LACCC presents: Innovations in Recovery Conference, Monday, June 23rd, 8am – 4pm

The LOS ANGELES COUNTY CLIENT COALITION is putting on the 3rd Annual Innovations in Recovery Conference. The conference will ill take place on Monday, June 23, 2014 at the California Endowment Center (Directions & Innovations Conf 2014.flyer)  located at 1000 N. Alameda Street Los Angeles, CA 90012, from 8:00am to 4:00 pm. 

Please join us!!! The Wildflowers’ Movement will be exhibiting and presenting SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND, an innovative workshop with music, singing and art! Our group is about giving & receiving mindful support while practicing self-awareness, cultivating radical wellness, and celebrating diversity. We meet every 1st and 3rd Sunday at SHARE! in Culver City and out at various events, and in nature, our natural habitat.

 

 

Found Voices: Art Exhibit, Poetry, Music

Join us where ART and SCIENCE collide with Art, Poetry & Music at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA Art/ Sci + Lab, Gallery, at UCLA CNSI, this coming Tuesday, May 20th, at 6.30-9.00 p.m.

The CNSI UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab is dedicated to pursuing and promoting the evolving “Third Culture” by facilitating the infinite potential of collaborations between (media) arts and (bio/nano) sciences.

 The center’s affiliation with the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) offers access to cutting edge researchers and their laboratories and a dedicated gallery for exhibitions. The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is a research center at UCLA whose mission is to encourage university collaboration with industry and to enable the rapid commercialization of discoveries in nanosystems. CNSI members who are on the faculty at UCLA represent a multi-disciplinary team of some of the world’s preeminent scientists. The work conducted at the CNSI represents world-class expertise in four targeted areas of nanosystems-related research including Energy, Environment, Health-Medicine, and Information Technology.

                                                                                                                                                            CNSI NEW DIRECTIONS  are attached… Parking is $12, $5 w “disability” pass. There is meter parking on La Conte Ave. and parking at Ralphs on La Conte – if you decide to shop and/or risk it 🙂

The DSM-5: A Dystopian Novel

March/April 2014, By Sam Kriss, from The New Inquiry

The best dystopian literature, or at least the most effective, manages to show us a hideous and contorted future while resisting the temptation to point fingers and invent villains. This is one of the major flaws in George Orwell’s 1984: When O’Brien laughingly expounds on his vision of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever” he starts to acquire the ludicrousness of a Bond villain; he may as well be a cartoon—one of the Krusty Kamp counselors in The Simpsons, raising a glass “to Evil.” Orwell’s satire of Stalinism, or Margaret Atwood’s on the religious right in The Handmaid’s Tale tend to let our present world off the hook a little by comparison. More subtle works, like Huxley’s Brave New World, are far more effective. His Controller, when interrogated, doesn’t burst out in maniacal laughter and start twiddling his moustache. He explains, in quite reasonable terms, why the dystopia he lives in is the best way to ensure the happiness of all—and he means it. Everything’s broken, but it’s not anyone’s fault; it’s terrifying because it’s so familiar.

by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Great dystopia isn’t so much fantasy as a kind of estrangement or dislocation from the present; the ability to stand outside time and see the situation in its full hideousness. The dystopian novel doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel. Maybe the greatest piece of dystopian literature ever written is Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a collection of observations and aphorisms penned by the philosopher while in exile in America during and after the Second World War. Even if, like I do, you disagree enthusiastically with his blanket condemnation of all “degenerated” popular culture, it’s hard not to be convinced that what we are living is “damaged life.” It’s not an argument so much as revelation. In Adorno’s bitterly lucid critique everything we take for granted is suddenly revealed in all its hideousness. The world Adorno lives in isn’t quite the same as ours; he’s coming at his subjects from a reflex angle—they’re a bunch of average Joes and Janes, he’s a misanthropic German cultural theorist with a preternaturally spherical head—but his insights are all the more relevant because of this. Something has gone terribly wrong in the world; we are living the wrong life, a life without any real fulfillment. The newly published DSM-5 is a classic dystopian novel in this mold.

It’s also not exactly a conventional novel. Its full title is an unwieldy mouthful: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. The author (or authors) writes under the ungainly nom de plume of The American Psychiatric Association—although a list of enjoyably silly pseudonyms is provided inside (including Maritza Rubio-Stipec, Dan Blazer, and the superbly alliterative Susan Swedo). The thing itself is on the cumbersome side. Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it’s unlikely to find its way to many beaches. Not that this should deter anyone; within is a brilliantly realized satire, at turns luridly absurd, chillingly perceptive, and profoundly disturbing.

If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it’s undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. Perhaps as an attempt to ward off the uncommitted reader, the novel begins with a lengthy account of the system of classifications used—one with an obvious debt to the Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are exhaustively classified according to such sets as “those belonging to the Emperor,” “those that, at a distance, resemble flies,” and “those that are included in this classification.”

