
My life as an Artist with Psychosis
- Change
- CHRONIC CONDITION
- Diagnosis
- health issues
- identity
- Independent Living
- Music
- Pathway
- PROSUMER
- Reform
- self control
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- Systems Issues
- Transformation
My time playing was plagued by paranoia and hallucinations in the meantime.
Exercising the Right to Speak Out
- Abuse
- Change
- Diagnosis
- Future
- Health
- health issues
- identity
- Peer
- Peer Specialist
- PROSUMER
- Reform
- social worker
- symptoms
Clinicians must respect our rights
Derangement
if we can’t see these behaviours in ourselves, how would we describe them in other people
Effects Of “Broken Brain Syndrome”
I was led to believe I would be forever “sick” no matter how successful my recovery or how creative my writing production.
The Value of Good Complex Case Management for Comorbid Psychiatric Issues
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- CLINICAL
- Comorbid
- Diagnosis
- DISABILITIES
- GUIDE
- Health
- health issues
- Lifestyle
- LONG TERM CARE
- PROSUMER
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- symptoms
- THEORY
However, my efforts were not always enough, and on two occasions, I was given rental violations due to my disorganized apartment.
Breaking The Rules Saved A Man’s Life
- Abuse
- Childhood Trauma
- Diagnosis
- Future
- identity
- MA
- Pathway
- Peer
- Peer Specialist
- PROSUMER
- Vengeance
- Victim
I told him he “looked like shit” and asked if he had slept or eaten.
‘Identity Politics’ and Mental Health
Cultural re-appropriation is rife and considered business as usual in Western psychiatry
Melancholy
- Change
- CLINICAL
- depression
- Diagnosis
- Health
- health issues
- identity
- Lifestyle
- Melancholia
- pandemic
- PROSUMER
- symptoms
- Terms
Sufferers from ‘depression’ have fearful difficulties in trying to come off antidepressants because they revert to their involutional melancholia.
When Creativity Calls, When Your Alibi is Art
Around the same time I registered for class I walked into a shrink’s office
My journey in mental health housing and recommendations for change and reform
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- CHRONIC CONDITION
- CLINICAL
- Commitment
- GHETTO
- GUIDE
- HOUSING
- Pathway
- PROSUMER
- symptoms
Those of us with mental illness know full well thatRead More
Systems-based disparities for African American Medicaid Recipients in the NY OMH Article 31 Clinic
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I’VE BEEN DISCHARGED?” “YOU’VE MISSED TWORead More
Finding Higher Purpose in Affection
I think it’s important to ask: when I say “I need you,” what am I saying?
MARCH WINDS AND APRIL SHOWERS BRING MAY REVENGE
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- CLINICAL
- Crisis
- Eddie Franklin jr.
- Fighting against Mental Illness
- help
- identity
- Muse
- Self Help
- Vengeance
- Victim
With therapy every other week and medication from a psychiatrist monthly, his life has improved
Upward mobility: Steering recovery in the right direction
The vehicle can crash on its way to point B and not make it to its destination
Plan B: Relapse and reconstitution
- CHRONIC CONDITION
- CLINICAL
- Crisis
- Health
- health issues
- help
- HOUSING
- LONG TERM CARE
- positive thinking
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- symptoms
- THEORY
Like most thoughts surrounding fear, paranoia, and anxious thinking, they all snowball
STIGMA: PEER SERVICES, DOUBLE STANDARD, AND SELF-DISCLOSURE
Peers, through the act of self-disclosure, reveal their lived experience at work in the agency all the time.
From sickness to illness, we have now birthed the modern mental health disorder
From an illness of the soul to the mind, medicalization has crept into mental health in all ways.
Eleven years and no progress
- bipolar disorder
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- CHRONIC CONDITION
- CLINICAL
- Diagnosis
- health issues
- HOUSING
- LONG TERM CARE
- Self Help
- symptoms
I would later find out that cases like Minerva exist everywhere, and she is no more unique than her biography is to other people with a mental health disorder who share their story.
Reflections on Mental Health treatment: Recommendations for reform
- CASE MANAGEMENT
- Change
- CLINICAL
- Diagnosis
- GUIDE
- health issues
- Reform
- revision
- symptoms
- Systems Issues
- Terms
- THEORY
My overreactions were to behaviors I considered as threatening
The ‘Sign’, ‘Signified’ and “Psychosis’: The Intersection of Language and Psychosis
Ultimately, the symptoms are overwhelming and become so profound that life becomes too distant and unrecognizable to live without incident.
Lack of caring can create unthinkable tragedy
- bipolar disorder
- CHRONIC CONDITION
- CLINICAL
- Diagnosis
- health issues
- identity
- LONG TERM CARE
- PROSUMER
- REALITY TESTING
- self control
- Self Help
- symptoms
- Terms
I find it problematic to count all the regrets I have had throughout my life.
Introducing: Urban Space and Race
- Change
- Crisis
- EVICTION
- Future
- GENTRIFICATION
- GERRYMANDERING
- GHETTO
- GUIDE
- Pathway
- Reform
- revision
- Self Help
- Systems Issues
- Terms
- THEORY
Starting the week of April 4, 2021, I will be posting weekly episodes of a series called “Urban Space and Race”
What is considered ‘normal’ behavior for a teenager in High School?
