Lived Experience Forum

[Fredd50]

@Eden1919 

Your last post was incredibly relieving to read, thanks so much. It's a big antidote and hope to not feel so alone with this.

Sadly, my own research and experience has left me with very similar troubling conclusions.

There is another human element too, that acknowledging how we are always learning, that everyone's experience is difference and that the best genuine progress for a lot of people is made by understanding those very states of being that the "mental illness" ideology had taught it's practitioners need to be pushed away requires a very radical shift in attitude in those professionals who genuinely want to help, not just enjoy the status and get money and recognition from their work. It involves putting their egos aside and learning from their clients, instead of presenting the idea that they know everything. It requires them to learn how to understand states of mind they have no training in understanding and have been taught to suppress with drugs instead of resolving.

These things are very real problems for the professionals, they have been trained to see the world a particular way their whole lives, it has shaped their brains. Overcoming the obstacle of the distortion it has created is every bit as real and difficult as understanding and overcoming the impacts of an abusive family or environment that constantly undermines a growing child's sense of self and can lead to extreme states where unresolved emotions, hurts, abuses that have been continuously denied might exert themselves on the consciousness as flashbacks, as symbolic metaphors in worldview or as actual visions or internalised voices.

We are all, in one way or another, products to of a complex relationship with the physical, social, relational, and psychological environment we developed in. As we change, we change the world. As the world changes it changes us.

Those professionals that act purely on greed, those who are fuelled by identity and status, those who genuinely want to help and every other possible permutation and combination have worldviews and thinking, feeling, behaviour payterpa that are a product of the same mechanisms as their clients. Just with different inputs.

I find that hopeful. For humanity in general. That the more we talk about these things the better our chances of shaping a world that's better for everyone - by recognising the power of narrative to shape things for the better.

I don't understand the idea of putting career, status, power above everything, or of blindly following the tradition of the status quo. But I think the bio-psycho-social causes of these things are every bit as relevant and important to understand for our shared future as anything that gets called "mental illness".

I'd love to live in a world of genuinely rational, caring and independently thinking folks who could discuss different ways of looking at things without the distortions of perceived political or economic threats that were not being aacknowledged.I guess learning how such a world might be accomplished is a big part of our times, when more and more people are becoming emboldened to question the status quo on many fronts and are learning how incredibly powerful humans are when they work together.

I just hope we can start to go in that direction, rather than towards polarisation, domination, anger, competition, exploitation and all those not so great aspects of our potential nature. I also hope (indeed I often pray) that we can learn to have the courage to see things as they really are when that often requires realising that each new thing we think we know for certain becomes very different the more we learn about our infinitely complex world.

Humans have such incredible potential, yet we know that every civilization we have ever made has ultimately collapsed (or been invaded) due to greed, fear, panic, anger, self-interest, inequality, exploitation of each other and our environments. I hope we make it this time. 🙏

[Eden1919]

@Fredd50  yes it is a big challenge unfortunantly something i seem to be realising is that not everyone has the ability for self reflections and abstract thoughts be that a lack of teaching in how to do it or a refusal to even try. but i can understand people wanting to cling to what they "know" it feels safe and secure if you think you know everything then there is nothing that can scare you becuse you can fix everything. but if you accept that there are things you dont know and cant control then the world can be a much more scary place. much like that feeling when you realise how small you are compared to how big the earth is and then compared to how big the universe is. but i think if we are to have a society that can function for the good of everyone we need to not cling to the safe things and take risks. not risks like starting wars but risks like accepting that one person doesnt need to have an amount of resources that could feed 1000 people all to themselves. sure that one rich person may be worried well what if something happens and the world runs out at least i will have enough but they dont realise that if they had shared in the first place then the people who made the thing could have kept making it because they would have had enough to live off as well. we need to work towards better ways to be kind to each other regardless of what someone looks like or how they talk or dress. and we need to be more kind of our environment. if we support our environment it supports us back but instead we just keep taking and taking all to try and have hords of money. but even if you manage to become rich and get whatever you want. it doesnt buy you eternal life you cant take posessions or money with you when you die so stopping everyone else from having access to basic needs untimatley just ruins other lives. still i wish i was more hopeful about the direction humanity is headed in but sadly i dont see things ending well we may already be too late to save the planet and we dont have a back up but as far as suffering goes. we all need to accept that there is no right or worng way to suffer.  

[Fredd50]

@Eden1919  @@@Indeed wise words. I especially love the last bit " there  is no right or wrong way to suffer". I feel like this would be a much more helpful and less misleading slogan than "mental illness is real" which is very misleading no matter how well intended it is and sadly leading to unintended consequences that would no doubt horrify those who meant it to make things better.

