I have enjoyed being a member of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Pyschosis (ISPS) and want to alert all of you to the opportunity to present your ideas at, or just attend, some important conferences they will be putting on later this year.

The first of these will be in Warsaw, August 22-25.  It is titled “Best practice in the psychological therapies for psychosis: A contemporary and global perspective”.  Anyone who wants to present needs to submit their proposal by March 10, details about how to do that are available here.

The second conference, for the US chapter of ISPS, will be October 4-6 in New Brunswick, New Jersey The keynote Speaker will be Debra Lampshire, Experience-based expert, Senior Tutor at the University of Auckland, and Project Manager for Auckland District Health Board in New Zealand.  Honorees: Marius Romme, MD, PhD and Sandra Escher, MPhil, PhD, Researchers, authors, founders of the international Hearing Voices Movement.

If you are not an ISPS-US member and would like to receive details on how to apply to be a presenter at the ISPS-US conference, email Karen Stern at contact@isps-us.org with your name, email address and/or mailing address.  Proposals will be due March 31, 2013.

It is my understanding that some more progressive people see ISPS as too conservative, while the mainstream tends to see ISPS as too extremely psychological and humanistic!  Overall I think it is a good place for the meeting up of ideas, and I hope some of you can get involved.

Below is an article I had published in our local newspaper yesterday about the need to avoid simplistic approaches in mental health, which are driven by fear rather than insight.

Simplistic solutions could increase the risk for violence

Published: January 27, 2013 12:00AM, Midnight, Jan. 27

It’s starting to seem like common sense to propose that every community should have its own Hearing Voices group or groups!

Hearing Voices groups aren’t just for those who see themselves as “ill” – they are for anyone who hears voices and sees a reason to meet with others and talk about the experience.  And increasingly these groups include people who have other anomalous experiences, like seeing visions, having really different beliefs, or other kinds of “extreme states.”  When people have a space to talk about these kinds of experiences in their own way, they can often figure out ways to handle them, and this can help many people reduce or even possibly eventually eliminate any need for other kinds of assistance such as mental health care.

According to the website of the UK Hearing Voices Network, which has pointers on establishing a hearing voices group is “not rocket science.”  While it helps to have facilitators who know a lot about voice hearing, and especially people who have their own “lived experience,” such knowledge and experience is not required in order to start a group.  Instead, the key ability is simply to establish a respectful and open minded forum for all to share and explore their own experience.

People interested in starting groups should also check in with Intervoice, The International Community for Hearing Voices which can provide free packets of books and DVD’s helpful to getting a group started.  People in the US should also contact Hearing Voices USA for more information and guidance.

Here in my town of Eugene OR I’ve helped facilitate a hearing voices group for a number of years, but it has always operated within a clinical setting, which doesn’t fully meet the objectives of hearing voices movement groups.  More recently we have organized our own group, Eugene/Springfield Hearing Voices, and this group will be free to everyone whether in the mental health system or not, and facilitated by people with lived experience.  I hope to hear about new groups like this springing up all over!

I was interviewed for the Psychope website for their “feature of the month.”  You can read the interview on their website, or catch it below (though their layout of it is better, and they include pictures!)

January 2013

Feature of the Month

Recovery from “schizophrenia” and other “psychotic disorders” – New understandings of the mind and of madness can open new doors to full recovery – Ron Unger

 (Background:) Where were you born and raised? What did your parents do for a living? Do you have any siblings? What was life like growing up for you?

I was born and raised in Michigan, USA, mostly in the little town of Big Rapids.  I was the third out of 11, nine brothers, one sister!  My dad worked as a car mechanic, and my mom not surprisingly stayed home with the children.  While I had some good experiences as a youngster, my family life was often traumatic.  This led to me becoming socially awkward, and my trauma was compounded when my awkwardness and low self esteem made me a target for bullies.

 What is the earliest childhood memory you can remember?

My earliest recollection is of when I discovered how to climb out of a crib in which I had been placed for a nap, alone in an upstairs room.  I then wandered away from the crib and the room, and when my mom came up to check on me, she found me missing and panicked.  I imagine I had climbed out partly to go looking for her and the others, but my efforts led to everyone getting upset.  Looking back, I can see this as an early example of me discovering that my acting in an autonomous way, even if I was seeking connection, could be perceived by others as dangerous and wrong!

Which University/College did you go to? What course of studies did you follow? What happened next?