Just as Borges’ system groups animals by seemingly aleatory characteristics entirely divorced from their actual biological attributes, DSM-5 arranges its various strains of madness solely in terms of the behaviors exhibited. This is a recurring theme in the novel, while any consideration of the mind itself is entirely absent. In its place we’re given diagnoses such as “frotteurism,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and “caffeine intoxication disorder.” That said, these classifications aren’t arranged at random; rather, they follow a stately progression comparable to that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, rising from the infernal pit of the body and its weaknesses (intellectual disabilities, motor tics) through our purgatorial interactions with the outside world (tobacco use, erectile dysfunction, kleptomania) and finally arriving in the limpid-blue heavens of our libidinal selves (delirium, personality disorders, sexual fetishism). It’s unusual, and at times frustrating in its postmodern knowingness, but what is being told is first and foremost a story.

This is a story without any of the elements that are traditionally held to constitute a setting or a plot. A few characters make an appearance, but they are nameless, spectral shapes, ones that wander in and out of view as the story progresses, briefly embodying their various illnesses before vanishing as quickly as they came—figures comparable to the cacophony of voices in The Waste Land or the anonymously universal figures of Jose Saramago’s Blindness. A sufferer of major depression and of hyperchondriasis might eventually be revealed to be the same person, but for the most part the boundaries between diagnoses keep the characters apart from one another, and there are only flashes. On one page we meet a hoarder, on the next a trichotillomaniac; he builds enormous “stacks of worthless objects,” she idly pulls out her pubic hairs while watching television. But the two are never allowed to meet and see if they can work through their problems together.

This is not to say that there is no setting, no plot, and no characterization. These elements are woven into the encyclopedia-form with extraordinary subtlety. The setting of the novel isn’t a physical landscape but a conceptual one. Unusually for what purports to be a dictionary of madness, the story proper begins with a discussion of neurological impairments: autism, Rett’s disorder, “intellectual disability”. The scene this prologue sets is one of a profoundly bleak view of human beings; one in which we hobble across an empty field, crippled by blind and mechanical forces whose workings are entirely beyond any understanding. This vision of humanity’s predicament has echoes of Samuel Beckett at some of his more nihilistic moments—except that Beckett allows his tramps to speak for themselves, and when they do they’re often quite cheerful. The sufferers of DSM-5, meanwhile, have no voice; they’re only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back. As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.

Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM-5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: “repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.” Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted. References to compulsive behavior throughout the book repeatedly refer to the “fear of dirt in someone with an obsession about contamination.” The tragic clincher comes when we’re told, “the individual does not recognize that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable.” This mad project is so overwhelming that its originator can’t even tell that they’ve subsumed themselves within its matrix. We’re dealing with a truly unreliable narrator here, not one that misleads us about the course of events (the narrator is compulsive, they do have poor insight), but one whose entire conceptual framework is radically off-kilter. As such, the entire story is a portrait of the narrator’s own particular madness. With this realization, DSM-5 starts to enter the realm of the properly dystopian.

This madness does lead to some startling moments of humor. One vignette describes in deadpan tones a scene at once touchingly pathos-laden and more than a little creepy: “He rubs his genitals against the victim’s thighs and buttocks. While doing this he fantasizes an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim.” The entry on caffeine intoxication disorder informs us, with every appearance of seriousness, that the diagnostic criteria include “recent consumption of caffeine” along with “1) restlessness 2) nervousness 3) excitement.” There are, occasionally, what seem to be surreal parodies of religious dietary regulations: “Infants and younger children […] eat paint, plaster, string, hair, or cloth. Older children may eat animal droppings, sand, insects, leaves, or pebbles.” What the levity of these moments masks, though, is the sense of loneliness that saturates the work.

The narrative voice of the book affects a tone of clinical detachment, one in which drinking coffee and paranoid-type schizophrenia can be discussed with the same flat tone. Under the pretense of dispassion this voice embodies a whole raft of terrifying preconceptions. Just like the neurological disorders that appear at the start of the book, mental illnesses appear like lightning bolts, with all their aura of divine randomness. Even when etiologies are mentioned they’re invariably held to be either genetic or refer to other illnesses such as substance abuse disorders. At no point is there any sense that madness might be socially informed, that the forms it takes might be a reflection of the influences and pressures of the world that surrounds us.

The idea emerges that every person’s illness is somehow their own fault, that it comes from nowhere but themselves: their genes, their addictions, and their inherent human insufficiency. We enter a strange shadow-world where for someone to engage in prostitution isn’t the result of intersecting environmental factors (gender relations, economic class, family and social relationships) but a symptom of “conduct disorder,” along with “lying, truancy, [and] running away.” A mad person is like a faulty machine. The pseudo-objective gaze only sees what they do, rather than what they think or how they feel. A person who shits on the kitchen floor because it gives them erotic pleasure and a person who shits on the kitchen floor to ward off the demons living in the cupboard are both shunted into the diagnostic category of encopresis. It’s not just that their thought-processes don’t matter, it’s as if they don’t exist. The human being is a web of flesh spun over a void.