As for the very wealthy, sadly their efforts are really a very futile protection against uncertainty. All of their wealth will be utterly worthless if civilization fails. It depends entirely on property laws and recognition of their currency. Without these being respected by their fellow humans they are as vulnerable as the rest of us. Sometimes even more so if their push towards inequality becomes too extreme or callous: as we once saw with Russian Czars or French nobility and numerous other regimes before or since.

I don't see things quite so bleakly though thankfully. There does seem to be a growing awareness of cooperation, environmental fragility and equity/diversity/inclusion in the community evenin the midst of some very loud or prominent groups pushing to the contrary, perhaps even because of them. People seem to be getting a sense of their own power  back. It has been very heartening to see, and I hope to see more of it , especially when joined with a sense of true accountability and awareness 🙏

[Eden1919]

@Fredd50  yes all big issues. what do you plan to do about the group? do you think you will try and find another? is there an online version you could look into? it is a shame that you dont feel safe there and that because of that you cant get the skills you need. i really do think the facilitators should have done something about the other participants. just because a few people believe one thing on an issue doesnt mean either is wrong or right and they should have made an inclusive group from the start. if it was DBT there are some people who run private groups but they can be very expensive! so only look into those if you are fortunante enough to have the funds.  

[Fredd50]

Hi @Eden1919 

What I did about the group was try to realise the bigger picture.

Many of us in the group were there because we recognised that we wanted to do something about the effects of past experience and trauma that had left us with defense mechanisms that could involve anger. The difference was that unfortunately the only way the group had been equipped to explain their situation was as a "mental disorder". They found this validating when others criticised their behaviour and didn't realise how difficult it was for them to change it. They had never been taught another way to recognise this same thing, and even thought (because they had been taught as I once was) that recognising their behaviour was affecting others and calling their behaviour a 'mental disorder' were one and the same thing: unseparable. 

They had been taught that they had a choice: either they were to blame themselves or they had to publicise and accept as 'fact', the theory that they had an 'illness' which was affecting their brain (this has been described by some authors as the "brain or blame dilemma").

I realised that the escalation of the situation was an almost inevitable consequence of the adaptive defensiveness we were all trying to overcome as a result of trauma that wasn't focussed on or resolved (just mentioned briefly if at all) and, importantly, the pushing of the "brain or blame" dilemma by professionals.

The "Brain or blame dilemma" was so deeply infused into the other participants' and the facilitators minds that they couldn't escape it. If I challenged the ideology of illness, in their minds I was 'blaming' them. There wasn't any room for subtle exploration of the issues.

I know from experience this isn't surprising as the way the industry works is to discourage or repress any attempt to seek a genuine explanation of experiences they brand 'mental illness', even to rebrand the desire to seek an understanding as a 'lack of insight'. "Insight" is appropriated as accepting the "brain or blame" dilemma: either accepting blame and immediately changing behaviour or saying one has an illness in the brain - anything else is shamed and punished (someimes violently) by the mental health industry and the wider community that has been 'educated' to think this way over the past few decades.

So I figured the only way to do something about the problems in the group were to deal with the problem at the source: work with the health service management and other organisations to try and let them know they need to *stop* promoting the "brain or blame" dilemma and be more realistic and clear in their messaging.

The service is poorly funded, but they have agreed to look into funding for a Power Threat Meaning Framework based DBT group, one that supports openly the fact that increasing numbers of people are seeking more meaningful explanations of their experience than that of "illness". They also agreed that they need to look into culture change, so that the 'illness' ideology is no longer perpetuated as "real".

They've offered me an extra idividual session each week because they recognised it wasn't safe for me to attend group. It feels bad but I suppose it will be worth it if they really do look at changing their attitude as a service.

I guess sometimes its about more than just individual needs. We are all in this together as a community. I just hope that organisations are more willing to see the consequences of the way they have been going about things and be willing to listen and change, not just keep seeing themselves as 'experts' and promoting the status quo.

But we can only try...

[Eden1919]

@Fredd50  well i am glad they are offering you one to one sessions. and yes institutional change is needed hopefully one day it actually happens because i for one have had enough of being treated like i am not human because of a "diagnosis" i have been given. 

[Fredd50]

Feeling more and more marginalised with the way "antistigma" is rolling out. The new statement to avoid stigmatising languages in the election should be a celebration but instead it just feels like being more marginalised.

Why? Because it's not inclusive. It would be so easy to explain that "mental illness" was a way some people found helpful to look at their distress while recognising there were others, that's all it takes to get a lot of change.

But the increasing way that "mental illness" refined in "antistigma" campaigns leaves those of us who had to turn away from those models to find healing and understanding more marginalised, more forced, less understood, more traumatised, and more discriminsyed againat. It's not a competition. We might be a minority but we have suffered too. Our suffering is not less real. So why can't we be included in antistigma too? Don't we also deserve not to be stigmatised?