Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

Next Recovering Our Families course starts in August

Recovering Our Families

“Recovering our Families” introduces families to key recovery principles, leaders, research and resources that are person- and family-centered, trauma-informed and strengths based. This interactive, facilitated online class combines emailed lessons with recovery exercises, videos, online resources and a password-protected website with private facilitated group discussions and peer support. The “Recovering Our Families” course was written by and is facilitated by Krista MacKinnon with the help and support of Family Outreach and Response Program in Toronto Canada, and The Foundation For Excellence in Mental Health in Oregon, USA. If you’re not registered in the class, learn more about it here. Next class begins August 29th, registration will be open soon.

A list of warmlines by state

Warmline logo

A warmline is a peer-run listening line staffed by people in recovery themselves.
Scroll down to see a directory of known warmlines around the US.

Information on peer-run respite nationwide.
Other peer-run respite programs to go to:

Another directory of warmlines:
http://www.mhselfhelp.org/warmlines-index/
Metro Boston Recovery Learning Community (MBRLC) recent Peer Warmline feature in the SAMHSA Recovery to Practice weekly newsletter 11/12/10.
Warm line featured in the Boston Globe on February 5, 2009! (Article written before our collaboration with NERLC and the expansion from three to six days a week.)

Article about the Metro Boston Recovery Learning Community warmline by Carey Goldberg

The Warmline Guide is now live at:
http://www.power2u.org/peer-run-warmlines.html

To search for Warmlines by state, click on a state in the list below.

(Note: Warmlines listed in red are nationally accessible and welcome calls from anywhere)

The Secrets They Kept: The True Story of a Mercy Killing that Shocked a Town and Shamed a Family


An intriguing quote in this book puts the secrets of the Levin family tragedy in perspective:

“Secrets are like stars. They blaze inside the heart and ultimately could be explosive. But there are two types of secrets. Small secrets, like small stars, will eventually burn out. With time and space they lose their importance and simply vanish. No harm done. But big secrets, like massive stars, with time and constant fear grow stronger, creating a gravitational pull that eventually . . . When they get so big, they become a black hole.” (Jennifer Jabalay).

A true story, The Secrets They Kept reminds me very much of the family secrets that author Robertson Davies so brilliantly exploited in his novels like Fifth Business and What’s Bred in the Bone.

The central question in this book is what could possibly motivate a man to kill his own daughter? Sixteen year old Sally Levin had recently been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and about to be institutionalized. Sam, her father, told the court that he wanted to relieve her suffering and she had begged him to do it. Sam’s granddaughter, Suzanne Handler, leaves no stone unturned considering plausible answers where very little family history is available. Her aim in writing the book is to give Sally her rightful place in the family and to expose the consequences of the stigma surrounding mental illness. What I see when I read this book is all that and more. This is a family psychodrama acted out over multiple generations. At the end of the book, the author writes about how hidden secrets estranged her from her mother (Sam’s daughter), reminding me of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s observation, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

My review of this book draws on shamanistic beliefs that form the basis of Family Constellation Therapy popularized by ex-Jesuit priest Bert Hellinger. My family participated in Family Constellation Therapy that was precipitated by a diagnosis of schizophrenia in my son.

The Hellinger Institute of Northern California website explains that “A Family Constellation is a three-dimensional group process that has the power to shift generations of suffering and unhappiness. Bert Hellinger, the founder of this work, who studied and treated families for more than 50 years, observed that many of us unconsciously “take on” destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, aloneness, alcoholism and even illness as a way of “belonging” in our families. Bonded by a deep love, a child will often sacrifice his own best interests in a vain attempt to ease the suffering of a parent or other family member. Family Constellations allow us to break these patterns so that we can live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. In a moment of insight, a new life course can be set in motion. The results can be life-changing.” 
(http://www.hellingerpa.com/constellation.shtml)

From a Family Constellation Therapy perspective, there are probably two or more tragedies in the Levin family history, one buried in the history before the family immigrated to America, and the one at hand. We suspect this because of Sally’s status as a black sheep and her diagnosis of schizophrenia. Sally embodied something about the Levins that they feared about themselves. She was their mirror.

