Three Little Words

Forgive me for not writing last week about this week’s International Recovery Perspectives: Action on Alternatives conference at Hart House, as I had promised.

Sometimes life interrupts your best intentions. Last week, it wasn’t life, but death. Two deaths. One was the suicide of my neighbour, a sweet, gentle, caring man who was very ill. He lived across the street.

I ran out of words.

Then, on Saturday, at the First International Conference on Integrative, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (ICAM) and Mental Health on “Creating Hope in Mental Health,” I found them again. I came home inspired and uplifted, stimulated and excited.

Today, I’ll start with three. Simple words. We hear them every day.

Communication. Respect. Compromise.

These three little words define healthy relationships. They’re synergetic, too. The interaction of the three produces a combined effect greater than the sum of their individual effects.

As human beings, we are all about relationships. With each other, our families, our friends, our life partners, our children, our pets, our colleagues, our environment, our bodies, our minds and all those people with the experience, knowledge, wisdom and skills to help us to heal.

This conference is the brainchild of Jean Antoine Boodhoo, a dynamic Medicine Hat-based, British-trained psychiatrist who envisions a world where conventional and alternative healthcare practitioners work together in their healing.

“Healing is a journey, and if we care about each other, it’s important to be able to work with each other,” said Boodhoo. “Despite medical advances in both traditional and alternative medicine, Canadians are increasingly suffering from emotional and mental health problems.”

His vision? Combining conventional medical approaches and widely practised alternative medicine that dates back thousands of years.

In what he calls “a movement” to see conventional medical healthcare providers and alternative and complementary healers “working together for the benefit of mankind,” Boodhoo gathered the most prominent North American medical doctors with expertise in alternative and complementary medicine.

In treating mental health problems––depression, bipolar disorders, anxiety, ADHD, and a range of other conditions––they combine psychotherapy and psychopharmacology with nutrition and nutritional supplements, chiropractics, Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, aromatherapy, spirituality, hypnotherapy, herbalism, light therapy, aboriginal healing.

“You need healthy relationships to do that and it takes communication, respect and compromise,” Boodhoo said. “I don’t always agree with what others are doing but I won’t denigrate or degrade them, as long as they do no harm.”

I often wonder, sitting in a medical doctor’s office, especially a specialist’s, how much he or she really knows about my big picture, my whole organism? Modern medicine with all its specialties and subspecialties seems to have forgotten that we, as human beings, are synergetic, too. We’re greater than the sum of our parts. We’re all unique. We’re not just a collection of organs in isolation.

That’s where complementary and alternative medicine have much to share. They’re holistic. That’s what healing is all about.

Maybe they could have helped the man who used to live across the street.

What is Normal?

 It all depends on how you look at mental health.

Can your mind become ill, like other organs in your body? Or are what we consider mental illnesses not illnesses at all, but differences within the human spectrum of experience—just more “extreme mental states?”

In other words, are some people just “too” different for our society?

Consider a study conducted by the World Health Organization in 1979 comparing the outcomes of people with schizophrenia in developed versus developing countries.

In the developing countries, mainly in Africa, the recovery rate of people with schizophrenia proved to be twice as high as in developed countries—U.S., England and Europe.

The WHO couldn’t believe their results. Scratching their heads with no explanation, in 1991, they repeated the same study. Same results. Still no clinical explanation was cited. Just speculation.

Don’t believe it? Well, fast forward to 2008. Seattle-based mental health journalist Philip Dawdy, who has bipolar disorder and fervently and fastidiously monitors the shenanigans of Big Pharma on his award winning blog “Furious Seasons,” discussed a small study today published last year in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Two University of Illinois psychiatrists found that "patients with schizophrenia who had removed themselves or been removed from antipsychotic medications showed significantly better global functioning and outcome than those still being treated with antipsychotics.”

Don’t try this! The study followed these people for 15 years after diagnosis, was relatively small and they were carefully monitored.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe what we consider to be mental illnesses may not be illnesses at all. Maybe they’re temporary or evolutionary states. Maybe they aren’t best “treated” by “scientific” and “medical” means.

