Searching for the Joy

I was fortunate to see Beth Hart in concert this week. Here is a video from that night of her singing/playing her song relating to her experience with mental illness “Everything Must Change” and an interview about it (and more) from HuffPo:

 

 

MR: Beth, let’s talk about “Everything Must Change.” You’ve actually had some major life changes especially over the last couple of years, haven’t you?

BH: Yeah. It seems like my whole life has been major changes on every corner. I’ve always struggled with bipolar disorder but I never was medicated as a kid for it. I kind of self-medicated, which led me into a lot of problems with drug addiction and whatnot. Then I finally just had to get sober, and this was many years ago, right around when I married my husband. We’re coming up on twelve years of being married. All the doctors were telling me, “It’s not going to take just being sober, you’re going to have to go on some sort of medication probably.” I said, “No I don’t, I’m going to be sober and I’m going to get my life together,” and I did. I got sober, I still had my weird little head shit, but I was doing pretty good, I’d started working in Europe, things were going pretty good, I was building a career, my second chance career was happening there. I was feeling really good and I was kind of being a little bit of a brat, saying to my doctors, “See, I told you I could get sober,” and they were saying , “No, you’re in remission. You’d better watch it.”

They were right, because about five years ago, I had my worst decline mentally I’ve ever had, stone cold sober, and ended up going to the hospital. So everything changed. That song was written as soon as I got out, and it was all about what I experienced in there. I’d been to hospitals before, but never for such a long run, and usually when they let you out, you just get semi-stable and then they let you out. But this time, I had to get not only stable but they wanted to keep me and watch, so I was in there for a good month and a week. On the last week that I was there, I realized that whatever kind of darkness in life, all people have their own difficulties they deal with, that we know that when things are really good, we know that they have to change. But I think I forgot that when things are bad that, too, will change. That will also change, and it will get better and it will get hard again and it will get better and it’s this journey of life, so I just tried to bring in a lot of different metaphors. In the song, I talk about the outlaw and I talk about the little women dancing and I’m trying to use these different pictures of how when things are good, they get bad, and when they’re bad, they get good again, especially at the end of the song when I talk about my mother and my way of saying goodbye to her when she’s dying. “Mom, don’t be afraid, because it must change. That’s part of the natural law. Everything must change.”

MR: The title “Everything Must Change” has been used often prior to your own song about life because it’s such a constant, it’s like street wisdom. People want things to stay as they are, but they, and we, just can’t.

BH: They cannot. And I think one of the great things to recognize is when things do change for us, especially when they’re going good and they get really ugly or really difficult, it’s not because we’re bad or created something bad, it’s just the natural journey of life. Everyone’s got their own destiny and their own paths, and I think that our paths are meant to be filled with joy and dreams and even tragedy and that’s just a part of it. We can either flow with it or we can pretend like it’s not supposed to happen and every time, have our asses kicked because we’re expecting it to stay good and that’s just not the natural law of things.

 Full article/interview here.

DSM’s Demise?

“The world’s biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry’s “bible” – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”. This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5.

On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorising diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person’s symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing.

This would mean abandoning the manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that has been the mainstay of psychiatric research for 60 years.” (Source: New Scientist: Psychiatry divided as mental health ‘bible’ denounced)

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This move is being heralded as great news in the “survivor” community. But, I want to know who in the hell will pay for the brain scans and cognitive testing the NIMH is recommending as diagnostics?! Let’s get real, this is yet another way to pass the buck on treatment of mental illness! Most claims by the US government regarding the improvement/advancement of mental healthcare is extremely insincere  and aimed to keep/place the burden of mental health care square on the shoulders (and wallets) of those with a mental illness.

Honestly, my brain scans have been non-events. No doctor would never know I have Tourette syndrome, let alone have struggled with severe depression and bipolar EVER by looking at the results of my brain imaging!

Of course, I don’t like the idea of any sort of “bible”. I think the DSM began as merely a set of guidelines that have been extremely helpful for a lot of doctors and a lot of folks with psychiatric disorders as well as abused to no end by the medical establishment and extremely destructive for a helluva lot of women and many, many members of my LGBT family, too.