Author Suzanne Handler has stunned me by fearlessly and compassionately shining a light on her own grandfather and his immediate family in order to bring respect and honor to her long dead and forgotten aunt Sally. She leads the way in showing others how compassion and forgiveness are important in even the most awful circumstances. She’s done what Family Constellation Therapy would advise her to do for the sake of her own healing and for those of her children and her children’s children. She brings Sally to life through this book, she erects a new gravestone bearing the proper spelling of Sally’s name, and she forgives her grandfather.

Amongst other things, this book is a truelife crime story so I’ll put my own thoughts on the table as to what may have motivated Sam Levin to kill his daughter on August 16, 1937.

It is not axiomatic that all parents love their children equally or at all. Some parents have favorites and some have scapegoats. From what little we know about Sally, it appears that Sally was the one who never quite fit in with the family of seven who lived a cramped existence in a two bedroom house. Her break with reality may have been the final straw for an already stressed family. Anyone who has lived with a family member who is actively psychotic knows how high tensions can run. The psychotic person is alternately feared, criticized and ridiculed by other family members who haven’t a clue how to help their relative. Or, in trying to be compassionate, families often project worry and instill learned helplessness in their loved one. (There are books and courses available today that teach people how to diffuse the stress and uplift the person, but this kind of knowledge was little known then and only somewhat better known today.)

This (purely speculative) abuse may also have been a longstanding pattern in the Levin household when it came to Sally who was strikingly different from the others, being two shades darker in complexion. Her family called her “Blackie,” underscoring her noticeable difference. Was she the family black sheep or the family “scapegoat”? Shouldn’t at least her mother (Sam’s wife) have protected her? Surely she must have known something of Sam’s plans that day, or at least have had some sort of inkling. Protection is often too big a burden to ask of siblings, who are rivals for their parents’ affections. When the deed was done, the family members rallied round their father and perhaps took a vow of silence to not divulge to anyone that Sally was anything other than a beloved sibling. Their shame would have been too great.

Regarding Sam’s wife, I thought immediately of the Mrs. Dempster character in Davie’s book, Fifth Business. Both were alike in that the townsfolk said they were never right in the head. Mrs. Dempster wandered off one day and took a tumble with a tramp down by the river, to the lasting shame and horror of her pastor husband. Perhaps Sally Levin’s complexion gave rise to suspicions on Sam’s part that she was not his biological daughter and he treated her accordingly, despite his professed love for her.

What is a scapegoat? In Family Constellation Therapy a scapegoat is someone on the receiving end of a subconscious family process spanning multiple generations. Like the Biblical animal scapegoat, one family member, as a form of atonement, takes the brunt of the collective sins of the community/family and then is forcefully driven away from them. The family honor is thereby restored and the family can point to the scapegoat as the strange one who is not like them.

If one believes that there is some truth to the intergenerational scapegoat theory, then Sam was sacrificing one child for the good of the many. He was unconsciously carrying out his duty to his ancestors, while problematically creating a new burden for future generations of the family.

Did Sam Levin really intend to kill himself along with Sally? I doubt it. It was Sally’s idea for him to join her in death, not his. He needed to live to support the rest of his family. He was a dutiful husband, son, and father. His suicide note cleverly introduced the idea that he was insane himself, and destined to go the local insane asylum if he didn’t kill himself first. His suicide note says nothing about loving his daughter, nor anything about his daughter, for that matter, other than signing her name at the bottom. He was sane when he killed her. Not even temporarily insane. And yet, I can also imagine him fearing he was becoming temporarily insane because of stress. I’ve almost been there myself. The label of schizophrenia was enough to push me into a spiraling psychedelic anxiety that if not checked, could have made me temporarily insane. There is nothing I can tell from the story that leads me to believe that Sam loved his daughter, although the investigators came to the conclusion by interviewing relatives and church leaders (all people who would want to protect Sam) that “the defendant was so obsessed with the love for his child that he himself would lay down his life with her.” Except . . . he didn’t lay down his life for her. This is a psychic anomaly. It seems that he visited her grave many years later, and that shows a certain amount of contrition and respect for her, but love for Sally may not have been the case while she was alive. 

There is another interpretation of Sally’s outcast status that comes from Family Constellation Therapy which shows how Sally herself was perhaps sacrificing herself for someone in a previous generation of the Levin family who was denied their right to belong to the family, through an untimely death, a murder, prison or some other form of estrangement. The Levin parents were immigrants from the pogroms of the Ukraine whose known family history was lost along the way. Sally chose to offer herself in atonement for some long forgotten exclusion. She was intuitive to the suffering in the Levin household. She was their mirror.