Maybe we should be asking more questions. Be more critical.

What is normal? Is there a “normal”? Who decides? Are they normal?

Are mental illnesses psychiatric disorders or diseases that can only treated with traditional psychiatric treatments—drugs and psychotherapy?

How well are drugs and psychotherapy working? Mental health issues aren’t going away. They’re on the rise.

If there are alternatives to mainstream medical approaches to mental health issues, how alternative?

Over the next two weeks, a mind blowing array of global experts will descend on Toronto to explore and share a vastly diverse array of “alternative” ideas, research, knowledge and experiences to the traditional, mainstream medical approach of dealing with mental health and mental illnesses.

At the First International Conference on Integrative, Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Mental Health at the Sheraton Hotel this weekend, North American “medical” specialists will discuss treating mental illnesses with acupuncture, naturopathy, Ayurveda, nutrition, Native American healing, chiropractics, homeopathy, aromatherapy, spirituality and other methods.

This conference is for doctors, health professionals and students, but I’ll be there.

Then, on Thursday, June 5 and Friday, June 6 at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, the International Network toward Alternatives and Recovery (INTAR) and the Leadership Project of Toronto are presenting International Recovery Perspectives: “Action on Alternatives.”

For more information on registering for this conference, contact Brian McKinnon at bmckinnon@iprimus.ca or (416) 285-7996, ext. 227.

And stay tuned. Later this week, I’ll tell you more about this critical and creative exploration of leading edge approaches to Mental Health Recovery.

Mad Pride

Let's talk about "Mad Pride."

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a front page story in the “Style” section of all places, headlined “Mad Pride fights stigma.” (I wish the editors had used the word “prejudice” instead, but that’s another story.)

It focused on two women with mental illnesses who are living out loud.

Philadelphia Weekly writer Liz Spikol muses about her bipolar disorder in forthright, often disquieting YouTube posts, and in her blog and newspaper column about mental health.

Elyn Saks, University of Southern California law professor and associate dean, speaks out candidly about her lifelong struggle with schizophrenia in lectures and in her new memoir, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”

This is nothing new.

In March 2007, the Toronto Star’s Helen Henderson wrote a feature about “Mad Pride,” the first in a mainstream North American newspaper, although she didn’t use that term. Mental health advocates and activists all over the continent, and globally in cyberspace trumpeted her column. Even the Poynter Institute, the preeminent St. Petersburg, Florida school for journalists and journalism teachers recognized Henderson’s breakthrough story.

“Mad Pride” is all about human rights like the Gay Pride, Black Pride and Women’s Lib movements. Its roots date back to the 1960s psychiatric and consumer survivors, whose anger and activism stewed underground, known, but largely ignored by the mainstream media.

In London, England, media campaigns to counteract the slurs of the tabloid press emerged in the late 1990s. Activists began reclaiming the word “mad” in the same way gay rights activists have reclaimed the word, “queer”––to celebrate our identity, fight prejudice and discrimination, and declare our rights to visibility, acceptance and respect.

Mad People’s History courses are offered at York and Ryerson Universities and at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education.

Mad Students’ Societies on university and college campuses all over the continent are empowering young people and breaking down barriers to education.

For many years, "Mad Pride" has been celebrated internationally on July 14. (Bastille Day, too, which celebrates the beginning of the French Revolution.)

Last year, Mayor David Miller officially proclaimed July14th Mad Pride Day in Toronto, which was marked by our first official “Bed Push.”

This event was inspired by British psychiatric survivors, consumers and mad folks who staged the first-ever “Great Escape Bed Push” in 2006.

Pyjama-clad, they pushed a psychiatric bed from Millview Psychiatric Hospital in Brighton, 96 kilometres to the original sight of “Bedlam,” the Bethlem Asylum in London, while being pursued by a giant syringe.