Some students fall into a social “no-fly zone”
VOLUNTEERING FOR OUR MENTAL HEALTH
- Diagnosis
- Entertainment
- help
- INTERN
- NAMI
- Peer
- positive thinking
- PROSUMER
- Self Help
- social worker
- Student
- Systems Issues
- volunteering
I am aware that not all volunteer jobs lead to paid employment
The relationship between “Inner work” and Symptom Management
Resolution of inner conflicts has a direct impact on how my life has unfolded
Blockages to reforming the ‘system’
The mental health movement was a civil rights movement, but what happened?
The ‘Point’ Person: Care-Coordination
Being a leader means knowing the immediate mental status of their patients
1 responsePreventing, Predicting, & Dismantling Problems Ahead
- Crisis
- health issues
- help
- Pathway
- REALITY TESTING
- revision
- self control
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- THEORY
Asking yourself: “What issues seem to pop up consistently?”
SNL’s ‘LOCO’ Speaks a Truth about ‘Displays’ rooted in Mental Illness
hen the worker finds him or herself front and center in the life of the client. Becoming the object of their desire and madness, emotions and even feelings of safety become subsumed into the client’s new playground.
LADY MACBETH AND OCD
she is obsessively washing her hands while sleepwalking due to guilt.
1 responseFEBRUARY STILL REFLECTING ON DECEMBER
- BIDEN
- Celebrities
- Change
- COVID-19
- Crisis
- ELECTION 2020
- Future
- Howard Diamond
- identity
- Peer
- positive thinking
- racism
- Reform
- Systems Issues
- TRUMP
Success and failure are different for each of us, but we do strive for the former
What exactly does it mean to be a Peer?
Either we disband every manual out there in mental health, or we must only use the DSM-5
1 responseBOOK REVIEW: Better Days by Craig Lewis (CPS)
Mr. Lewis dishes out recovery in fabulously palatable forward-thinking pieces of narration and encouragement
De-bunking ACCCEPTANCE and COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT)
ACT is a ‘third wave’ behaviour therapy approach with a supposedly ‘expanded perspective on how to guide clients to skilfully self-regulate.emotional distress and conflicting states of mind’,
Undiagnosed (Part Two): Schizophrenia or Wicked Healing (East Coast Slang)
That is why I took all the pills; to make me better.
1 responseThe ‘truth’ about ‘fuctional’ impairments
- Change
- health issues
- help
- identity
- PROSUMER
- revision
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- symptoms
- Systems Issues
- Terms
- THEORY
Noone who read my writing can deny that I believe in recovery
DO YOU WANT TO BE A VOLUNTEER?
Volunteering is willingly working on behalf of others without the expectation of pay or other tangible gains.
HARPs at 5 Years: What Have We Learned?
- Diagnosis
- DISABILITIES
- HEALTH HOMES
- health issues
- Reform
- revision
- Self Help
- Systems Issues
- Terms
- THEORY
The state agencies cited are by no means the only entities working to achieve these goals
Undiagnosed (Part One): Why Was I Given a Psychiatric Diagnosis?
My parents were taught that “love” was the same as “abuse”; and sadly, it has always been that way.
Neo-Institutionalization: The Overregulation of Community Mental Health
Neo-institutionalization evolved and came into being out of the clumsy rollout of de-institutionalization policies in the 1970 and 1980s.
GOODBYE IS STILL GOODBYE
Adios, arrivederci, au revoir, shalom, ciao, goodbye.
All of them say goodbye, but they say much, much more…
Politics and the ‘status’ of our National Mindset
Amid the struggle, heartache, loss, betrayal, and disappointment can be not easy to find the strength and motivation to keep going in life.
Combating STIGMA and DISCRIMINATION
The words STIGMA and DISCRIMINATION make our overall situations exceedingly tricky.
BINARY RELATIONSHIPS COMPLICATING THE CLINICAL PROCESS
It subsumes the patient and encircles him or her in its grasp.
The Early Warning System
- AFFECT
- Change
- Diagnosis
- health issues
- help
- positive thinking
- self control
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- symptoms
- Terms
I want to introduce a concept called the Early Warning System
I was just following orders…
Are you complicit in using similar rhetoric to achieve your aim and hide your intentions?
The Mental Health Advocacy Spectruum
Why are these the poster patients of AOT? Because the most severely ‘disordered’ folks do not benefit from AOT.
1 responseSleeping Amid the Ruins
- bipolar disorder
- health issues
- Peer
- Science
- self control
- Self Help
- Self-Management
- sleeping
- symptoms
I have insomnia, and only sometimes feel somnolent.
ELECTION DAY WITH OCD
- BIDEN
- Diagnosis
- ELECTION 2020
- Entertainment
- help
- revision
- Self Help
- symptoms
- Systems Issues
- Terms
- TRUMP
ARIZONA, GEORGIA, NEVADA, PENNSYLVANIA LEANING TO BIDEN ALASKA, NORTH CAROLINARead More
ANXIETY: SIMILAR FOR HAMLET AND FOR US
Keep in mind everyone, anxieties, and Mental Health Issues are not death sentences.
Keeping your Head Above Water
Too often it seems we are trapped in our own ignorance, mistakes, and deficits. I