According to Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, schizophrenia often has its roots at the fourth (intuitive) level of healing because schizophrenics are particularly sensitive to these familial exclusions or injustices and will act out the role of victim. Dr. Klinghardt maintains that if schizophrenia is not cured at the physical level (level 1), it is usually because the issues lie in the realm of intuition (level 4). According to the Family Constellation theory, the root of schizophrenia is almost always found three or four generations removed from the present. The current family environment isn’t directly responsible for the origins of the schizophrenia, but the family is implicated because of the way its members might unconsciously deal in the present with the aftermath of the family event from the past.

On a non-Family Constellation note, I’m of the opinion that it is the original diagnosis of schizophrenia that is a recipe for disaster because it causes people to lose all hope. Sally might well have lived had her doctors not painted such a bleak scenario of her future. This non-medical diagnosis of schizophrenia (there are no biomarkers) and similar mental illness labels should be dropped in favor of empathic treatment of people, not treatment of labels masquerading as diseases.

I highly recommend this book because it shows us how the author explores and attempts to resolve the ominous burdens of her family history.

Justin Bieber: The new face of positive psychiatric labelling

I went for a walk today with my youngest son Taylor around our neighborhood. We looked at the Nantucket style houses that were recently built and we agreed that, while charming, the blue shingles didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the houses on the street, and we mulled over  that was a good thing since they did liven the neighborhood up a bit.

Taylor spotted a kid buzzing around the street on a bike with a Justin Bieber style hair cut, and we both laughed and agreed how much we like Justin Bieber, hair poof and all, because he is clueless and fun (remember his happy mug shot -Yo, check it out – I can’t believe I’ve been arrested!), he acts like many other clueless twenty-year olds despite his fame and fortune, and he’s generally nice to people.

We eventually got around to to talking about benzos, celebrity deaths, doctors with boring jobs, and psychiatry. “It seems to me that all psychiatrists do is tell people what’s wrong with them,” said Taylor. “Why don’t they instead start describing people by what’s right with them?” Taylor began to warm up to his idea. “Take Justin Bieber. Why not call him “wonderfully expressive and enthusiastic (mug shot)? Or, a true risk taker who likes to test his own limits (excessive drunken speeding in a residential neighborhood). How about just plain “boyish”? (Egging of neighbor’s house.) This is a whole paradigm shift. I can’t even think of what we would call the Bieb’s diagnosis because we are so used to negatives.”

The parents’ role in a medical setting

This applies to so many parents who insist that their child has a mental illness. 

From The Healing Paradox, by Steven Goldsmith, MD. 

“My agreement of her parents’ definition of it (anorexia nervosa) as an illness would have doomed treatment because only doctors’ definitions of it are supposed to be able to cure illnesses, and parents are supposed to hover over an ill child. Such a definition (anorexia nervosa) would have reinforced this family’s pathology and provided no leverage for change. Moreover, the label, like all conventional medical diagnoses, reflects Medicine’s attempt to isolate the disease as a discrete, namable entity as a thing, rather than a pattern of dysfunction and a disturbance of relationships. By doing so, Medicine minimizes its chances of effectively altering those relationships and curing the dysfunction.”

STEVEN GOLDSMITH received his MD at the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. In the last forty years he has practiced medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and homeopathy and has held faculty and staff positions at the Boston University, Tufts University, and New York University Schools of Medicine. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he maintains a practice that emphasizes natural solutions for mental and physical illness.