Also, see The Walrus: Mind Games for some interesting reading on this.

What are your thoughts on the possible demise of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual?

Thoughts on Recovery from Bipolar Disorder

I am asked a lot  about whether I think I have recovered from bipolar disorder. I say yes, but I always get a queasy feeling along with my affirmative answer. It’s because we (or at least I ) have been socialized and led to believe there is no recovery from  mental illness. Plus, some stupid buzz-kill must show up to remind me there is always a potential for relapse.

I said this to a new friend, a sister traveler in the consumer world, recently. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, “if you recover from the flu you can still get it again, but you’ve still recovered.” Now, I don’t usually like comparisons between physical illness and psychic pain, but this made a lot of sense to me.  As we discussed the issue further, I became more comfortable in what I already knew in my gut: It is possible to recover from bipolar disorder for some people and I am one of them.

I did a presentation for some drama therapy students a month or so ago. One of the facilitators is a social worker on an inpatient unit at a large metropolitan hospital. He said the team he works with never (NEVER) thinks in terms of recovery, only remission and relapse. He reflected on this, said he never really considered recovery for his patients and that upon momentary reflection about my discussion of recovery, it was interesting to think about and also pretty fucked up, too, to operate only in a space of perpetual illness.

Now, of course all people don’t recover, and folks recover at different levels, different times, different ways,etc. But, with THE WORD from the top  (the ‘helping’ professions) being that we cannot recover, well, then, there you go. We. Cannot. Recover.

But FUCK THAT! I don’t believe there is no recovery from mental illness, and neither do a lot of folks I talk to, read, agree with, disagree with, and otherwise. So, today is a new day of believing, affirmatively, that I am recovered, and I will stand my ground with anyone who tries to tell me otherwise.

“Dear Steph, Today it is 3 years ago Ken died.”

My friend and comrade, and a brilliant illustrator, Ken Rinciari, died three years ago yesterday.

I think he had cancer. I know he had severe neuropathological pain in his legs that he described to me after his last visit to NYC. I also know he had all the miscellaneous aches, pains, and various terminal diagnoses from various doctors. He was a man in his late 70s who had smoked hand-rolled cigarettes lit off each other his entire life .

However, I didn’t find out about his death until early in May after he died. It wasn’t a shock since I hadn’t heard from him for quite some time even though we were daily correspondents. And, I knew he had not been feeling well for some time. But when his companion Dawn’s email came–the email addresses of his closest correspondents culled from his Outlook–I cried a little. I was on a New York City bus, and read the news on my phone. Who knows where I was headed…something probably not at all important in the scheme of things.

My eyes are not dry now.

     

 

 

 

 

 

Things come in threes “they” say. My longtime friend Mary, in her 60s and living in New Mexico, died a year after Ken. Soon after that, Cheryl, a Brooklyn writer friend died — she was not even 40. I received a single phone call and one form letter from two of Mary’s sisters. She was far away  and we hadn’t seen each other in a very long time, though we spoke on the phone regularly. But I couldn’t get the money together to travel to Albuquerque. Cheryl’s book was published posthumously. Her legend lives on among her friends her in Brooklyn and in the NYC literary scene.

I’ve been having an email conversation with a friend of Ken’s from Alkmaar, Holland for the past week. She said she was thinking of Ken, Googled to find a photo of him, and found this blog. She is an Advocatenkantoor (attorney) there. Ken introduced us quite a while back and we emailed briefly about exchanging apartments, but nothing came of it at the time. We have a lot in common, aside from both being 50-year-old women and being friends of Ken… I’ve had correspondence with lots of Ken’s friends, and some of his family. It seems he touched a lot of lives — and also gave everyone some of his artwork as well…

I don’t really know what more to say than death sucks. That’s what Cheryl’s partner has taught me about death and accompanying grief. There’s really nothing to say except that grief sucks.