With this radical misreading, the American Psychiatric Association is following something of a precedent in the actual psychological professions. Sigmund Freud himself performs a similar feat of ostranenie in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he appears to take the position of an alien observer of everyday affairs, noting that “the kiss […] is held in high sexual esteem among many nations in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.” If you’re going to make a properly objective study of human behavior, to some extent you have to disavow your own humanity. You have to ask, why kissing? Why do people press their mouths up against each other? In DSM-5 we can see a perverse mirror image of this kind of estrangement. Freud retreats to a position of inhuman detachment to ask questions. Here, the narrator does it to issue instructions.

The word “disorder” occurs so many times that it almost detaches itself from any real signification, so that the implied existence of an ordered state against which a disorder can be measured nearly vanishes and is almost forgotten. Throughout the novel, this ordered normality never appears except as an inference; it is the object of a subdued, hopeless yearning. With normality as a negatively defined and nebulously perfect ideal, anything and everything can then be condemned as a deviation from it. Even an outburst of happiness can be diagnosed as a manic episode. And then there are the “not otherwise specified” personality disorder categories. Here all pretensions to objectivity fall apart and the novel’s carefully warped imitation of scientific categories fades into an examination of petty viciousness. A personality disorder not otherwise specified is the diagnosis for anyone whose behaviors “do not meet the full criteria for any one Personality Disorder, but that together cause clinically significant distress […] e.g. social or occupational.” It’s hard not to be reminded of a few people who’ve historically caused social or occupational distress. If you don’t believe that people really exist, any radical call for their emancipation is just sickness at its most annoying.

If there is a normality here, it’s a state of near-catatonia. DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it. The vast absurd excesses of passion that form the raw matter of art, literature, love, and humanity are too distressing; it’s easier to stop being human altogether, to simply plod on as a heaped collection of diagnoses with a body vaguely attached.

For all the subtlety of its characterization, the book doesn’t just provide a chilling psychological portrait, it conjures up an entire world. The clue is in the name: On some level we’re to imagine that the American Psychiatric Association is a body with real powers, that the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” is something that might actually be used, and that its caricature of our inner lives could have serious consequences. Sections like those on the personality disorders offer a terrifying glimpse of a futuristic system of repression, one in which deviance isn’t furiously stamped out like it is in Orwell’s unsubtle Oceania, but pathologized instead. Here there’s no need for any rats, and the diagnostician can honestly believe she’s doing the right thing; it’s all in the name of restoring the sick to health. DSM-5 describes a nightmare society in which human beings are individuated, sick, and alone. For much of the novel, what the narrator of this story is describing is its own solitude, its own inability to appreciate other people, and its own overpowering desire for death—but the real horror lies in the world that could produce such a voice.

Read: http://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/dystopian-novel-dsm-5-zm0z14mazros.aspx

Martin Luther King Jr., Jan. 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

from MindFreedom International, MLK on the International Association for the Advancement of the Creative Maladjustment (IAACM)

In one of his earliest references to creative maladjustment, MLK addressed the 27 June 1956 annual convention of the NAACP in San Francisco to describe the historic victory of the ”Montgomery Story” bus boycott in 1955.

Excerpt:

“There are certain words in the technical vocabulary of every academic discipline that tend after a while to become stereotype and cliches, there is a word in modern psychology which is now probably more familiar than any other words in psychology. It is the word the maladjusted; it is the ringing cry of the new child, psychology — maladjusted.

And as a minister seeing and counseling with people very day concerning their problems and their maladjustment’s, I’m certainly concerned with those who are maladjusted, concerned to see everybody as adjusted as possible.

But I want to leave this evening saying to you that there are some things in our social system that I’m proud to be maladjusted to, and I call upon you to be maladjusted to. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of lynch mobs; I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and discrimination; I never intend to become adjusted to the tragic inequalities of the economic system which will take necessity from the masses to give luxury to the classes; I never intend to become adjusted to the insanity’s of militarism, the self-defeating method of physical violence.

There are some things that I never intend to become adjusted to, and I call upon you to continue to be maladjusted. History still has a choice place for the maladjusted. There is still a call for individuals to be maladjusted. The salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

I call upon you to be maladjusted, maladjusted as the prophet Amos who in the midst of the tragic inequalities of injustice in his day cried out in words that echoes across the generations: ”Let judgment run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

As maladjusted as Lincoln who confronted a nation divided against itself and had the vision to see that the nation could not exist half free, and half slave.

Maladjusted as the — hundreds and thousands — of Negroes, North and South who are determined now to stand up for freedom, willing to face possible violence and possible death, who are willing to stand up and sacrifice and struggle until segregation is a dead reality and until integration is a fact.

Maladjusted as Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery cried out in words of cosmic proportions: ”All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I call upon you to follow this maladjustment. It is through such a maladjustment that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom, equality and justice.”