Leonard Cohen’s 1970 European tour: “I want to play mental asylums”

Excerpt from Salon 

The politics, the police, and the frenzy exhausted Cohen. When the whole world was going mad, where did you go for shelter?
“I want to play mental asylums,” Cohen told Bob Johnston. The producer was no stranger to such requests; just two years earlier, Johnny Cash had approached him with the task of arranging a gig at Folsom Prison. But Cash had intended for his prison concert to be recorded and released as an album. Cohen seemed drawn to asylums for entirely personal reasons. He never explained them to Johnston or to the other members of his band. Four years later, speaking to a reporter, he recalled his request and suggested that the “experience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.”
In a sense, he continued, “when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs.”
On August 28, the Army drove up to the Henderson Hospital, just south of London; “it was all talking therapy,” a former nurse at the hospital told Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons, “no medication, no ‘zombies.’” Cohen was led up to the institution’s imposing and narrow tower, where his impromptu performance would take place. “Oh boy,” he told Johnston as they made their way in, “I hope they like ‘So Long, Marianne.’” Most of those in attendance were young, and many were Leonard Cohen fans. The band quickly set up, and Cohen took his place at the front of the makeshift stage, underneath one of the “tall, narrow windows that gave the room the feel of a chapel.” He looked at the audience. “There was a fellow I spoke to last night,” he said, “a doctor. I told him I was coming out here. He said, ‘They are a tough bunch of young nuts.’” There was some applause, and Cohen started playing “Bird on the Wire.” But then he stopped. “I feel like talking,” he said. “Someone warned me downstairs that all you do here is talk. That’s psychotic, it’s contagious.”
During 80 minutes, he played only 11 songs. The rest of the time, he told the audience about his relationship with Marianne and how it had dissipated, about how “You Know Who I Am” was written after taking 300 acid trips and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” was composed while coming down from amphetamine, about the Chelsea Hotel and life in New York and making love and sharing lovers and feeling inconsolably sad. Each time he finished a song or a speech, the audience applauded rapturously.
And then it was time to leave. “I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we’ve been looking for,” Cohen said as the Army was packing up to go. “I’ve never felt so good playing before people.”
Adapted from “A Broken Hallelujah: Rock n Roll, Redemption and the Life of Leonard Cohen” by Liel Leibovitz. Published by W.W. Norton and Company. Copyright 2014 by Liel Leibowitz. All rights reserved.
See 

Temporary shut down

This is my last blog post for the foreseeable future. I’m winding down the blog after nearly five years. It’s time for me to let go, to move on, for Chris to move on so that he can challenge himself to fulfill his potential. Amongst other reasons for leaving, I really need to finish my book by writing that final chapter. The blog will remain, and I do respond to comments. If you wish to contact me, you can always e-mail me at recoverymodel@gmail.com

Have I broken any new ground in the last five years? Perhaps at the beginning, but not recently. Apart from writing from the perspective as a mother who is skeptical of standard treatment for schizophrenia and who has explored lots of non-traditional options, there are plenty of other people out there who are openly questioning the mainstream and are not hard to find. I have written countless recent comments in response to articles and have started many blog posts that I have abandoned and not posted. There just isn’t much more that I can say that hasn’t been said before. There is still lots to act upon, and I would love to see a more militant movement develop around civil rights and access to better, more humane treatment.

Before I go, I thought I would leave you with several thoughts about what I believe about schizophrenia and recovery and, as an aside, why I see merit in many sides of the political debates raging around mental health. Unfortunately, the debate is usually centered around the drugs. I think the no drugs at any cost position is as misguided as the drugs are necessary for life position.

This broad mindedness when it comes to seeing that even people with a viewpoint different than mine have a point, is part of the reason why I don’t want to invest too heavily in the emotionally draining game of defending one viewpoint to the exclusion of others, when most of the time there is more than a kernel of truth in what the opposing side is saying. That being said, I am excited by how much the mental health community is beginning to question the effectiveness of the medications, to uplift the role of alternative therapies, to explore how important the family environment is to outcomes, etc.

My experience has taught me to have a foot in both camps when considering what causes schizophrenia. Is it a medical condition, or a psychospiritual one?  I like what blogger Monica Cassani wrote recently:

There is no reason to assume that the medical and the spiritual causes are mutually exclusive. As deeply holistic beings they are almost always intertwined. The spiritual experience often needing support and attention from a physical/medical stance as well. What is dangerous is to assume that psychiatrists actually know a damn thing about true medical causes when it comes to psychiatric distress. All sorts of things can contribute to the creation of psychosis in an individual…what it is not caused by is an imaginary chemical imbalance made popular by pharma, then medicated by said neurotoxic pharma. Such medications may dull the symptoms and even help people function in the short term but they poison and sicken the body in the long term and heal nothing at all. Psychotic symptoms can be, at least in part caused, by autoimmune disorders, celiac and other gluten intolerances, other food sensitivities, nutritional deficiencies, thyroid problems and the list goes on and on…it’s a very rare and unusual MD that looks for such causes or knows anything at all about how to treat them. Sacred illness may be both deeply physical/medical and spiritual both.

