If you are a patient, or psychotherapist, the odds are you have been encouraged to use metaphors in the therapy room. I teach family therapy at the university level, and have been a family therapist for a decade. I can say that this overemphasis on utilizing metaphors to […]
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 […]
I am a rhetoric scholar and a person with lived experience with schizophrenia. I am also a prosumer. My identity aside, the status of Disability studies and narratives, memoirs, and stories that aim to reclaim the writers lost authorial voice are in demand. These stories offer catharsis—Upon reflection, […]
When you carry a mental health diagnosis, you are in almost constant fear of relapsing
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 […]
Who we are now, who we were back then, and who we will become one day is a journey marked with fear, etched with courage, driven by strength, and laden with every emotion available in our affective spectrum intersecting with the multiplicity of experiences of what will hopefully […]
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I am an overweight Jewish man from New York State with an active schizophrenia diagnosis. I have been committed to involuntary treatment numerous times for different length of stays at both local and state psychiatric hospitals across New […]
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.
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 […]
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.
There is very little myself or anyone knows about the life or even whereabouts of Dr. H today. I can only speak for ten years ago. And very little information, even from back then, explains how Dr. H became so involved in my life, friends, family, academic life, […]
I have said before that there is no universal way or signified to capturing or expressing in words the experience of psychosis. I might have been wrong about this claim. All of this depends on your definition of capture, and experience, to really inquire into the validity of […]
I needed a break from studying, a nightmarish winter session, and not enough sleep. The plan was to meet my friends for a weekend of fun and excitement away from it all in Atlantic City New Jersey. We had all been there before. There was going to nothing […]
At one point in the activation of my symptoms, particularly mania, I began driving endlessly and purposelessly, without general course or direction. Towards the more intense manic episodes, I would drive to self- soothe and unwind after spending 15 hour days on campus, in the library researching my […]
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 […]
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 […]
Citing and awarding merit for people beleiving in my recovery.
When you have a preexisting label, “baggage”, and a mental health diagnosis, there is no question dating becomes more complicated than healthy courting. There are several reasons why finding a partner is more difficult when you are carrying a mental health diagnosis. Several questions immediately come to mind, […]
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 […]
There is nothing to do except pace the hallway and swallow pills in a psych hospital. So I decided to speak with my peers. Inside the Community “So, how did you get here?” I asked an unsuspecting peer on the ward. He was around my age and appeared […]
Without question, all of us involved with the mental health system, treatment, peer advocacy, and those with a vested interest in the health and wellness of our friends use language to talk about, explain, articulate, or just commensurate about subjects involving mental health, health, and the world-at-large. As […]
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.
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 therapist, peer, disability rights advocate, and just plain people person, I love talking to people about just about […]
Mental Health Affairs 
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