Addressing Symptoms… Learned Helplessness Must be Stopped🔴 30 Jan 201930 Jan 2019 One of my biggest struggles as a social worker in the human services is challenging learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a phenomena in which clients, patients, or any person connected…
Education… Rejected and/or “kicked-out” of Treatment: Untimely discharges and subpar linkages🔄 9 Aug 201814 Aug 2018 Finding the right treatment fit can be difficult. Not only are therapists important to try-on, so are facilities, programs, and treatment centers. This article evolves out of my experience in…
Adventure… The Mystique of Psychosis 29 Jul 201829 Jul 2018 Psychosis is experienced by people carrying its active constellation of corresponding and altogether unique symptoms differently. At different times, along a spectrum, psychosis symptoms exist in a dark harmony, sometimes…
Addressing Symptoms… Addressing Symptoms: Extended Metaphors, Ideas-of-Reference 28 Jul 201828 Jul 2018 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…
Cover Stories… The Peer Standard⚖️ 25 Jul 201814 Aug 2018 There is an unspoken, invisible and arbitrary standard for being for every oppressed group living in the United States and everywhere discrimination goes without question. This social norm and standard…
Addressing Symptoms… The Criminalization🚨of Mental Illness 15 Jul 201814 Aug 2018 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…
Education… Addressing Symptoms: Stilted Language, Perseveration, Word Salad 13 Jul 201816 Jul 2018 Anyone who knows me personally or professionally is aware of my love of language. As a person diagnosed with schizophrenia and a lover of language, the road to recovery and…
Cover Stories… The Fear of Self-Disclosure🗣 12 Jul 201814 Aug 2018 We all talk about ourselves to other people in our lives. We talk about the day-to-day bullshit, the victories, however small, the good, the bad; all of it. As a…
Cover Stories… The Myth of High Functioning📊 10 Jul 201814 Aug 2018 I hear it all the time working in Mental Health and also as a person carrying a diagnosis. It's a term that is both misused and overused, infantilizing, and laden…
Adventure… Dismantling state-level psychiatric centres: instituting full community access and integration 14 Jun 201811 Sep 2018 This paper presents a long-overdue proposal to the New York Office of Mental Health (NY-OMH) to close state psychiatric centers and discharge all remaining patients into the community. From long-term…
Addressing Symptoms… Repositioning symptomatology for mental health conditions post DSM-5 7 Jun 20187 Jun 2018 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…
Addressing Symptoms… Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Re-Imagining Treatment 12 May 201813 May 2018 Background:I have been a consumer of mental health services for a litany of diagnoses including but not limited to NPD. With this said, this presentation is intended to explore existing…
Peer… The Modern Psychiatric In-Patient Technician: Skilled Worker or Guard? 10 Mar 201810 Mar 2018 One of my earliest memories as an adolescent in an in-patient unit was the tall, stocky men brazenly hanging around the treatment areas, lounge, and nurses station. These people were…
Addressing Symptoms… Chronic Illness & Recovery: Setting the Pace for Sustainable Healing 9 Mar 201811 Jul 2018 For people with a chronic illness and long standing mental health diagnosis finding the right pace for recovery & healing can be difficult and even misleading at times during the…
Addressing Symptoms… No Flowers for People with a Mental Health Disorder 1 Mar 201811 Jul 2018 When a person walks into a medical facility, hospital, or otherwise, they walk right past the gift shop. Usually, people walk right past it, just to ask someone else passing…
Experience in Mental Health… Selfless Living 7 Feb 20187 Feb 2018 ''soliciting my grandmother for money for a project and then, when she told my mother, I denied the event, blaming her misunderstanding of my behavior on her dementia...' I've lived…
Peer… The Future of Recovery Now❗️ 6 Feb 20186 Feb 2018 "In doing so, the consortium has conscripted the Anointment of a Health Czar💂♀️..." People around the globe are wondering what exactly is the future of Recovery Now? Across the…
For Clinical Use Only… Recovery is a Privilege 10 Jan 2018 I have been privileged in my recovery in many ways. There are many forms of privilege people can "benefit" from, most of the time, at the expense, of others. During my…
Peer… NAMI doesn’t Speak for US 25 Dec 201720 Feb 2018 "So, when I say, or hear, that NAMI doesn't speak for us, it is because they speak for my mother, my father, my brother, but not me" The Mental Health…
For Clinical Use Only… The Commodification of Empathy: How Authenticity is Packaged for Consumption in the Mental Health System 24 Dec 2017 We want counselors, therapists & peers to be authentic. But what does that really mean in the context of systems of care? Authenticity is commonly defined as true to own's…