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.
Here’s the thing: having a normal life shouldn’t be the barometer of how well a person is doing in recovery.
Vavá is a young man with the mental disorder Schizophrenia
The system is broken. We all know it. We all preach it. When reflecting upon my experiences, both personal, and professional, I remember this short exchange between myself and a big wig, a clinician-craft, in the system of care. “You’re not easy to serve” the director of care […]
So, I read an article today on the Mighty titled: “I’m not high functioning- and I’m okay with that”. So, this is more complicated than it seems, to quote the article. In the DSM 4, the GAF or Global Assessment of Functioning, attempts to capture the ability of […]
The pictures posted are from a secretly videotaped meeting with my care manager and his director at a non-profit agency in Westchester NY. For three months, I have been calling and trying to reach my care manager. I left message after message for weeks for this person. It’s […]
When I first began writing about mental health, and topics concerning my own experience with schizophrenia, I was a bit naive. I thought since I lived through “this”, meaning, the various incidents, challenges, and pitfalls of my disorder people who struggled with similar hazards in their life could […]
There is nothing more profound than healing and recovery from extreme perilous circumstances and returning to a more normal life.
I have been accused of several crimes, socially unacceptable behaviors, and a litany of outrageous transgressions during my mental illness.
In the last decade, I have made no secret my skepticism about the clinical value of new research in mental health. I am just not confident we are targeting the right areas or bodies of underdeveloped research and moving forward in the important or needed areas to truly […]
I am a very, very passionate learner. I believe in education, and anyone who reads my writing understands my love of learning. Partially due to a trauma suffered in my experience in higher education as an undergraduate, I learned to love the pursuit of higher learning, again, and […]
One of my biggest struggles as a social worker in human services is challenging learned helplessness.
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 […]
I was asked to write down three things I cannot live without on a piece of scrap paper for a seminar on interpretation.
The ethics of the helping profession and helping professionals are constantly under the radar. Help seekers, colleagues, and other professions in vastly different fields continue to question the ethics, values, and intentions of therapists and other helping professionals. I understand this suspicion aimed directly at therapists. As a […]
Today I received a certified letter from my apartment building’s management company stating there is noise emanating from my studio during the day and late night hours. Without question, my neighbors directly underneath my studio contacted the management company and lodged a complaint. These are the same neighbors […]
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.
Sometimes, school crises erupt on college campus’s unexpectedly. Other times, there is a slow build up of tension before the crescendo. The crescendo can be violence, hate speech, or any number of plausible incidents that can manifest on a college campus. Ten years ago in Binghamton, I was […]
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 St. Vincent’s Hospital in Harrison, New York. St. Vincent’s was my treatment center for seven years. I began […]
This is the 100th article posted on Mental Health Affairs. All of us at Mental Health Affairs have aimed to bring readers the most critical and rigorous analytical commentary on the status of medicine, psychiatry, social work, psychology, and allied fields intersecting with mental health care today in […]
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
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