I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae.The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm.This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by  istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Working with Voices

A TWO-DAY EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOP WITH RON COLEMAN
Ann Arbor Michigan, Oct. 10-11, 2011

Ron Coleman returns to Ann Arbor to teach methods that he & many others have used in their own recovery from serious psychological problems. This workshop brings together mental health workers & people who hear voices for 2 days of learning & exploration. Ron shows how to create a safe environment, a space free of hierarchies & labeling, in which diverse ideas can be heard.


GOALS OF THE WORKSHOP:
To learn practical skills to increase self understanding such as voice profiling; to learn how voice hearing can be seen as a means of coping with difficult experiences; &, to learn ways people can begin to change their relationship with voices to regain choice & control in life. “Working With Voices” also fosters connection among voice hearers & their supporters.

ISPS The International Society for the Psychological Treatments of the Schizophrenias and Other Psychoses, Beyond Pandora’s Box: Exploring Integrative Approaches to Treating Psychosis
October 14-16th, 2011, San Francisco CA

Keynote Speaker: Richard Bentall, Ph.D. Author of Madness Explained and Doctoring the Mind

“The Psychology of Paranoid Delusions “

Honoree: Ann-Louise Silver, M.D. Founding President, ISPS-US.

“Early Onset Psychosis: Do We Want It in the DSM-5?”

International Society for Ethical Pyschology and Psychiatry
Alternatives to Biological Psychiatry: If we don’t medicate, what do we do?
Los Angeles, Oct. 28 – 29, 2011

Panel Presentations, Roundtable Discussions, Meet the Authors; More!

Confirmed Speakers
■Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D.

“When Johnny and Jane Came Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans”

■Nicholas Cummings, Ph.D

“Restoring Psychotherapy as a First-Line Intervention”

■Thomas Szasz, M.D.

“Varieties of Psychiatric Criticism”

■Robert Whitaker

“Psychiatry’s Response to Anatomy of an Epidemic: What the Emperor Says When He Has No Clothes”

■David Antonuccio, Ph.D.

“It May Be Time To Stop Calling Them ‘Antidepressants: Skills, Not Pills, for Depression'”

■Scott Shannon, M.D.

“The Ecology of the Child: A New View of Pediatric Mental Health”

■David Stein, Ph.D.

“A Unified Model for Matching Therapy with Etiology: Better Therapy Is the Most Effective Weapon Against Reliance on Drugs!

■Jacqueline Sparks, Ph.D.

“Listening to Clients, Not Disorders: A Revolution in Therapeutic Services”

■David Oaks

“Where’s Your Canoe? Uniting the Many Islands in Our Movement for Deep Change in Mental Health”

■David Cohen, Ph.D., LCSW

“The Ethics and Politics of ‘Neuroenhancement'”

■Thomas Scheff, Ph.D.

“A General Theory of ‘Mental Illness'”

■Tomi Gomory, Ph.D.

“Working with Human Troubles: Three Possible Models of Practice for the Helping Professions-Two Medical and One Educational.”

■Joanne Cacciatore, Ph.D.

“The Zen of Death: A Mindfullness-based Traumatic Bereavement Intervention”

■Howard Glasser

“Transforming the Difficult Child”

■Ann Rider, MSW

“Narrative Therapy in Peer Support: An Alternative Approach”

■Bose Ravenel, M.D.

“Treating Behavioral Problems Without Drugs: An Integrative Approach to ADD, ODD, and Childhood Bipolar Disorder”

■Ron Unger, LCSW

“Learning to Not Be “Psychotic”: Cognitive Therapy for Psychosis”

■Mark Foster, D.O.

“Ghosts in the Machine: Lessons from the Front Lines of a Mental Health Revolution”

■Claudia M. Gold, M.D.

“Over-reliance on Psychiatric Medications for Children: A Pediatrician’s View”

■Willa J. Casstevens, Ph.D. (w/ J. Coker and T. Sanders)

“Exploring Voices in A Mentored Self-Help Approach to Voice Hearing”

■Brian Kean, Ph.D.

“Psychotropic Medication in the Classroom: How Should Teachers and Education Students be Informed About This Complex Dilemma?”

■Virgil Stucker, MBA

“Restoring Mental Health Through Relationship-Centered Care and Philanthropic Action”

■Jill Littrell, Ph.D.

“Immune System Contribution to Major Depression and What to Do About It”

■Jeanne Stolzer, Ph.D.