Festival of Recovery

Join us for the Festival of Recovery this Saturday, April 6th, at:

SHARE! Culver City    (press the link for directions)
6666 Green Valley Circle
Culver City, CA 90230

from 9:00 am to 5:00pm, Lunch will be provided, Free parking, suggested donation is $5

If you cannot join for the full day, please come join us at 1.30-2.30 p.m., immediately after the lunch hour, in the PROSPERITY ROOM. We would love to meet you and have you sample our group meeting 🙂  !!! We are listed under WILDFLOWERS’ MOVEMENT.

Check out more than 30 Self-Help Support Groups and find the one you want!

A support group can help you…

• Turn from struggling to thriving

• Think about your dreams and find a way to make them happen
• Cope with feeling depressed
• Overcome anger and resentment
• Get help finding or keeping a Job
• Make new friends
• Discover gratitude for your life
• Get along better with people
• Manage your money, no matter how much you have

Sponsored by SHARE! and SOS

Responding to Madness With Loving Receptivity: a Practical Guide

By Micheal Cornwall, Ph.D., posted in Mad in America

He will be featured this Saturday, December 8th, (11amPT/2pmET) on MindFreedom Radio with the theme:  “If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then WHAT IS IT?” Hope you can join the conversation!!
____________________________

In my last three blogs I posed the question- “If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then what is it?” Now I’m asking- “If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then how should we respond to madness?’

Here are some thoughts that I wanted to share with you about how to effectively serve your clients, friends and loved ones who are having an experience of madness. These ideas may also be of help in doing self-care if you are entering or traversing a madness process yourself.

They are followed by my quite personal and un-orthodox neo-Jungian formulation of madness. That formulation and these practical suggestions are mainly gleaned from my own un-medicated, untreated experience of madness in my early twenties, and from working daily as a primary therapist for almost 30 years with actively mad clients using a Jungian/Transpersonal, Laingian approach.

During that time I worked for over 3 years at the  24/7, alternative, 20 bed, free standing, transpersonally oriented, acute care open door program called I-ward in Martinez California where no medications or leather restraints were used or diagnoses given to consumers who were acutely mad, which I describe in my last blog- “Remembering a Medication-Free Madness Sanctuary.”

I also helped develop a similar 5 bed program in Marin County, Passages In, that was short lived. I did several months of internship at St. George’s Homes in Berkeley where a similar Jungian/Transpersonal approach was used. After that I worked for 25 years in public sector clinics and on a mobile crisis team as well as in private practice. Even in those settings, most of the mad clients I served were not on medication.

I also am drawing on my doctoral research follow-up study done on the San Francisco based, medication free Diabasis House sanctuary for clients in acute madness, and my 20 year relationship with its founder, Jungian psychiatrist John Weir Perry. But my early experience of serving from age 18 as a medic in the Army and Air Force Reserve for 8 years and then as a State Hospital attendant with profoundly developmentally delayed men- and for 2 years as an orderly at a nursing home with brain damaged, demented and Alzheimer’s patients, also informs my advice on how to relate with love to people in physical and emotional pain and suffering.

So, here are two basic principles for helping someone or yourself in a madness process which are distilled from my own personal and work experience and  from the study of successful Bay Area alternative programs.

1. Keep suspending your disbelief

Every time you tell yourself or believe that the mad  person you are being with, or you yourself has a tragic, lifelong, and threatening illness that has no inherent meaning or purpose- such as a neuro-biological, genetically based diseased brain, an incurable thought disorder, or chemical  brain imbalance- try to suspend your disbelief that another explanation may be possible.

Instead, hold the belief that they or you are going through a necessary, meaningful, developmental, initiatory, trans-formative, transpersonal/ archetypal, symbolic and/or purposive natural process – one that is neither pathological nor indicative of a genetically inherited, neuro-biological brain disorder.

Hold the belief that, as Dr. Karl Menninger famously said, it is possible to emerge from the madness process- “Weller than well!”

2. Be Receptive

Once you are able to stay open to the possibility that this process is an important, potentially transformative natural life event, draw on all your skills of receptivity and empathy. Begin by simply listening and receiving the person or your own experience with an open, compassionate heart. Let the gentle feelings of love that you would feel for a loved one who is frightened and suffering be present within you.

As this process unfolds, gently invite and encourage the expression of both the emotional and symbolic content. People in a madness process may need to use modalities such as drawing, painting, movement and evocative music to express themselves in addition to or instead of speech. Somatic modalities of touch and bodywork can be especially welcomed and grounding and soothing.

The common and overwhelming evidence from  the Agnews project, Diabasis House, I-Ward, Soteria House and other alternative programs from all over the world, confirms the basic need for a person in such a madness process to be believed in, listened to and lovingly received and responded to in this way.

Some years ago I co-led a workshop on madness with  Loren Mosher of Soteria and Mathew Morrisey of the medication free sanctuary Burch House. We all agreed that the necessary and sufficient condition for someone to traverse a madness process into wholeness, was the presence of heart centered people around them who received the person’s emotional and symbolic process with a certain level of compassion that I would call love.. Those loving people did not need to be professionally trained.

