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.’
I have a framed portrait of the Titanic in my mental health private practice. Many people ask me: What does the Titanic have to do with having good mental health and practising self-management? The answer is, it has everything to do with exhibiting good mental health. This past holiday season, I […]
There is no question that family participation in a person’s mental health treatment is beneficial and critical to manage the long-standing problems that surface during a person’s recovery from a mental health disorder. This message was communicated to my parents Jane and Frank Guttman when I was an […]
his writer has a profound fascination with attention-seeking behavior(s). Also, profoundly astute at capturing the attention of peers, family, and friends, this writer is also no stranger to these histrionic red flags into a possible personality disorder.
Let us be completely honest, some of know, without too much consideration and thought, exactly how to gain our peers, friends, and family’s attention. Conversely, some of us could not get the attention they were seeking if their life depended on it. The level and intensity of attention-seeking behavior begin and ends with the ability, tenacity, and creativity of the person seeking attention. Attention seeking behaviors can be attributed to various mental health diagnoses. To correctly identify which diagnosis, the clinician will need to evaluate the behavior very carefully closed.
For most personality disorders, including, but not limited to Narcissistic Personality disorder, Histrionic, and Borderline, the clinician will need to evaluate the intentions or motives of the person seeking attention. Motives, intentions, and the general goals of anyone seeking attention should be the primary indicators that someone is seeking attention is trying to make up for, or satisfy a character-logical deficit. I am suggesting that if the motive is clear, the intention purposeful, and the aim is to gain others’ attention. Then, satisfy an individual’s thirst and make up for their shorting comings or lack of insight into an interpersonal situation gone awry then beware.
In terms of NPD, the reason or rationale for seeking attention is probably, first and foremost, to satisfy a personal deficit in self-worth or self-esteem. For people carrying a diagnosis of Histrionic personality disorder, the aim is creating hysteria to mask whatever set of bad decisions or personal choices occur or require concealing and hiding to shift the focus to something more benign and innocuous. In terms of patients carrying a borderline diagnosis, the attention-seeking behaviors are aimed at splitting and causing such chaos around them, that the ability to take ownership or accountability takes a backseat to the clinician focusing primarily on the week’s crisis.
Nevertheless, these diagnoses are not the only ones in which attention-seeking behavior is by the patients who carry the mental health disorder. Thus, patients with personality disorders are primarily attributed to enacting attention-seeking behaviors above other less performative. We, as clinicians and friends of people carrying a mental health diagnosis, need to remember why? From an epidemiological standpoint, diagnoses are merely the markers of the incidence and distribution of symptoms in patients. From a mental health perspective, we clinicians and friends need to remember all humans seek behavior at different levels, even at cross-purposes, and always to connect with other people fundamentally. While this should be a given axiom in mental health, it is not! Only when these behaviors create extreme distress, for the person exhibiting or displaying the behavior, and the people in their social world is truly diagnosable and problematic.
As stated before, mastering grabbing the attention of peers and other colleagues is simple. After going through such extreme lengths to capture attention, and experiencing the police show up at the door. Rigor, persistence, and aim were so alarming and off the mark in terms of purpose that everyone was puzzled. Again, this is when attention-seeking goes awry. Over the years, since this writer has been in mental health and learning to scale back, and generally decrease the intensity and viability of behaviors. This writer is very good at gaining a peers’ attention without making it clear as day from when I began to enter the social scene.
As a society, we have begun to truly mark, identify those seeking attention, and shame them for such behaviors. Not entirely sure this is the right path or the best way to handle such behaviors. Collectively, we need to make it clear that such behavior is unwelcome, unwarranted, and not necessarily appropriate. We give the person seeking such behavior precisely what they are looking for when displaying such untoward or visibly obnoxious scenes.
I believe people need to take a more psychologically sound and driven approach when putting the blinders up. Actively ignoring and minimizing or better yet, making it clear through our body language and words, these sorts of displays are ineffective in capturing our attention and keeping it.
I was asked to write down three things I cannot live without on a piece of scrap paper for a seminar on interpretation.
There is no question, that the language of the social work profession is limitless as an agent of change and transformation.
My message continues to be different
In April of that Spring, I was not only receiving assistance through the disabilities office on campus, I was also speaking at their ceremony and reception for graduating students.
This was to be the first semester of my graduate education in English. I had just completed 19 winter session credits across five universities in New York State. After this last semester with my friends still students at Binghamton, i would enter into a JD law school program […]
Citing and awarding merit for people beleiving in my recovery.
I was an English major in college. Like many students studying language, I loved words, meaning-making, and using rhetoric to both dazzle and re-orient my listener to whatever I was spitting out of my mouth. Indeed, like most students, and English majors, I loved buzzwords, and the word-of-the […]
Fully alive means more than just framing the world in more positive terms.
There are a lot of articles out there all over the internet, newspapers, and mental health forums talking about the increasing violence in the community stemming from inadequate mental health awareness, access to treatment, and laws surrounding forced treatment. Even more abundant is writing on people with severe […]
To this day, my speech continues to heal, and I am being more vigilant these days about the quality and content of wording and status of my language.
Most people do not realize that there is no such thing as high-functioning.
The vision in his mind is of a Brave Experiment.
This following presentation is the long-overdue plan and proposal to the office of mental health to shutdown the state psychiatric centers and discharge all remaining patients to the community
In the throes of madness, I have found some form of peace to hold on to like an anchor while discovering my innermost serenity. Only at the very end of my tormented nights was I unable to identify a technique to self-manage the chaos around me. At that […]
Walking into your therapist’s office, you feel a mix of apprehension and vulnerability. As you sit down, you notice your therapist’s eyes intently assessing your mental state even before you speak. And then, it happens – the floodgates of emotions, insecurities, and vulnerabilities open up. But it’s not […]
In the summer of 2008, mid-July, I was ready for discharge from Binghamton State Psychiatric Center. Of course, readiness for discharge from a state hospital by no means signals the completion of the healing process, but it does set the stage for what would become a decade of […]
The worst thing in the world is to have had the opportunity to fix or resolve a problem and to sit on one’s hands or let the chance pass us by without taking action. While some issues take us by surprise, e.g. breakthrough symptoms, new symptoms, or unexpected […]
There is no question that food is apart of our identity. What we eat, how, when, where, and if we eat a particular food speaks to our culture, ethnicity, history, and relationship with food. People with a mental health diagnosis are no exception. & yet, in hospitals, specifically […]
This is the climax scene. Everyone is here for your big finish”. I was ecstatic. My movie, according to the voices, was finally over. We could all be together again.
I would be at this disposal and will of these poorly trained and quick-tempered workers.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CHOICE AND FREEDOM IN CHOOSING OUR CARE HAS BECOME A RIGHT.
There seems to be several types of mental health blogs on the market. Clinical blogs, peer blogs based on personal experiences, hybrid blogs which combine both aspects of recovery, and research re-blogged materials from across the web. I would hazard to say blogs focusing on prevention and the […]
Mental Health Affairs 
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