“Alternatives to ADHD Medications: A Bioevolutionary Perspective”

■Jacob Z. Hess, Ph.D.

“‘If McDonald’s is the only place in town, we all eat Big Macs’: The case for diversifying community mental health education in the U.S.”

■Brad Hagen, Ph.D.

“The Greater of Two Evils? How People with Transformative Psychotic Experiences View Psychotropic Medications.

■Dathan A. Paterno, Psy.D.

“Desperately Seeking Parents: How to Reclaim Your Family”

■Phil Sinaikin, M.D.

“Psychiatryland: Marketing and Manipulation Tactics of the Biopsychiatry – Psychopharmacology Industry”

■Jennifer Spaulding-Givens, Ph.D.

“Florida Self-Directed Care: An Exploratory Study of Participants’ Characteristics, Goals, Service Utilization, and Outcomes”

■Fred Baughman, M.D.

“An Epidemic of Sudden Cardiac Deaths in the Military Related to Psychotropic Drug Cocktails for PTSD”

■Jay Joseph, Psy.D.

“The “Missing Heritability” of Psychiatric Disorders: Elusive Genes or Non-Existent Genes?”

■Noelene Weatherby-Fell, Ph.D.

“A Non-Medical Intervention for Supporting the Mental Health of Teachers and Students”

■Robert Grome, Ph.D.

“The Differential School-Clinic: A Topological Approach To The Cure-Symptom”

■Mike Mullin, M.D.

“Nutritional Supplements and Diet in the Treatment of Pediatric Mental Health Issues”

■Michael Bloom, Ph.D.

“Human Evolution and Ethical Use of Antidepressants”

■Keith Hoeller, Ph.D.

“America’s Medical Inquisition: Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness 40 Years Later.”

■Alexander Bingham, Ph.D.

“Phenomenal Healing: Embracing the Next Step in the Evolution of Psychological Research and Practice in a Post-Medication World.”

■Burton Seitler, Ph.D.

“So Close and Yet So Far Away: Successful Non-Medication Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Youth Experiencing a Psychotic Reaction to the Traumatic Loss of His Mother”

■Judith Parker, Ph.D.

“What Can We Know? Making Sure Children Benefit from Psychotherapy”

■Pär Daniel Andréasson

“Mindfulness-Based Approaches in Family Therapy: A Review and Integration of Current Research and Future Directions in Practice”

■Laura K. Kerr, PhD, MFTI

“If Not Biomedical Psychiatry, Then What? Trauma-Informed Care”

■Debbie Felio, MA, LPC

“The Path of P.E.A.C.E. – Treating the Family and Community”

■Robert McKeever, Ph.D. Student

“Beyond the Medicine Cabinet: A Comparison between Online D-T-C Advertisements for Psychiatric Medications and Other Medications in the Digital Marketplace”

■James Dugo, Ph.D., and Sandra Lema-Stern, Ph.D.

“Working with Resistant and Aggressive Clients in Therapy”

■We are adding speakers to our program daily!

Corinna West, founder of Combat Arts for Recovery has provided an update on where her program is currently in relation to the competition. Her program is one of 12 semi-finalists out of 55 entries to the Team USA grants competition. If chosen as the winner, her program stands to earn $12,000 to promote combat sports for mental health issues.

Hi friends,
At this point 82 people have communicated with me that they were voting or trying to vote for Combat Arts for Recovery. Thanks so much for your vote. I really appreciate your efforts. If all 82 of you voted once each day we would have it made, and now the Olympic Committee has fixed the worst of the bugs in the program.From now on, for the next six days, if each of you could vote once per day, we would win in no time. We need to catch up to the figure skaters. This program is designed to help bring disadvantaged people into the Olympic movement, but I’m not sure how disadvanted someone can be if they can afford to hire a private coach and rent out a whole hockey rink each time they practice. We are also the only fighting sport in the whole finals. We are also the only program helping people with mental health labels. We need your help.

Go to https://www.facebook.com/USOlympicTeam
Click Team USA Grants on the left, then accept non-secure browsing, accept the Facebook application, then vote for Combat Arts for Recovery. If you have trouble, try clicking the video and then click logout right by the comments. Please email me with any problems.My blog about this program is here for more information: http://corinnawest.com/why-to-vote-for-combat-arts-for-recovery/. If you want to help further, invite 25 (or all) of your friends using our Facebook invite. Or send out a bulk email and post my blog to your Facebook status. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=210484989010592

Thanks so much for voting for me. This is a wonderful program which can bring two communities together.