My experience has taught me not to underrate the effectiveness of medications in a crisis situation. They generally stop hallucinations, calm the person down, and very importantly, calm the relatives down. Some psychiatric survivors blame their relatives for insisting that they take meds, or for hospitalizing them. Fair enough, if that is your truth, but please don’t dismiss the traumatic impact of a psychotic break on family members. Relatives cannot be a reliable source of help if they are worried and scared. They can become traumatized in the presence of psychosis and thus make recovery harder to achieve for themselves and for others. Their needs count, too. Patients blaming the parents or parents blaming the patient helps nobody. I also believe that if more empathic help is available before, during, and after a crisis, maybe medications wouldn’t be needed, but that’s a “maybe” and that scenario is still quite far in the future. They can be a quick fix in an emergency but should never have become enshrined as a life long panacea. And, yes, I agree with people who say that we need more rigorous scientific research and therefore better medications with fewer life threatening side effects. Yes, we need that, too, but we also should not presume that science based remedies are always better. Keep in mind that today’s science if often tomorrow’s discredited science.

Broadly speaking, medications are not as good as doctors and industry say they are, but they do work well enough for some people. If someone says the medication helps them, and they are not in a conflict of interest position with the pharmaceutical industry, then I’m willing to take their word for it.

My experience tells me how important it is to have family members understand and appreciate what their relative is going through and learn to work together as equal partners in recovery, starting from day 1. Although this sounds like a motherhood issue (seems everybody’s at least on the surface is in favor of a collaborative approach), what has been missing up until quite recently is to approach recovery through the lens of STUDIED optimism and hope. (Understanding what hope is and how to sustain it can be taught and learned! That’s a relatively recent and revolutionary development in mental health.) The routine prescribing of drugs to treat a “brain disease” does not demonstrate optimism if that is all that is being tried. Family members who insist that their relative lacks insight lack insight themselves. Their attitude destroys hope.  Everybody, relatives included, needs access to good patient centered education that takes the optimistic view that people can and do recover.

My experience has brought me full circle as to the nomenclature of psychiatric labels. I like to be able to write freely and not worry constantly that I have irritated someone else’s view of what is correct and acceptable. I could review this post and substitute the word drugs for medications or put quotation marks around schizophrenia. I know the objections to the word medication and what quotation marks signal, and I get it and even subscribe to the viewpoint, but I don’t want to get bogged down in semantics when there are bigger projects to tackle, like building communication bridges to others.

The best approach to overcoming schizophrenia is still the basket of eggs approach. Keep an open mind to trying different things. Unlike prescription medications most alternative approaches do no harm. Don’t wait for double blind studies on alternatives. Alternative therapies work for some people and not for others, just like “real” medicine.  Find the therapies that work for you and ignore what others may say. But, on the other hand, don’t get too caught up chasing alternatives treatments. There is nothing like paying attention to what your relative is saying, and respecting their right to say it. It’s so important to be on their side.

Chris is now thirty, and I’m bowing out of his life as much as possible. He’s generally up and running, he has friends, a girlfriend, and a social life that revolves around singing, amateur theater, and community volunteer work. He’s still living at home because he doesn’t yet have an income that would allow him to live elsewhere. His future is in his hands. This realization has taken years for him to come to grips with. Recently he has taken the first step on the way to a B.A. in Theater and Performance by enrolling in and sticking with a night course. Getting a job is also high on his wish list this year. He recently switched his medication back to Abilify (5 mg) from Respiridone (1 mg). I’m still looking for ways that may eventually allow him to live drug free. I haven’t given up that hope.

I’ll be back in time. Thanks for your support and encouragement and good luck with your journeys!

Random jumbled thoughts on cold remedies and antipsychotics

I’ve been cooped up at home for the past few days with a runny nose and chest that feels like it’s winched to the point where a rib bone might break. A friend suggested that I take an over-the-counter remedy, which, at first, I chose not to do, since I rarely buy the non-prescription medication that doctors usually add on to their prescriptions, considering it mostly a waste of money. Either a prescription will do the trick, or it won’t.