EVENT: Mental Health Care: A Painful Legacy and Today’s Crisis, May 23, NYC

PARADIGM SHIFT: NYC’S FEMINIST COMMUNITY PRESENTS

MENTAL HEALTH CARE: A PAINFUL LEGACY AND TODAY’S CRISIS

Screening & Discussion with LUCY WINER, Filmmaker of “Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution” and STEPHANIE SCHROEDER, Activist & Author “Beautiful Wreck: Sex, Lies, and Suicide”

Trailer of Kings Park

Thursday, May 23, 2013

6:30-9:15 PM

The Tank- 151 W. 46th St. (b/t 6th & 7th Ave) 8th Floor, NYC 10036

elevator access

Subway: N,R,Q to 49th St. or B,D,F,M to Rockefeller Center

Cost: $12 pre-paid, $15 at door

LIMITED SEATING / Buy Online!

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/374137

Round-up

 

Here are a bunch of articles I’ve been posting and thinking about the past few weeks:

Trapped: The Story of the Mentally Ill in Prison

 

Caldera: dream-like animated short about mental illness

 

Massacres and mental health — focus on young men

 

Entry on mental illness is added to AP Stylebook

 

Thinking through gun laws aimed at mentally ill

 

SAVE THE DATE: Mental Health Care: A Painful Legacy & Today’s Crisis

 

Trailer for the work-in-progress animated feature “Rocks In My Pockets”

 

Imperfect Tools

Mental Illness: Consumers & Cages, Users & Abusers

I was asked to be a part of  a panel discussion for an upcoming event  in NYC entitled “Mental Health Care: A Painful Legacy and Today’s Crisis.”

This discussion, to take place at the end of May, will follow a screening of the documentary “Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution” by filmmaker Lucy Winer. I asked Winer for an advance screener copy of her film, which I received yesterday and immediately sat down to watch. The film is so compelling, so honest, and so horrifying at the same time, at least for anyone who’s been incarcerated in any sort of mental illness cage for any length of time, I called Winer to tell that her film is “fucking amazing.”

Perhaps this was not the most eloquent of descriptions, but it’s hard to put into words all of what “Kings Park” conveys.

The film explores Winer’s past (she was incarcerated at Kings Park, an enormous psychiatric facility on Long Island, twice for six month stints when she was 17) as well as the “deinstitutionalization” of individuals with mental illness and the closing of large hospitals in New York state (and nationwide), especially in the 80s & 90s.

“Kings Park” includes various stories of other inmates along with a range of people who worked at the institution (psychiatrists, attendants, therapists) all of whom have their own stories — sometimes even conflicting with the overall narrative of the film, which is that warehousing and intimidating (and even murdering) inmates/patients is not effective”treatment” or “care” even for those who are mentally ill (and many in Kings Park — as elsewhere — were not). One former attendant considered Kings Park a “paradise” — it was his home for several decades, both his personal and professional life flourished there, and he lived in what he considered a palace. Kings Park was once a collection of giant buildings sitting on approximately 850 acres of a scenic, secluded woodland. For others it was hell, including people who went in for no reason but being orphans (as were some workers) or too-hard-to-handle kids from group homes, teenagers already abused by various systems invented to help them, who were then betrayed by those systems for an even worse one: Kings Park.

That’s all I’m going to write about “Kings Park” right now. I’ve linked to the movie site above, there is an excellent trailer you can view, check for (or organize!) a screening event near you. You can also purchase the film for yourself, or if you work are affiliated with any type of school or educational/academic institution, hospital or community organization or public (or private) library, you can purchase the film for your specific group. All proceeds from sales of the movie support outreach efforts.

And, I’d be negligent — and a bad publicist — if I didn’t include a listing of the specific event where I will be a part of the discussion:

Paradigm Shift NYC  presents Mental Health Care: A Painful Legacy and Today’s Crisis, screening & discussion with Lucy Winer, filmmaker, “Kings Park” and Stephanie Schroeder, author, “Beautiful Wreck: Sex, Lies & Suicide” — Thursday, May 23, 2013 @ 6:30-9:15pm @ The Tank, 151 West 46th Street, NYC. Tickets will be available soon and are $12 online (through brown paper bag tickets) and $15 at the door. Buy early and buy online, this event is going to sell out!!!!