It’s interesting how your mother can tell you something, and you don’t believe it, or at least, you downplay it, and then a stranger tells you something and it makes a deep impression. Last night Chris told me he had been out the evening before and ran into a friend from his psychiatric program days and her brother. The brother said to Chris that, judging from how well he is now, Chris seemed to be doing better than most from the program. Needless to say, Chris was pleased. This remark really boosted his confidence.

I subscribe to a newsletter called Natural News (http://www.naturalnews.com/). Don’t know how I first started subscribing, but it arrives in my in-box daily. I myself have wondered if it is a front for a certain unnamed American politician, whose name keeps cropping up affirmatively in the newsletter. Here’s what the website has to say about itself.

The NaturalNews Network is a non-profit collection of public education websites covering topics that empower individuals to make positive changes in their health, environmental sensitivity, consumer choices and informed skepticism. The NaturalNews Network is owned and operated by Truth Publishing International, Ltd., a Taiwan corporation. It is not recognized as a 501(c)3 non-profit in the United States, but it operates without a profit incentive, and its key writer, Mike Adams, receives absolutely no payment for his time, articles or books other than reimbursement for items purchased in order to conduct product reviews.

Whatever this organization is, many of its news items are right up my skeptical and holistic alley, like this item from today’s newsletter:

“Don’t believe all the goody-goody “mental health groups” that claim to help teens and adults with their brain problems. Many of these are really just psycho-pharma front groups, and CCHR has exposed them all:

(NaturalNews) A highly effective public relations technique is the “third party technique” of creating front groups to endorse or promote the need of any service or product. The first party is the original group or client that would benefit more from increased public trust or affinity. The second group is the public or consumers. A third group is created with a contrived name to appear publicly as a disinterested party endorsing the industry of the first party.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033453_psychiatry_front_groups.html#ixzz1WWaj0fwt

A link inside the body of the article takes you over to the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) for website, which readers of this blog probably already know was founded in 1969 by Dr. Thomas Ssasz and the Church of Scientology. Many people say CCHR is a front for Scientology. Be that as it may, and because I’m catholic in my tastes and opinions, here’s what the CCHR website has to say about these front mental health front groups, who are listed by the way, on the CCHR website.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health – including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical/scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

Nearly half of the 432 patients at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital have signed a petition or boycotted therapy sessions this month to protest new rules they say further limit their activities and force them to attend programs that don’t help in their recovery, patients and an advocacy groups say.

Read the rest of the here .

Thanks to Susan Schecter for spotting this one.

From the New York Times

“Disaster Was My God” delivers a Rimbaud who forces literary true believers to ponder an unwelcome thought: that artistic ambition may sometimes be, as the guidance counselors say, just a phase that troubled teens — even geniuses — go through.

Review on Amazon
“Disaster Was My God” is a blazing trip through fascinating characters, the tortured trajectory of a brilliant man’s life, and the revolution in poetry brought on by Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce Duffy has a knack for writing about pain and extreme awkwardness in a style that keeps it light and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The characters in this book, they are characters. Rimbaud is first a child prodigy, then a poet who changes the fundamentals of poetry, then a gun runner in Africa. Duffy finds a way to do what I thought could not be done- connect the seemingly unconnectable dots that form Rimbaud’s life. This book is about a bizarre and unique man, and about all of us. It is about what can happen when we emerge from the unrealistic thinking of our adolescence and bump up clumsily against the adult reality of the outside world. Read the book. He says it better than me. Then there is Rimbaud’s mother, the mother of all mothers, who apparently could have written the book on controlling, narcissistic, queen-of-martyrdom parenting. If I was a Hollywood actress of a certain age, I would be putting this book down, calling my agent, and saying “Get this book. I want to be Rimbaud’s mother.” And finally, Verlaine, who brings Rimbaud to Paris, and is honest enough to admit that he fell for him and got kicked in the teeth. I have never read a funnier tragic book.

…………………………………

Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French letters, more than holds his own with Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde in terms of bold writing and salacious interest. In the space of one year—1871—with a handful of startling poems he transformed himself from a teenaged bumpkin into the literary sensation of Paris. He was taken up, then taken in, by the older and married poet Paul Verlaine in a passionate affair. When Rimbaud sought to end it, Verlaine, in a jeal­ous rage, shot him. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud—just shy of his twentieth birthday—declared himself finished with literature. His resignation notice was his immortal prose poem A Season in Hell. In time, Rimbaud wound up a pros­perous trader and arms dealer in Ethiopia. But a cancerous leg forced him to return to France, to the family farm, with his sister and loving but overbearing mother. He died at thirty-seven.