This view was also expressed by R.D. Laing when asked- “Dr. Laing, I still don’t understand the theoretical basis of your approach to schizophrenia. Could you please explain?”

“Certainly,” said Laing- “The basis is love. I don’t see how you or I can be of any help to our clients in a visionary state unless we are capable of experiencing a feeling of love for them. Therapy, as opposed to mere treatment requires that we have a capacity for loving kindness and compassion.”

The questioner was still perplexed and asked- “But Dr. Laing, what is your clinical methodology for developing this approach?’

A recent Facebook post from a psychiatic nurse shows how the very subtle, even non-verbal communication of the energy of love can dramatically effect someone who is mad-

“I remember once bathing a woman, who was diagnosed “schizophrenic”, who had not responded or spoken for 20 years. I remember feeling some affection and sadness for her as I washed her gently in the tub. All of a sudden she started to respond and called me mommy and rose up from her catatonic state. The care, the loving touch got through to her.. I will never forget that.”

It is the same very familiar feeling tone of caring love that we often feel for our children or mates as we nurse them when they are ill, that can be evoked between us and someone in a madness process if we open our hearts beyond what professional mental health training teaches.

The nurse’s story makes me remember working with a man who was almost 80 years old who was diagnosed bi-polar and who had been in the hospital many times. Even though I was almost 30 years younger, because I sat with him with my heart very open and asked for his dreams, after some time he came with a  healing dream. He had been depressed his whole life and said that his mother was always very harsh with him and had never in his childhood told him that she loved him or touched him with love or hugged him..

He reported his healing dream with tears of gratitude and joy because in it he was a young boy again, held warmly and rocked for a very long time by his mother who repeated wonderful terms of endearment and told him over and over that she loved him..

He then said-’And the strangest thing was Michael, she was bald just like you are.’

So, in that spirit of risking to call what we may feel for ourselves or others in a madness process as being in fact love, here are observations I slowly learned for myself the past 30 years about how to more specifically make yourself available to anyone in a madness process. The list is only an attempt to begin a conversation and exploration of all the possible ways we can be of service.

• To be most helpful try and feel like your inner subjective state is more emotional than mental.

• Create a physical and emotional state of receptivity. Let warm feelings of caring be present in you.

• With your feet flat on the floor, hold the awareness that there is now a solid base and foundation beneath you.

• Remember to keep your anal sphincter relaxed.

• Keep a focus of energy in the hara chakra below your navel.

• With your stomach muscles relaxed, feel yourself do deep and slow belly breathing.

• Drop down your shoulders.

• Let your face become calm and relaxed–not becoming pensive or quizzical.

• Let your voice come up from your hara in lower octaves, emerging with the energy of your heart chakra as you speak..

• Let your kindly, gentle, even loving and tender feelings of empathy and compassion arise in your heart chakra for a fellow human being in distress and suffering who is sharing the room with you.

• Allow silences.

• Don’t seek direct eye contact if it seems to make the person uncomfortable.

• The person may be in a very heightened state of awareness and is processing minute inflections in your voice and body language.

• Their ability to see into you may surprise you as uncanny and psychic.

• In this state they may directly or symbolically tell you secret things about yourself that are disquieting.

• If the person is hostile increase your vigilance on your own physical and emotional markers of receptivity.

• Because you may find that you may involuntarily be holding your breath.

• You may notice your throat becomes constricted and your voice goes up in octaves.

• You may notice you are opening your eyes very widely and blinking a lot.

• You may feel the need to fold your arms across your chest or cross your legs.

• To the degree that you can be aware of these shifts in you prompted by anxiety, you can refrain from them as much as possible and remain in the open, receptive, emotional and physical posture with a potentially physically or verbally assaultive person in a madness process.

• The more you stay grounded and centered the more they will calm down, will not sense a fight or flight visceral response to them building in you.

• Being with agitated people in a madness process is kind of like practicing an internal martial art at times- a form of Aikido.

Madness is an ancient form of uncivilized wildness. It also is a sacred mystery.

Emily Dickinson said it well-

“Much madness is divinest Sense–
To a discerning eye–
Much sense–the starkest Madness–
‘Tis the Majority In this, as All prevail–
Assent–and you are sane–
demur–and you are straightaway dangerous
and handled with a chain.”

If you are given the opportunity to serve those traversing the mysterious depths and heights of madness count yourself lucky, especially if they are not emotionally anesthetized by medication.

The efficacy results from the Northern California based Agnews Project, I-Ward, Diabasis, and Soteria House all clearly demonstrate that without medication, most first time, acute madness crises will in fact be the occasion for a life changing developmental and possibly even a spiritual transformation if a 24/7 alternative, non-medical model sanctuary is provided.

My experience and research into alternative approaches for serving those in an acute madness process has led me to believe that at least 75% of the consumers who become trapped in the mental health system could have avoided that fate if acute care, 24/7 Bay Area sanctuaries like Diabasis House, Soteria and I-Ward (where I worked )were available at first contact with the system.

They never would have gone on to be labeled Schizophrenic or Bi-Polar or Schizo-Affective.