All to raise awareness of the history of maltreatment of people diagnosed with mental illnesses and the increasing force of the psychiatric establishment.

This year, Monday, July 14 to Saturday, July 20 is Mad Pride Week in Toronto. Each day will feature different activities –– an arts festival, a tour of the patient-built wall at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (formerly the Toronto Lunatic Asylum), a Mad Pride Poetry Jam and the second annual Toronto Mad Pride Bed Push Parade and Party.

At last, all over the world, we’re coming out. Hear our voices. We won’t be silenced, ever again.

Peeling The Onion

A letter arrived recently. It rattled me. Got me thinking about a couple of things. So let’s just call this post a “crazy quilt.” A riff of random thoughts on “peeling the onion.” My psychiatrist’s metaphor for psychotherapy.

You realize that peeling onions makes you cry.

Psychotherapy isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. It isn’t self-indulgent. It isn’t “mindless navel-gazing,” as one fellow, I know, calls it. He’s dead wrong.

Sometimes it’s painful, frustrating. Even frightening. Ultimately, it’s enlightening. I’ve had more “ah-ha” moments in therapy than anywhere else.

Good psychotherapy is not just talking and remembering, it’s grounding your experiences and memories in meaning. You may not like what you learn.

Often it’s easier to let those memories sift back into your unconscious. Deny their existence. Except they tend to bang around back there and eventually make trouble.

 

“When I was in my 20’s, I used to wish I could have a lobotomy,” a woman wrote. “It would have been so wonderful to start all over again without the memories and demons from an extremely abusive upbringing.”

Despite a history of emotional and mental distress, she lives an apparently enviable life. Now she’s approaching 60. Behind a semblance of success, her exceptional career, her admiring friends and colleagues, secretly, she’s tortured—especially since her psychiatrist died.

“I thought I could eke out a living on my own, but the shadow cast by my past is getting so long, I can see it ahead of me,” she admitted.

So she’s looking for another psychotherapist.

It’s time to peel off another layer.

What grit and courage, this woman has. She’s not going back, but onward and inward.

Dr. Bob confided recently that on quite a few occasions, he’s seen “patients”—his word—who insist on being given a diagnosis and a prescription. They have no interest in psychotherapy.

“They come once or twice, but when they don’t get what they want, they never come back,” he said.

They want quick fixes.

An emotional trauma can’t be bandaged like a sliced finger or cast in plaster like a broken leg. You can’t see your mind healing. It isn’t a linear experience. Those layers don’t always peel off easily.

It hurts and heals at the same time. Rebuilds spirit and soul, from the inside out. You have to be ready.

 

You don’t always need a psychotherapist.

Hairdressers can be great psychotherapists. Have you noticed? You can talk to them as they transform you. Listening, they make you feel good.

That’s often what psychotherapy is.

Whatever works for you.

There are many ways to peel the onion.

Let's Have Mental Health Awareness Week 52 Weeks a Year

May 8, 2008

Two weeks a year are devoted to Mental Health Awareness. This week, at the beginning of May. And another week, at the beginning of October.

Two weeks a year are not enough.

With six million American and who knows how many Canadian children –– as young as three years old –– prescribed cocktails of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs never intended for children, tested in children or proven effective in children –– two weeks are not enough.

With more antidepressants sold than all other prescription drugs combined –– two weeks are not enough.

Who says we’re supposed to be happy all the time? What happened to waking up on the wrong side of the bed? What happened to situational sadness? What’s wrong with “a bad mood” or “feeling blaaah” or being blue? Moods swing. If they didn’t, we’d be robots. Stepford people. We sure wouldn’t be human.

When we’ve medicalized our moods away by numbing our minds to life’s big and little tensions, pressures, strains and stresses with prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs, even food –– two weeks are not enough.

Today’s array of antidepressants are effective most often only in cases of severe, extreme and persistent depression. Deep, dead dog dark depression that hits hard and doesn’t let go. That lays you out flat. For no apparent reason.

Even in these cases, powerful neuroleptics are only one approach. Temporary tools. They have side effects, too.