 My college experience was very much complicated by the fact that I was undergoing a sort of mystical and creative exploration into the nature of self and reality, at the same time I was pursuing “formal education!”  This exploration was triggered by my need to challenge the defective sense of self that I had formed as a result of childhood trauma, but it became much more than just that.   My experiences and perspectives commonly teetered on the edge of what the mental health system calls psychosis, and not infrequently crossed completely over that edge!  But I was lucky enough to get all the help I needed from books, peers, and other sources, and to avoid any coercive “help” from the mental health system.  As a result, overall my journey became very positive for me, even though it was often chaotic and at times disrupted my college trajectory. [continue reading…]

A recent article, “Screw Positive Thinking! Why Our Quest for Happiness Is Making Us Miserable” provides humorous perspective on the ways seeking too hard after happiness can make us unhappy – and, it seems, stupid as well!  I’m going to argue that the same paradox also applies to other aspects of mental health, and that some of the major problems in current mental health treatment result from failing to take this into account.

The problem with trying too hard to be happy is that “positive thinking” can often backfire; affirmations for example can make people think less of themselves, and excessively positive thinking can lead to us making foolish choices that have serious, and negative, consequences.  Also, there is a tricky effect called “ironic process” where trying to “improve” by getting rid of something in our mind often makes us amplify the very thing we are trying to get rid of (spend the next 30 seconds trying not to think about hippopotamuses and see what I mean.)

Another problem with trying to get rid of unhappiness, in order to become happy, is that unhappiness itself can be understood as part of an attempt to reach a greater happiness.  That is, I may be unhappy with a paper I am writing because I want a better paper and the happiness that comes from that, or I am unhappy with a relationship because I want a better relationship, etc.  If I suppress my unhappy feelings with my current paper or relationship, in order to be happy, I may turn in a lousy paper or fail to act to improve my relationship, which then leads to more unhappiness in the future.

I believe it is helpful to consider the possibility that pretty much everything that disturbs us can be understood as something that in some way is trying to help us.  Even something as dark as a part of us that wants to make us kill ourselves can be understood as a part that is trying to free us from the ways we feel stuck in our lives, even if it is going a bit overboard in the means of getting unstuck that it is proposing.  We may be disturbed by extreme rage, by  sexual impulses we find unacceptable, or by voices which seem completely foreign to us, and we may see these things as the enemy, and think that our recovery depends on getting rid of them, but this very effort to get rid of them could be the primary barrier to healing.  (Healing usually involves finding a place for something, where it doesn’t dominate but is allowed to make a contribution.)

A key part of “psychosis” is often the sense of having components in one’s mind which are foreign and distressing, whether these are seen as related to a brain implant, telepathy from neighbors, evil spirits, or just “voices.”  The standard approach to these experiences is to try and get rid of them, through drugs and distraction.  But if the thing disturbing us is actually trying to help us, and also if efforts to get rid of something can often make it worse (ironic process) then this whole mission of trying to get rid of what seems foreign and distressing may be entirely the wrong idea. [continue reading…]

I just listened to a couple of interesting youtube videos by Rufus May on alternative approaches to voice hearing.  It gets to a bit of a slow start, but then really gets amazing, especially the story of how he helped one voice hearer get from feeling persecuted by a voice intent on killing her to having a very friendly and cooperative relationship with the voice, to the extent that she now allows the voice to have its own facebook page, and the voice is a valuable ally to her.

It also covers the essentials of how mindfulness can be used to “cook” the raw energy of an emotion like anger or of a voice, so that the emotion or voice, once cooked, becomes like a cooked potato that now can offer some nutrition or assistance.

Rufus May – Part 1 – Living Mindfully with Voices – Hearing Voices – November 8, 2012 – Copenhagen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNp-7DT2u8E and Rufus May – Part 2 – Living Mindfully with Voices – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SARayODS_90&feature=relmfu

I came across a recorded talk by Jacqui Dillon, chair of the Hearing Voices Network in the UK, speaking at the UCC conference ‘Critical Perspectives and Creative Responses to Experiences of Trauma and Distress’ on ‘The Personal is Political‘

She is a sharp and witty storyteller, and she also touches on the horror of a mental health system that still way too often responds to trauma survivors by telling them they have an illness in their brain that has nothing to do with what happened to them.

I agree with most of what she says, though I would like to see her more clearly acknowledge the way people’s attempts to survive trauma can inadvertently cause them serious problems.  (In CBT, we might call these “over-developed coping strategies.)  I agree with Jacqui that we should be acknowledging that these responses are people’s attempts to cope, so we shouldn’t just see them as “part of an illness” but I think we have to balance that with also noticing that what once was helping with coping may now be disabling.

Anyway, I hope some of you listen to this presentation and let me know what you think!

Many people come into the mental health system often after being betrayed and traumatized in a number of ways:  too often, the mental health system ends up betraying these people again, causing more harm than help.  I believe the system has been too slow to respond to criticism, and to take seriously all the ways it can cause harm and how things could be changed to reduce harm.