But even for those not blessed to have a sanctuary to go to during their initial excursions into madness, hope is not to be lost.

John Perry acknowledged that my utilizing Jungian dream work with consumers who had been medicated for years such as the older man I told about above, extended his work on acute episode madness into another level. He had not worked with long term consumers.

After all the sanctuaries were forced to close in the Bay Area, I got to do therapy with long term people who were mad as well as acute phase consumers in clinic settings.

Against conventional wisdom and the wishes of my clinical supervisor at work, but with the tentative encouragement of doctoral program clinical supervisors John Perry, David Lukoff and Jungian, Tanya Wilkinson, I started asking consumers to share their dreams. For many, their psyches had just been waiting to be asked!

The buried, un-experienced, un-named, un-expressed affect/emotion that was the prime causal factor in their becoming mad in the first place was re-animated as archetypal dreams of emotional power and symbolic expression came pouring forth. It took years for some people for their psyche to do it’s work of resurrection and to allow the person to have access to the full range of human emotions without becoming mad as before, whenever too strong and intense feelings would come alive.

One of the many contibutions that John Perry made to a Jungian approach to madness, was to wonderfully re-defined the meaning of ‘archetype’ to mean- ‘affect-image.’ He meant that affect and the image are co-equals of archetypal activation and experience.

I would take that further and say that affect, emotion is the source of all imagery, every word, thought, facial expression, auditory and visual hallucination, so-called delusion. We are first and foremost emotional beings who from conception begin to rage, weep and laugh and hide in terror and dance for joy- and seek to receive and give the emotion of love. For me, by definition, everyone who is mad is in an archetypal, transpersonal experience, just as everyone who isn’t mad is too.

The artificial distinctions that label some mad people chronic schizophrenics and others blessed to be in a spiritual emergency don’t exist for me. The mumbling, homeless mad person is just as deserving of our seeing that they are in a spiritual wasteland where the Gods of the wasteland rule as the person who is having amazing, visionary experiences that we are inspired and maybe dazzled by,- who brings Hermes or Persephone or Kwan Yin into the room with us as often happened on I-Ward.

The New Age and sometimes Transpersonal Psychology over emphasis on defining spirituality and spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence as being only enlightening and uplifting is an unfortunate mistake. The elevator goes down as well as up.

Spiritual experience means to me the contact with spiritual energy. From my own initiatory madness some of it is dark I know. Some of it is light I know. Darkness initiates just as much as light does. It turns out that both light, love emanating energy and rightly feared dark, dangerous spiritual energies are sometimes active in bringing balance through transformative madness as well as in- ‘normal’ life.

Based on my experiences on I-Ward which I describe in my last blog, I believe that if you spend much time with people in acute madness experiences who aren’t medicated you will encounter an uncanny presence of what can be viewed as spiritual light as well as darkness. That is another reason madness has been feared as being demonic until science/medicine said it was all in people’s heads- and came up with perverse ways to silence it that at times would make an inquisitor smile.

Jung said that: “Psychiatry has turned the Gods into diseases.”

Unfortunately Jung and most Jungians have turned the Gods and Goddesses into archetypes: named and minutely described denizens of the collective unconscious that we can have an ‘as if’ relationship with at weekend workshops and schoomze with once and a while in our dreams. Unless we go mad and then we know them intimately.

Traditional Jungians have identified the forms, the affect and imagery tracings of the gods from dreams and visions, but rarely ask them into the consulting room for an embodied visit. They haven’t turned the gods into diseases, but they have not honored them through the timeless practice of ritual where the gods were fervently called forth to have their way with the initiate. The 50 minute hour with some active imagination is about as wild as it gets!

Jung greatly feared going the route of Nietzsche who died raving mad. Perry extended Jung’s work on madness because he named it as purposive if welcomed with open arms. Jung exhorted analysts to terminate an analysis if a single dream of a patient looked like a sign of an- ‘incipient psychosis.’

 Please don’t make the mistake of too greatly fearing madness or underestimating the spiritual dimension of our human birthright as you may practice your own shamanic vocation or seek to understand the mysteries of others or your own madness.

One of my favorite Jung quotes points to that mystery-

“These inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under it’s control. In the mythology of earlier times these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons or gods. They are as active today as they ever were…the one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent on ‘powers’ that are beyond our control.”

In my experience, behind every image, thought and word, there is an emotion first. Behind every emotion there is a universal so-called archetypal power and emotional energy that must come forth as imagery that expresses that deep emotion. Behind every archetype is a totally autonomous living force of deity that has no historical bounds, no time bound archetypal form.

These ancient and emerging deities, that use our lives and bodies as their playgrounds and every second hold us in sway as they incarnate themselves in us, ever emerging anew, arise out of a greater unifying mystery of benevolent silence.

Weep for the prophets and so-called psychotic visionaries who are robbed of their life giving gifts from the Gods by our culture of fear and human arrogance. And weep for us that we still treat the mad ones among us as lepers when they are, and always have been a divine source of the mana we need to survive on earth.