But, I reconsidered my friend’s suggestion because I want to be in good shape for an unusually festive New Year’s Eve, and was hoping against hope that the non-prescription stuff worked.

Here’s the verdict. Since I am still coughing up a lung and the nose continues to run, and I had no sleep last night, it’s hard to imagine that the non-prescription stuff works better than just letting nature take its course. I believe I am no further ahead cold-wise. As I lay on top of my bed and stared at the ceiling this afternoon while sneezing, coughing and blowing my nose, I began to think about – what else? – antipsychotics. If we compare psychosis to a long running and miserable cold, are we better off with the prescription than we would be with “over-the-counter remedies,” e.g. the therapies, strategies, and attitudes that I discuss in my blog.

Putting aside the very real concerns about antipsychotic side effects, the best one can say about them is that they sedate in emergency situations. and can be useful in the very short run. “But antipsychotics are prescribed,” some will say, “and these prescriptions work,” and they might go on to say that everybody knows that there is no cure for the common cold. To which I would answer, and there is no “cure” as such for schizophrenia. Should we believe the pharmaceutical companies when they say that people are better off long term on prescription antipsychotics than they would be using non-pharmaceutical, non-prescription remedies?

Going through the thought processes that I did while lying in bed this afternoon, I can’t help but reach the conclusion that the public has been suckered into a willingness to pay for non-prescription cold remedies and prescription antipsychotics.  The common cold is short and psychosis is long, but where is the proof that taking cold remedies or antipsychotics gets a person back on their feet any sooner than they would have if they had just taken normal precautions and sweated it out with e.g. chicken soup, a box of kleenex, psychotherapy or tender loving care from someone who believes that this, too, shall pass.

End of year thoughts

I haven’t done a post for quite a while, and I’m not adding my two cents worth much on other blogs and sites for a number of reasons. I’m disengaging more and more from the intense and too often ugly online debates surrounding mental health issues.  I feel that after ten years of searching and questioning, I know what I know about about how to help my son work through “schizophrenia,” and I no longer have the mental energy or the patience to convert others to my way of thinking. All I can offer are my own opinions based on my experience with Chris, and if I don’t put quotation marks around the word schizophrenia, is the world going to end? Apparently for some people it will. I think an intense debate about the validity of schizophrenia and the drugs given to treat it is a welcome change from the past and is forcing needed change. I applaud the many good people willing to go to bat for those changes, but now I think it’s time to stop focusing on the often minute differences of opinion between people we perceive as our enemies; there is a huge risk of marginalizing our growing base of support if we don’t reign in the rhetoric. We are attacking people over words and I’m looking for more useful ways for me to contribute.  Even though I feel I have a message of hope about recovery that can be practiced to some degree of success by others, at the same time I feel that I’m not adding anything terribly new to the schizophrenia knowledge bank that I haven’t said many times before.

Another reason I haven’t posted much is that Chris is almost thirty, and really, it’s time I bowed out of publicly recording the latest events as if I were the proud mother of a toddler or grade school student. Why I’ll most likely continue blogging is because I like writing personal stories and I like reading personal stories because I think that they have the greatest reader interest and impact. But, by the time my” baby” reaches 30 next month, maybe it’s time to NOT to document his every achievement and struggle.

We are living in narcissistic times. Anyone who blogs about or uploads Youtube videos of themselves or their close relatives (check out Holderness family Christmas video) can be accused of being narcissistic, but the trick is to manage to avoid the label by claiming a greater altruism (smiley face goes here). I’m blogging about Chris and me as a public service (and here) of hope to all those families who are struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel. If it has to be the two of us to bring this message of hope, I’ll risk being called a narcissist. There just aren’t a lot of blogs right now written by relatives and targeted to families who are uncomfortable with the medical model of the “disease.” It is through personal anecdotes from other mothers and fathers where many of us strengthen our hope. I would love to have some competition here in the blogosphere from the hope crowd to counteract all the crowded field of parental scare mongerers.

To end 2013 on an upbeat note, here is a summary of the good things that have happened to Chris and me on our journey this year.