There are alternatives.

Despite what your medical doctor or psychiatrist tells you, any so-called “chemical imbalance in your brain” is not necessarily the cause of depression or any mental illness. That is just the latest, most enduring psychiatric theory. It hasn’t been proven.

And the drug companies, Big Pharma, are laughing all the way to the bank.

Earlier this week, The New York Times “Well” Blog reported that according to the consumer watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), more than half of the 28 new writers currently working on the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (D.S.M.) are linked to the drug industry.

This psychiatric Bible, to be published in 2012, is the handbook used to make diagnoses of mental illnesses, a highly subjective, by-no-means scientific process. 

These “editors” annual income cannot exceed more than $10,000 per year from industry sources. One member, over the last five years consulted for 13 different drug companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Wyeth, Merck, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb, reported CSPI’s Integrity in Science project.

“We have made every effort to ensure that D.S.M.-V will be based on the best and latest scientific research, and to eliminate conflicts of interest in its development,” said APA president Dr. Carolyn B. Rabinowitz, in a press release.

You know what? This isn’t even new. Similar hazardous links between D.S.M. writers and the drug industry dating back to 1989 were reported in 2006.

Two weeks a year for Mental Health Awareness?

Nope. Just not enough.

Your Feedback, Family Therapy and More

Here, at the “Coming Out Crazy” cranny, I promised you that we would “talk.” I haven’t forgotten.

We’re not yet “interactive” –– I’m told that’s coming –– but in the meantime, in this post, and the next one, too, I’ll share some of your comments, answer a few questions and even let you rant a bit.

I’m in a great mood, thanks to you. You’ve been so supportive, enthusiastic and encouraging about “Coming Out Crazy.” Sharing ideas, concerns, comments and kudos.

Surprisingly, not a word of criticism. Yet. I live in hope. :–)

A young man from Toronto, studying in Budapest, writes: “I too have suffered a mood disorder for most of my life, and through psychotherapy I have best been able to manage depression. It was mostly therapy conducted on myself, through the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns, recommended to me by a therapist.

“I would love to read in future articles about particular insights or psychotherapeutic approaches that have helped you to manage your disorder.”

For a couple of years, I worked with two social workers –– family therapists. Amazing experience. The Family Therapy model is non-psychiatric. My therapists used some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Great for specific problem solving. They recommended “The Family Crucible” by Augustus Napier and Carl Whitaker. Remarkably insightful if you’re working on family dynamics.

My post on medicating children touched a nerve. This mother of a four-year-old girl labelled with ADD, childhood bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and reactive attachment disorder, writes: “In our family, we use diagnoses as a tool to understanding different aspects of our daughter's experience.

“We avoid treating any of the frameworks provided by a diagnosis as definitive. The danger in diagnosis is that it is inherently "medicalized" and parents and professionals are then lured into treating the "illness" as though it is separate from all other context.

“In the case of young kids, mental health issues cannot be separated from other aspects of social, emotional, and cognitive development. The entire foundation for infant mental health is the parent-child relationship. So handing over our kids to therapists and doctors is entirely counterproductive.

“I am not saying that professional help is not needed. Our family needs and uses mental health services and professionals. But our focus is getting the tools and support we need as parents to create a healing family context – a context that allows my daughter to thrive even though her development is atypical. This is not easy.”

You are so courageous. You’re preparing your daughter for a healthy future. And recovery. With young children, the parent-child relationship is the key to healing. Not pills.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom and extraordinary values.

One footnote: I’m amazed at the labels doctors have assigned your daughter. Since we’ve been discussing books, I urge you to read Harvard psychologist Paula J. Caplan’s “They Say You’re Crazy –– How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal.”

I’ve known Paula for years. She’s brilliant. Taught in Toronto at OISE before returning to Harvard. She’s written many books on mental health and her perspectives will put an enlightening spin on psychiatric labelling and bolster your confidence.

You’re doing everything right for your child. I applaud you!