Product description
Bruce Duffy takes the bare facts of Rimbaud’s fascinating existence and brings them vividly to life in a story rich with people, places, and paradox. In this unprecedented work of fictional biography, Duffy conveys, as few ever have, the inner turmoil of this calculating genius of outrage, whose work and untidy life essentially anticipated and created the twentieth century’s culture of rebellion. It helps us see why such protean rock figures as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith adopted Rimbaud as their idol.
 
Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud, by Bruce Duffy
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)

I watched several good films while flying across the pond recently, both of which got me thinking about advertising and image make-overs. The first, L’Amour Fou (Crazy Love) is an excellent documentary about the late, great fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. Go see it if you get a chance. The movie is a mesmerizing look at both Saint Laurent himself and the world of high fashion, and it has English subtitles. I wept when Saint Laurent announced his retirement with words evoking his favorite author, Marcel Proust. That speech alone is worth seeing the film, but there are also glamourous supermodels and glimpses of the jet set of the nineteen sixties.

I laughed when Saint Laurent said that his greatest achievement was putting women in pantsuits, but of course, he’s no oil exec, he’s a fashion designer and pantsuits for women caught the spirit of the women’s liberation movement, so it was entirely appropriate that he said so.

Yves Saint Laurent had his own fashion house, despite being painfully shy and suffering intense bouts of depression throughout his life. He and his business partner and lover Pierre Bergé created and marketed the YSL brand.

Morgan Spurlock, the director of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a documentary about product placement, marketing and advertising, is the antithesis of YSL; he’s more of an everyman, more Walmart than haute couture. In one scene in the movie, he goes to Pittsburgh, or someplace like that, to consult with a product placement firm, and the person he interviews helps him to determine how to place himself as a product. She decided after interviewing him that he was playful and mindful.

Seeing both these documentaries naturally got me thinking about Chris. I’m getting to old to be repositioned in any case. I’ve been into just maintenance for the past ten years and I can see years of intensified maintenance work ahead. Chris seems keen for product positioning. It’s a good time for a launch. He’s 27 going on 28, the age of his first Saturn return. His learning that he’s numerologically a number 3, has helped him focus on his creativity as an eventual career direction. He wears hats well. Hey – we can work with this. Musicians look good in hats, so do chefs. As part of his repositioning strategy, he’s now determined to lose weight.  Chris has put on a noticeable number of pounds over the past few months which coincided with his newfound joy in cooking. His lifelong dormant tastebuds have kicked into gear, and he’s making up for it with a vengeance. A fun idea, to think of what brand he would like to be, may help him gain more confidence in the spin he would like to put on his life.

Chris has come a long way, but still doesn’t have a highly developed sense of self. It’s starting slowly, and has been helped by many things such as Tomatis, sound therapy, psychotherapy, the Alexander Technique, and other things discussed in this blog. He told me today that he doesn’t feel ready to take on big challenges, he’s talking about further education, so it looks like nothing big is going to happen next year. It’s so nice to hear Chris being able to express this thought. As a teenager he kept everything close to his chest. If he’s not ready, he’s not ready. Sigh. In the meantime he’s auditioning for a role in the Christmas pantomime, Jack and the Beanstock. Now that’s progress!

Once again, researchers are hard at work replicating studies that have been done many times in other people for similar mental health issues. Apparently, asking the patients what is effective treatment is just “not done.”

Extract from today’s New York Times

Drugs widely prescribed to treat severe post-traumatic stress symptoms for veterans are no more effective than placebos and come with serious side effects, including weight gain and fatigue, researchers reported on Tuesday.

The surprising finding, from the largest study of its kind in veterans, challenges current treatment standards so directly that it could alter practice soon, some experts said.


Ten percent to 20 percent of those who see heavy combat develop lasting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and about a fifth of those who get treatment receive a prescription for a so-called antipsychotic medication, according to government numbers.
The new study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, focused on one medication, Risperdal. But experts said that its results most likely extend to the entire class, including drugs like Seroquel, Geodon and Abilify.


“I think it’s a very important study” given how frequently the drugs have been prescribed, said Dr. Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who was not involved in the study but wrote an editorial accompanying it. He added, “It definitely calls into question the use of antipsychotics in general for PTSD.”