Recovery Now’s Division of Mental Health Affairs is about to move in an exciting new direction. The former division is now officially the Office of Mental Health Affairs (OMHA). The new office is signing on writers, editors (SEO preferred), and site administrators to help run the blog. We are looking for licensed clinicians, professionals in mental health care, treatment, and administration with lived experience and a strong passion for advocacy in the fields of mental health, social work & justice, psychology, medicine, and allied fields.

At some point during your recovery you will be up against insurmountable odds pitted against your chances of success. This may be your doing, the aftermath of poor decisions, or it may be a new situation you are hurled into which was poorly planed and needs revision. In mental health we call it the perfect storm of contributing factors to risk of relapse. I call it mental status free fall and the emergent need for help.

For most of us served by its auspices, we just call it the system. There are many systems serving consumers with services and its people with “benefits” (e.g. social security, social services). Some of these systems are more distressed and outmoded then others, but no system is as complex, repressive, isolative, feared, and misunderstood as the mental health system. This article explores aspects of the mental health system at the local/community that can benefit from reform. This article is written from the perspective of a clinician who continues to work within the community mental health model and has experienced serious delinquencies in person-centered care, and few opportunities to move forward and escape its revolving door.

The Mental Health Awareness campaigns of modernity (e.g. Mental Health Month), commonly associated with “friendly” and person centered staff in your local non-profit agency & government sponsored program is a giant step forward since the days at Willow-brook. In the 1970’s, the state hospitals serving the mental patients of that time & long before it were deplorable.

I wasn’t born then. I wasn’t a patient at Willow-brook. In fact, the unit at Binghamton State Psychiatric Center I lived in for six months, is no longer in operation. That’s a good sign. Things are changing. But how much of what was going on, still is for some people left in psychiatric hold? Who is to blame for the systems broken aspects, discovered, but left unresolved by those running it?

There are many forms of privilege people can “benefit” from, most of the time, at the expense, of others. During my recovery, I have benefited from the financial, emotional, cultural, and intellectual prowess to move forward in my healing & wellness without bounds. I will make these aspects of privilege, which, without question, intersect recovery, visible to you the reader in an attempt to challenge those that believe anyone can heal from their illness.

I believe in healing & I believe in recovery. After surviving so many tragic circumstances and injuries, I fully understand how fragile life is and why we must protect ourselves from both seen and unforeseen events which put our health and safety in jeopardy. This presentation is a discussion on the importance of having psychiatric advanced directives. For the past few years, after my break, I have tirelessly searched for a health care proxy. A health care proxy is someone charged with making medical & psychiatric decisions in the event the a person becomes incapacitated. Speaking from a position in which I was deemed incapacitated, or in plainer English, insane, I know full well that people need a point person to make educated and very personal decisions by proxy in the event you or someone you love cannot speak for themselves.

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 by: “where is the gift shop?” because they were headed there anyway and didn’t see it on their way in to visit their loved one or friend.

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 life of a disorder. Acute disorders provide people with the space and room for misapplied energy and focus. Often, people can expend their energy dealing with their issue because that particular symptom will be inactive soon enough. However, when people have a severe chronic mental health diagnosis, a misstep in applying energy and symptom management can leave a person vulnerable and open to breakthrough symptoms and other unwelcome reactive symptoms due to the mismanagement of misidentified opportunities to heal and recover and a very small window for people to experience mistakes.

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 amelioration of symptoms before they become unmanageable are helpful, and even more useful are blogs that speak from the peer perspective when discussing uses of clinical interventions.

Burnout exists among practitioners & caregivers for those carrying a mental health diagnosis. Our allies, collateral contacts, and both natural and artificial supports are all susceptible to burnout. This presentation is designed to prevent and disrupt behaviors which contribute to burnout among people working with psychiatric disabilities. In doing so, burnout will be evaluated two fold: 1) caregiver burnout, & 2) practitioner burnout, for the purpose of improving continuity of care and uninterrupted service delivery by systems of care, family members, and organizations which provide mental health treatment. This article follows the assumption that when burnout decreases among allies in recovery, the quality of life of people carrying a mental health diagnosis will improve.

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 recovery. In July of 2008, the psychosis was beginning to lift, and the mania controlled, or in a partial remission. On a personal level, I was ready to pick up the pieces from where I left off, and beginning the transition back home in Westchester.

