Dating💘 with a mental health diagnosis☣️
Simply stated, dating with a diagnosis is much more complicated, problematic, and riddled with more expectations and appropriate use of self-disclosure than healthy courting.
Max E. Guttman, LCSW
Max E. Guttman is the owner of Recovery Now, L.LC, a private mental health practice in New York City. Through his work as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, therapist, and disability rights advocate, Max fights for those without a voice in various New York City care systems. He received a ‘2020 Bearcats of the Last Decade 10 Under 10’ award from the Binghamton University Alumni Association.
‘I knew my illness was so complex that I’d need a professional understanding of its treatment to gain any real momentum in recovery,’ Guttman says. ‘After undergraduate school and the onset of my illness, I evaluated different graduate programs that could serve as a career and mechanism to guide and direct my self-care. After experiencing the helping hand of my social worker and therapist right after my ‘break,’ I chose social work education because of its robust skill set and foundation of knowledge I needed to heal and help others.’
‘In a world of increasing tragedy, we should help people learn from our lived experiences. My experience brings humility, authenticity, and candidness to my practice. People genuinely appreciate candidness when it comes to their health and Recovery. Humility provides space for mistakes and appraisal of progress. I thank my lived experience for contributing to a more egalitarian therapeutic experience for my clients.’
This is what the Mental Health system does…
The words used to talk about mental health matter.
The ‘New Norm’: this is as good as it gets
The only issue is what constitutes ‘help’? Professionals in mental health cant agree.
Operation Psych-OUT
Back then, before the last discharge at New York State Psychiatric Center on Wards Island was when I first agreed to this calling….
BOOK REVIEW: A PAUSE IN THE WESTERN RHYTHM by Ember Manos-Belle
Grace is not afraid to insert her own thoughts and feelings and frame them in the trauma and grief she has endured in a domineering Arabic “courtship”
Seeking the help of a Tertiary Care Hospital
I once understood levels of care as abstractions when sifting through a clinical grey area. I now understand each of these precious stops in the system of care as levels of hope.
BOOK REVIEW: Life with Voices by Dmitriy Gutkovich
Life with Voices: A Guide for Harmony by Dmitriy Gutkovich is a complex, detail-oriented users’ manual for the Voice Hearing community and voice hearers.
Language and Stigma: The Objectification of Mental Illness
‘Othering’ serves to not only create an object of hatred but also of people’s discrimination.
Interdisciplinary parity: Which is the right clinical pathway forward?
Thinking about progress is critical for both consumers and practitioners
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Breakdown’ by Lynn Nanos
These case examples, while vivid, and telling of the extreme dysfunction in the system, are extremely black and white, with little grey area for clinical interpretation in terms of direction in the provision of patient care and treatment.
Understanding the Role of Support when Living with a Chronic and Persistent Mental Health Disorder
Whatever the stressor, life’s negative turns can be due to the impact of mental health symptoms or just tragic extraneous circumstances.
Mcdaggot’s Demise
Mcdaggot moved from receptionist job to secretarial positions but never seemed to make it past an assistant to someone more capable and better suited for the stronger and more lofty position.
(Re)-Defining the Language of Mental Health EVEN Further
How can we best further refine the language around mental health?
EDITOR-in-Chief DAN FREY AND CITY VOICES
A good friend of mine, a licensed social worker and peer advocate, said to me once last year: “Max, you certainly love writing about your lived experience, have you ever considered contacting CITY VOICES?” I had no idea what City Voices was when she first suggested I contact their […]
The Great Stingie War
In the end, it was the sheer size and strength of the stingies that overtook the sheer volume and numbers we had behind us.
BOOK REVIEW: Climbing toward November
Book Review of Climbing Toward November by Ember Manos-Belle
Cutting. Emotional Numbness and Pain. (Content/Trigger warning🔴)
Instead, physical pain and lots of it began emerged from cutting myself.
Auschwitz and the the Liberation of Ruth
I worked alongside Ruth at a mental health clinic down in the bario, 3rd Avenue.
Auschwitz and the Liberation of Ruth
We’re survivors”, Ruth said, reminding me yet again that this too shall pass. I worked alongside Ruth at a mental health clinic down in the barrio, 3rd Avenue. The Bronx, as south as it gets before the bridge into Manhattan and slightly further, Queens, Astoria country. Ruth had […]
The War Time Social Worker
There is a reason why you bring on the war time social worker into the clinical picture
We Created the Mental Health Crisis
In doing so, the crisis is really man made.
From Madness to Healing and back again. The Odyssey through the Toxic Connective Tissue
I have become the very social enigma that evokes fear amongst his own peers
Lexington and Fifth
“I’m on Lexington and Fifth, darling”
Speech Process then and now, and First Onset Psychosis
I have not gone about changing the way I handle things because I simply wanted to be spontaneous and change things up.
Mental Health Affairs 
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