As 2020 fast approaches, I can’t help but think its necessary to reflect on what was the most ambitious, self-directed, and awe-inspiring ten years of my life. There wasn’t a moment I would re-live, so much to celebrate, and nothing I’ll ever be able to forget. The decade […]
So, I want to pose a question: is a mental health disorder a disability? I suspect the answer to this question hinges on how disability is contextualized. There are several ways of going about thinking about disability. I want to focus on the purely academic conversation out there […]
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 […]
“In the future, further work should deconstruct categories of medicine, psychiatry, and social work and encourage strength based approaches that will supplant new-institutionalization and create a new gold standard in treatment” (Maxwell Guttman, Mental Health Diagnosis: Axioms, Continuum, and Future Directions) 2018 “Congratulations, Jacques, on your publication!” Jonas, […]
Ever find yourself in the most perfect or seemingly perfect moment? You just want things to stay that way, right? Well, as a human, you probably have already discovered that very few things are static or unchanging. Most of us, especially the most successful, have learned how to […]
We all know that staying positive is helpful in promoting good mental health. Well, this is getting harder and harder for some folks. Staying positive has become increasingly difficult when our world is plagued by personal problems, psychiatric symptoms or environmental issues. One great and simple tool for […]
The next step in Contesting Admission seemed rather obvious to me. Pummel the English Department into submission. In the words of President George W. Bush, this will be “shock and awe”. The plan was simple. Bombard the department with paperwork over all kinds. Inundating them with busy work […]
I’m am very much public about my status as a prosumer in the mental health community. I’ve outed myself time and again. People ask me about my book series all the time, which is also very much congruent with my prosumer identity: “Max, what is so different about […]
My perception was shifting everyday. At first the shift was gradual, eventually dramatically altered. The community appeared different. People seemed to behave differently and have different motives. All I wanted was to connect with the changing world around me in Liberty. This was increasingly difficult to do when […]
I’ve experienced a number of serious planned and unplanned hospitalizations and subsequent discharges. Medical, psychiatric, physical rehabilitation, you name it, I’ve been discharged from it. Discharge planning should always begin from the moment you enter the facility and become a patient in the hospital. If the facility isn’t […]
Far too many stories and firsthand accounts of recovery are terminal and end with a cure or picturesque life for the consumer of services or “sick” person. This recovery narrative is different. This is a story about struggle, ongoing collateral pushback from friends, and internalized self-doubt. Chronic illness, […]
The time is upon us! I need to address the ongoing rumors circulating around my writing. Ever since I have announced a second novella, Small Fingernails, Even Less Love 💕 , there has been undeniable chatter in the literary world. Upon hearing the new novella was, in fact, […]
Ive been accused of a number of crimes, socially unacceptable behaviors, and litany of outrageous transgressions during the course of my mental illness. While the majority of the truly grotesque periods and expressions of my mental health disorder where shadowed by the gates of a locked down unit […]
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, […]
There is an undeniable mobility to recovery. Moving forward in your path to health and healing requires an inertia. From rate of recovery, the very speed and velocity required to push life’s pash setbacks, to identifying a sustainable pace, is a space and feat that requires a high […]
When you carry a mental health diagnosis, you are in almost constant fear of relapsing. Whether you have a chronic long standing condition, or are suffering from a new diagnosis, the fear of symptoms re-activating, or worsening, is real problem for those of us that suffer from mental […]
I have a profound fascination with attention seeking behavior(s). I am also profoundly clever at capturing the attention of my peers, family, and friends. Let’s be completely honest, some of know, without too much consideration and thought, exactly how to gain the attention of our peers, friends, and […]
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 was asked to write down three things I cannot live without on a piece of scrap paper for a seminar on interpretation. At that time, I was floridly psychotic, self-referential, tangential, and totally detached from what was happening to me, around me, and despite of me. On […]
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 […]
Interviewer: Please tell us, Max E., why do you insist on writing about mental health when it continues to be so widely talked about and covered by talented authors in recent years? Mr. Guttman: I write because my message continues to be different than all the other authors […]
At the very end of my semester in undergraduate school, I attended a reception on campus in which I participated in honoring faculty that was special with and dedicated to people with disabilities. In my entire time as a student, I had never had a disability, or a […]
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 […]
I have witnessed the most obscene, ornate, loud, and grandest displays from people I work with both clients and colleagues. Center-staging isn’t just about the magnitude and lengths gone through to create a circus around him or her. Instead, it is the seductive pull and mystique about enacting […]
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 feeding off one another, and sometimes, working in complete isolation. The spectrum intensifies in many cases over time […]
Hanz Medard
J. Peters
Hanz Medard J. Peters
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University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy HARD COVER
In University on Watch, author J Peters chronicles his story in an academic environment where he struggled with his deteriorating situation as a student and mental health condition.
$24.00
Lesfic Author
& Metaphors
A Final Solution to the Mental Health Crisis
Reducing the stigma around mental health
mental illness, philosophy, depth psychology, life, the universe and everything
A fine WordPress.com site
A daily selection of the best content published on WordPress, collected for you by humans who love to read.
The Art and Craft of Blogging
The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.
Lesfic Author
& Metaphors
A Final Solution to the Mental Health Crisis
Reducing the stigma around mental health
mental illness, philosophy, depth psychology, life, the universe and everything
A fine WordPress.com site
A daily selection of the best content published on WordPress, collected for you by humans who love to read.
The Art and Craft of Blogging
The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.
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