My parents have been there during the darkest moments of my recovery and during the most triumphant. From the very beginning, my parents have been present with me in my health and healing, and if my prayers are answered,they will be with me until the very end. My parents have being doing this for a long time- caregiving. My mother was the caregiver for her mother for almost twenty years during the tenure of my grandmother’s dementia and aging. Around the time when my great aunt passed, and my grandmother first began to forget things, I was admitted to the hospital as an adolescent. My mother and father were there on the unit everyday. As soon as visitor time came around, my parents would buzz the unit door and there, in hand, would be a snack or my dinner, or just something I could use to pass the time. Indeed, family support is integral to the recovery process. Our family’s proximity to our issues, our sensitive and raw exposed areas, there is no question that family is the perfect match for people needing comfort and attention during our most vulnerable times.

When the timer finally reached zero there was no explosion. No noise. Except, there were tremors, those did not end. I walked back into the house and got dressed. I summoned the strength to go on my computer and began to go about my day as business as usual.

The most ornate and complex set and manifestations of symptoms exist in the Schizophrenia and related psychosis family of mental health diagnoses. Schizophrenia has both positive and negative symptoms. The symptoms are labeled differently to address and explain the experience of the person symptomatic. To identify which is a negative and which is a positive symptom, differentiate between an added feature to your presentation or an internal sensation or belief at work in your thought process.

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 with ableism. The expression I am talking about is “high-functioning”. Clinicians use it to categorize and label people who they feel are doing well and have their condition managed. These are the “worried-well” or the people carrying a diagnosis who also work and, seemingly, go without too many day-to-day crises.

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 symptom stabilization has been difficult and frustrating. Schizophrenia impacts the speech centers and hemispheres of the brain. I passed through several phases of speech problems, some more observable than others. This article will focus on two common speech related symptoms people with schizophrenia experience: 1) Stilted language, & 2) Word Salad. I will tie in my own lived experience with these symptoms and my experience treating the disorder as a clinician with experience in chronic disorders and serious and persistent mental illness.

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 and persistent mentally illness in the corrections system due to a fundamental misunderstanding of mentally ill needs for rehabilitation. In some cases, the mentally ill are remanded to jail without offending due to bed shortages in psychiatric hospitals. Whatever the reason people with a mental illness intersect with the courts, and/or corrections departments, the manner in which law enforcement handles and interacts with the mentally ill must change. I am talking about the police, courts, judges, lawyers, and people charged with the processing of mentally ill people suspected to have committed crimes and thus, under the auspices of criminal justice system for rehabilitation.

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 my statement. Therefore, to determine the validity of my original statement, I am going to suggest a new theory surrounding the study of psychosis and its application in practice. The theory I am dispensing is as follows: 1) That the accumulation of psychotic symptoms and the worsening of psychosis symptoms is rooted in the changing of signs within a person’s system of signification and 2) I am suggesting that while the identification of psychosis symptoms doesn’t mark or capture a single signified, or sign, the worsening of corresponding, primary, residual or inactive symptoms can be portrayed as a wholesale changing of a person’s experience in reality, 3) This occurs through a fundamental restructuring of a person’s own interpretation of their system of signs, in language, oral expression, and all brain functions with in interact with the world through use and passage through his or her interpretive eye.

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 a student in crisis. While I was only slightly in-tune with the momentum of chaos and cause for concern, I was adamant about reaching someone, some department office on campus, school staff, or even community member and public official i.e the Deputy Mayor of Binghamton to intervene with department affairs and the admissions process to the English graduate school. I fully believed if I found the right party with a vested interest in my well being, I would be admitted to the Graduate program in English.

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 documented disorder, but 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. The story of how I became connected with disabilities services, and the event that transpired at the end of the Semester, is one of deception, intrigue, respect, and courage for both facility and students taking part in the event.

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 treatment directly after coming home from upstate New York and discharge from the state hospital center in Binghamton. Shortly after arriving back home, I began treatment at St. Vincent’s. I started in the partial hospitalization program. The idea was this program would be a step-down from the state hospital unit. I was successful in completing the program within the usual length-of-stay two weeks. My experience in the program was pleasant enough, the staff was friendly and skilled, and I was moved through the program quickly enough making the progress I was after. Upon discharge from the partial program, I was referred to the hospital’s out-patient mental health program. There, I would would do a seven year stint with various therapists, and psychiatrists, over the better half of a decade of recovery.