As a first ever, initial madness process begins, the psyche is faced with such overpowering unbridled emotion that the inner emotional charge grows to become profoundly existential in nature and magnitude. As the person faces the initiatory challenge of young adulthood in such an all pervasive liminal depth, the ego, the frail manager of consensual reality, simply is engulfed.

The ego is swamped in the soul depth liminality of an emotional power that triggers all forms of desperate, seemingly delusional attempts to give some fragmented sense of meaning to the inner experience. It is a visceral, first chakra existential experience that seizes the individual.  It is the emotional response to being lost. It may be experienced mainly as one feeling exalted and indestructible at first or feeling totally terrified, doomed and bewildered.

The experience may also fluctuate between being plunged into the underworld and being drawn up into heavenly realms with amazing rapidity. In these dramatic ways the process mirrors shamanic initiatory ordeals described in every cultural lineage.

In any event, if not made numb by medication, the psyche creates a mythic story along predictable lines. The drama is played out on the stage of the central archetype, the Self, where every kind of polarity may be experienced and transmuted: good/evil, dark/light, male/female, life/death, terror/serenity, grief/joy, desolation/birth. All  the emotion generated and image fueled polarities may be contained in the mandala crucible of the relationship that you, the loving caregiver, creates with the person who is mad. In that container with you, all the polarities can be balanced into a cohesive unity.

That loving feeling toned relationship with you is crucial, it is a prerequisite for transformation and healing to occur.. Without a loving ‘other’ to make the mandala crucible which gets forged by the connection of their two hearts and psyches, the mad person spins on out of control. Acute madness is the ultimate identity crisis and is for some, a potentially shamanic initiation. Our feeble, arrogant egos usually assume we are master of knowing “Who am I?”

As the pre-madness/visionary ego floats in this ignorant vulnerability over an abyss of the unfathomable depth of the collective unconscious and spirit world of gods, demons and ghosts, the ego is always just a few nights without sleep away from psychosis, or a drop of LSD away from psychosis, or from a psychosis triggered by a kundalini eruption, or a loved ones sudden death.

The unprepared ego of an especially vulnerable young adult facing autonomous functioning separate from their family is at risk from drowning in the depth of the affect and images of the collective unconscious. It is remarkable that the childhood tasks of such a vulnerable ego do not overwhelm it. However, in the late teens and young adulthood comes the awareness of mortality and the knowing that physical survival and social acceptance and success depend on functioning separately from parents.

The broad range of every possible human emotion I mentioned above that is our human birthright and imperative to experience and claim, makes up the magma of the madness eruption that is too strong for the young adult. These emotions come boiling up to the surface because the young person has hit the developmental hurdle of young adulthood.. In their families, full emotional experience and expression was not allowed and made possible for them to sufficiently master.

Now the psyche will try and rectify that through transformative madness.

Because of the power of our toxic and soulless culture to create enormous deficits in our family systems, most notably an epidemic of the lack of a strong infant-parental love bond, when faced with the often cruelly threatening social Darwinism cultural gauntlet one must traverse into young adulthood, the pre-madness ego for some is simply not prepared to traverse the hero’s journey and initiation across so much underlying liminality.

We can’t underestimate the corrosive and pervasive effects on vulnerable children and young adults that our largely loveless and spiritually barren patriarchal culture inflicts through degradation ceremonies of endless winner-loser competitions where shame and guilt and fear of punishment break the spirits and hearts of so many.

For such vulnerable young persons, an affect of an unnamed existential terror, the dreadful sense of an abyss of yawning ontological insecurity seizes them. This overpowering challenge may then trigger an attempted visionary alternative restructuring of the ego through a radical immersion in a mythical inner struggle for adult independence.

This inner heroic struggle for ones future life is carried out at the archetypal center of the Self, if the young person’s process is not aborted, if they are given sanctuary and not medication. I have seen them come out the other side with a new, heroic ego strength that grew out of their trial by fire.

As the great R.D. Laing said after witnessing and attending many on such a journey at the Kingsley Hall sanctuary he provided:

‘From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not true ‘sanity.’ Their madness is not true ‘madness.’ The madness that we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the ‘inner’ archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death and rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer it’s betrayer.’

Could DSM-5 Be Harmful to Your Mental Health?

By Elayne Clift, posted on February 2, 2012 by the Women’s Media Center

The APA diagnostic manual revision process, in the news recently over the definition of autism, holds other potential threats for women’s health. Elayne Clift investigates the gender issues in DSM-5.

Debbie N. (not her real name) was a college student in the 1990s when she traveled to the Mediterranean to recover from an abusive relationship. Partying hard, a cultural norm for her immigrant family, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Back in the States, using alcohol and drugs to numb her pain, she entered Harvard where she earned a master’s degree.  There, diagnosed bi-polar and prescribed Lithium (which permanently impaired her thyroid function), she was given anti-depressants and told she would require meds for the rest of her life.  Now, after several hospitalizations and agonizing self-doubt, she is free of medication, owns her own business, and leads a healthy lifestyle based on rest, nutrition, exercise and meditation.  “I consider myself to be a sensitive person who’s been through a lot of loss. I changed my lifestyle and took responsibility for my behaviors.  I’m a survivor.”