Chris – got girlfriend, broke up with GF, seems to be back with GF, appeared in several theatrical choruses, attended an out of country course in musical theatre production, enrolled in a Monday night acting course, continues to be a member of several choirs, has gained greater ability to stand up for himself and voice his opinions  (Note: All of this did not happen overnight. It has taken several years for him to get to this level of confidence, and he and I both know that there is still work to be done.)

Me – learning that it is never to late to learn something new, enrolled in two online courses about how to practice recovery and sustain hope.

Happy New Year everyone. May 2014 bring you peace, good health, and hope.

A message of hope from Jen Maurer, Managing Director, Mother Bear; Families for Mental Health


Rossa’s note: I’m on the Advisory Group of Mother Bear and have taken two of its online courses  on practicing recovery and sustaining hope. I am so grateful to Mother Bear for filling a huge gap in the recovery movement — helping families to understand and appreciate the human side of psychosis and mental distress. Mother Bear’s online courses and Help Hotline, is a godsend. A few months ago my son, Chris, called the hotline when he needed an empathic someone to help him work through his emotional state. He keeps the SOS phone number handy and knows he can be listened to with empathy when he calls.

I’ve made my donation to keeping the Hope Light brighter and I urge you to consider donating, too. 
Jen Maurer


Dear friends,

As many of you know, for the past two years I have been working for a labor of love-literally and figuratively-as Managing Director of a new nonprofit, Mother Bear: Families for Mental Health ( http://www.facebook.com/l/9AQHkteVYAQFyM06tzKWpwmutkPIFhY0PAcBmW1oNCX2G9Q/www.motherbearcan.org), which is dedicated to helping families heal from intense emotional distress.

The traditional medical system, friends and other family members have often given up all hope for these families. Not surprisingly, families come to us with barely a flicker of hope left that their loved one will ever recover or that they will recover from the exhaustion and worry that comes from caring for someone who is in chronic distress.

That is what is heartbreaking about my work. Seeing how deeply families are struggling without support.

What is heartwarming is being able to share with families that with support and education, we can help them reduce relapse rates by as much as 75%. Fact. Decades of research to prove it.

Recovery from even severe emotional challenges is not only possible, it should be EXPECTED… with the right support, of which there is precious little.

That’s where we come in. Mother Bear is, quite literally, a light in the darkness for families. 

I am asking you to consider helping us burn our Hope Light brighter by making a contribution of any kind to Mother Bear today (Dec. 3rd), otherwise known as #GivingTuesday.

#GivingTuesday is a movement that encourages people to take collaborative action and harnesses the power of social media to create an international Day of Giving that thrives on the spirit of generosity and amplifies small acts of kindness in the service of changing our world for the better.

Here are just a few of the ways you can help Mother Bear transform lives:

* “Like” us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MotherBearCAN) to spread the word that recovery is possible and to share our healing resources. We are ALL touched by mental health challenges (yes, 1 in 4 of us at any given time!). You may not know whose life you are helping by sharing. Rest assured, you are.

*Post our #GivingTuesday link on your Timeline and ask your friends and networks to do the same.
( http://www.facebook.com/l/dAQFbdTBdAQHs9rNC-boU-5zOIYnx2tXMJm3IxatQPVpwzQ/givingtuesday.org/partner/mother-bear-families-for-mental-health/)

*Call our Hope Line at 1-855-I HOPE 4 U between midnight tonight throughtomorrow Dec. 3 (ending at 11:59 pm) and tell us what brings YOU hope. We’ll share it with our growing network of families on Facebook and Twitter! (I’ll be taking calls from 8 am to 3 pm tomorrow if you want to call and tell me your hope story personally!)

*Make a financial gift in any amount. If you contribute before 11:59 pm on Dec. 3, your gift (and your friends’) will be matched up to $150K! (That is a lot of HOPE!)
( https://www.facebook.com/l/tAQGrQpNyAQGcNugK26MJo6I7u13EWjMs-gm8qDRbwkVYhQ/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paypal.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fwebscr%3Fcmd%3D_s-xclick%26hosted_button_id%3DQNGYF76RFWAHC)

Our special goal for this campaign is to secure the resources and staff necessary to increase our Hope Line hours in 2014 so more families can get support when they need it. We are currently the only toll-free Family Mental Health support line in the country.

I’m grateful for your friendship, your support and all the healing work you do in your own ways!

Wishing you all Hope- and Love-Filled, Healthy Holidays!


Jen