Anyone interested in such issues may want to check out some of the resources listed below. I developed this list for some seminars I am currently presenting (along with Pam Birrell PhD) – we just finished presenting to a good group of 62 people in Eugene Oregon yesterday, and will be presenting in Portland Oregon on 9/14/12, more at http://ethicspdx.eventbrite.com/  I also hope to make this into a webinar, with ethics CEUs for professionals, by next spring.

The resource list for the seminar:

Many of the articles listed below are available for free at the included links.

Learn to think critically about psychiatric medications, while also earning up to 12 free CE credits, for free: http://www.criticalthinkrx.org/ (This site was funded through a settlement for drug company misbehavior.)

How to help people who might want to reduce or get off medications:  One source is Ron Unger’s guide http://recoveryfrompsychosis.org/therapists-guide-to-reducing-medications/  This source references a number of other sources which are written to be given directly to consumers, such as http://comingoff.com/  or the Coming Off Medications Guide – Second Edition – http://wp.me/p5nnb-7dS Or consider going to the seminar presented by Will Hall, the author of the Coming Off Medications Guide, Understanding Psychiatric Medications: A Harm Reduction Approach  Sunday, October 21 2012 10:00 am – 5:00 pm in Portland OR.

One place to find out more about medications and risks, that is professionally run but not drug company funded: Rxisk.org.  This site offers the ability to search for a drug and see all the available data from fda’s medwatch, organized in an easy-to-understand manner, with charts, graphs, leaflets, and other information that may not be available anywhere else, and it’s all free.  A number of psychiatrists, including David Healy, are the creators of this site.

There are two sources in particular that you might want to check in on frequently to make sure you have access to critical information about biopsychiatric claims.  One is Mad in America, a website organized by Robert Whitaker but also featuring many others, that includes both easy to read blog posts by a number of authors, plus references to the most recent research.  Another is Eyes on Pharmaceutico-Industrial Complex Corruption which is a facebook group that describes its purpose as “To be clear, this group is absolutely not anti-pharmacology. It is decidedly anti-pharmaceutical corruption, including perpetuation of pharma myths, concealing iatrogenic effects, under-representing and concealing side-effects, and exaggerating clinical efficacy.”

A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs by psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff is a short, clearly written book that can help both professionals and lay people understand psychiatric drugs in a balanced way.

[continue reading…]

I was recently talking with a young man about his anxiety, which he experiences as extreme.  When I asked him what the anxiety was about, he didn’t know.  When I suggested that we become curious about it and explore what it might be about, he told me that it was so extreme, it must be “biochemical.”  This meant to him that the anxiety could not be understood in a psychological way, but had to be dealt with as part of his “illness.”

I acknowledged to him that anxiety certainly involves biochemistry, but suggested that there are also experiences and interpretations of experience that trigger the biochemistry into action.  For example, if he experienced someone pointing a firearm in his direction, he would likely experience an intense biochemical process within his body, but the experience would not be “just biochemical.”

If people are going to understand themselves and work through emotional problems, it is essential that they get curious about their experiences and reflect on what might be triggering them.  Sometimes such curiosity or reflection results in getting valuable messages from those experiences, or at other times, it involves identifying a mistake that triggered the emotional experience, which then allows for resolution.  To use the simple example of the threat perceived from the firearm, one might either take quick action to avoid being shot, or in another situation perhaps observe more carefully and notice a movie is being filmed and that the firearm being pointed is just a prop.

Of course, experiences like anxiety and depression often have their sources in much more complex experiences, and so more complex reflection is necessary to sort out what actions to take or what interpretations to revise.  We live though in a society that does not like complexities or deep reflection, so we already have a bias toward thinking that disturbing emotions that don’t quickly make sense must just be something wrong with us.  This bias makes us think we “shouldn’t have” disturbing emotional states, so we tend to push them away or dissociate from them, which just makes it more difficult for us ever to understand their sources and decide what to do about them.

Those who market psychiatric drugs take advantage of this cultural bias to offer a seductive pseudo explanation, which is that unwanted emotional states that aren’t easily resolved must be the result of a “biochemical imbalance” or some other biological problem.   Our culture has become heavily influenced by this viewpoint, to the point where it seems the majority believe that seriously disturbing emotional states lacking easy explanations must be caused by a fault in biochemistry, rather than being something that can be potentially understood and resolved.

The sad result of this marketing effort has been to dramatically aggravate a cultural tendency to avoid deeply listening to each other, or even to ourselves.  Any mental or emotional problem which does not rapidly resolve must be “biochemical” and not worth even trying to understand; instead we should be trying to drug it away. [continue reading…]