Stories like Debbie’s are ubiquitous, and so troubling that as the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, is being prepared for release in 2013, clinicians formerly involved in its preparation are calling for major reform of the text that has driven psychiatric diagnosis and treatment for decades.  Many of them will participate in “Boycott Normal,” a demonstration planned for May 5, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meets in Philadelphia and is likely to vote to go forward and publish the DSM-5.

“This is not a civil war between establishment psychiatry and so-called radicals,” says boycott organizer David W. Oaks, executive director of MindFreedom International.  We are trying to put the debate into a human rights framework because the DSM has been used to discriminate, to take away liberties, and to allocate resources.  It’s a quasi-legal document written by a few hundred people voted on by rich white males.”

Dr. Allen Frances, who chaired the task force revising DSM-4, is among those psychiatrists now calling for reform, along with organizations like the American Counseling Association, the British Psychological Society, and a division of the American Psychological Association. But that effort focuses on the process of deciding what diagnoses should be included in the “psychiatrists’ bible” and how those diagnoses should be determined within the existing framework of the DSM.

Many feminist psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers are calling for stronger actions, including a boycott of the DSM-5 by clinicians, and Congressional hearings to address psychiatric diagnosis and the damaging effects of labeling people deemed to be “mentally ill.”

Foremost among these advocates is feminist psychologist Paula J. Caplan, a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the Joan-of-Arc of the new PLAN T Alliance (Psychiatric Labeling Action Network for Truth). The alliance is a coalition of individuals and organizations formed because of frustration with the unscientific nature of the DSM, the harm done to many people who receive arbitrary diagnostic labels, and the unwillingness of the APA to undertake serious reform.

“It is increasingly clear that the editors of the major psychiatric manual, which reaps huge profits for the APA, are ignoring the massive evidence of harm done by the labels of previous editions of the manual and of likely harm from what they plan to put in the [DSM-5],” says Caplan, who resigned from two prior DSM committees because “they were playing fast and loose with the unscientific research related to diagnosis.”

Critics of the alliance’s call to action believe its attempts at serious reform are what one called a “broadside” against psychiatry.  Many support a parallel petition seeking DSM-5 revisions.  While one prominent psychiatrist active in the development of previous DSMs acknowledges that there are serious problems with DSM-5, he argues that activist groups are criticizing the DSM-5 to smear all psychiatry in a way that is detrimental to people whom it could help.

But given what’s coming in DSM-5, the manual itself appears to be detrimental, especially for women, children and the elderly.  For example, grief after the loss of a loved one could be labeled “depression,” leading to medication if it lasts longer than two months.

“Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” PMS, is slated to return to the DSM, pathologizing many menstruating women.  “Binge Eating Disorder,” with alarmingly normal indicators, will be included, as will “Borderline Personality Disorder,” with roughly 75 percent of patients given that label being women. according to Dr. Dana Becker of the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work.

“Sexual dysfunctions” such as “Female Orgasmic Disorder,” defined as a “persistent or recurrent delay in, or absence of, orgasm following a normal sexual excitement phase” is another concern.  The diagnosis is “based on the clinician’s judgment that the woman’s orgasmic capacity is less than would be reasonable given her age, sexual experience, and the adequacy of sexual stimulation she receives.”  DSM-5 modifications describe further symptoms, an exercise NYU psychologist Dr. Leonore Tiefer calls an attempt at “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Feminist psychologists have been challenging DSM diagnoses since the 1980s when the Association for Women in Psychology coordinated a petition regarding DSM-III-R.  Today they are joined by others in a groundswell of opposition to the APA’s newest effort.

Al Galves, executive director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry, is among them. He wants to see DSM-5 jargon replaced with relevant terms reflecting the stresses of modern life—loss, despair, loneliness, hopelessness—words relating to “emotional distress, spiritual emergencies, life crises, and difficult dilemmas.”  The question, he says, is “how do you get the psychiatric establishment and the pharmaceutical industry to revamp totally” so that they move away from the language of the medical model and use ordinary words to facilitate helping people who are suffering.

Dr. David Elkins, professor emeritus of Psychology at Pepperdine University, agrees it’s time to frame harm done by the DSM as a “social justice issue,” although he stops short of endorsing the PLAN T Alliance call for a boycott just yet.  In a letter to the DSM-5 Task Force and the APA on behalf of the division for Humanistic Psychology/American Psychological Association, he called for “an external, independent review” to ensure that the DSM-5 is “safe and credible.”

But perhaps Paula J. Caplan put it best in posting a petition at change.org:  “This call is not an attack on or a questioning of psychotherapy or even diagnosis across the board but simply an attempt to draw attention to this minimally investigated enterprise of psychiatric diagnosis and to find ways to protect people from the harm that can result.”