In case you’re getting impatient with the slow progress your relative may be demonstrating, I thought I’d share Chris’s experience taking courses. The ability to pay income tax (and, by my inference, to succeed at training courses) is almost the gold standard for recovery (in addition to getting along well within the family and the wider community) according to Doctor Abram Hoffer.

Here’s a long list of the courses Chris attempted, beginning at about age 21, a year after he was first hospitalized.

Audited an art history course (managed to hang on mainly due to the heroic efforts of the professor to accommodate his behavior)
Passed a political science semester course
Quit another polysci course due to worsening symptoms
Enrolled in a month long physics course and lived away from home – didn’t keep up with assignments and, obviously, failed. Final grade about 5%, if I recall.
Failed to submit final work for a communications course
Took refresher math lessons with a tutor; too distracted to concentrate
Enrolled in a three-week French course – quit about day 3. Too anxious.
Took an online music theory certificate course for a semester – I think he passed. It was so long ago.
Resumed piano lessons – didn’t practice much. Stopped the lessons.
Enrolled in a three-week computer course. Passed first module
Enrolled in second three-week computer module. Failed second module
Enrolled in an intensive French course – passed
Enrolled in the next level of the French course – passed
Enrolled in a sound engineering certificate program for one year – not quite making the grade. Quit.
Enrolled in online math course – in progress
Resumed taking piano lessons – as of last week

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have encouraged Chris to become a student until he was much older and further into his recovery. Chris simply wasn’t ready until HE decided he wanted to do something more, which began around the age of 28 (course number 11 onwards). Getting there has been slow and unpredictable, but Chris has changed a lot and is finally seeing that he if wants to make something of his life, only he can do it.

Ron Unger is a licensed cognitive behavioral therapist whose understanding of psychosis I greatly appreciate and admire. His writing has helped me enormously in “normalizing” the way I think about my own relative, calming ME down, and increasing MY hope for my son’s recovery. Ron has recently created an online course in “how to talk to people with psychotic experience in a way that allows them to calm down, feel more grounded, access coping skills, and increase hope for recovery.” His course was designed with professionals in mind, but it is also open to service users, ex service users or survivors, and family members.

Free Online Training Module Using Normalizing Within CBT for Psychosis
Use the link above to signup to get access to a free online training in how to talk to people with psychotic experience in a way that allows them to calm down, feel more grounded, access coping skills, and increase hope for recovery. By signing up here, you will also be added to an email list to be notified about upcoming events like the release of the complete online training in CBT for Psychosis, which will include CE credits for US professionals. You can unsubscribe from this list at any time.

Please read more about the background for this course. I have reprinted an excerpt from Ron’s Mad in America post below. (If the link above doesn’t work, there is further information in the comments section of Ron’s post.)

How Can Professionals Learn to Reduce Fears of Psychotic Experiences Rather Than Emphasize Pathology?

Ron Unger, LCSW

July 19, 2014

The kinds of experiences we call psychotic are often incredibly scary: people feel they are being persecuted by strange forces, or that their brains have been invaded by demons or riddled with implants from the CIA . . . the list of possible fears is endless, and often horrifying.

While standard mental health approaches counter many of these fears, they often create new fears of a different variety. People diagnosed with schizophrenia for example may be led to believe that they will definitely be mentally ill for life, that this illness controls what happens in their brain and not themselves, and that there are few or even no alternatives if drugs don’t work for them.

This can be extremely demoralizing. Oryx Cohen graphically described his own reaction to the standard mental health psychoeducation he received after his first psychotic experience: he reported it made him feel he had lost his membership in the human race! As a result of it, he felt caught up in a pathologized understanding of himself, he lost his expectation of being capable of learning from experience and shaping his future, and he now felt defined by his abnormality rather than by his humanity.

Despite − rather than because − of what the mental health system taught him to believe, Oryx later discovered other ways of understanding his experience, and he made a full recovery. But wouldn’t it be better if people like Oryx were helped to find a more humanistic understanding of themselves within the mental health system and from the very beginning of treatment?

Wouldn’t it be helpful if professionals were trained in an approach that could help people shift away from both dangerous psychotic ways of thinking and also away from the sometimes equally terrifying explanations which emphasize pathology?

Further, what if such an approach could also build a foundation for learning effective coping skills, and also help a person build hope and a road map toward a possible full recovery?

And wouldn’t it be nice if this approach was already proven to be “evidence based,” so that both people learning the methods, and their supervisors and colleagues could have confidence in its effectiveness and safety?

Fortunately, at least one such approach exists, and it is called CBT for psychosis. This method allows professionals to collaborate with people in developing understandings of their psychotic experiences that neither minimize problems nor emphasize pathology, but instead help make sense of extreme human experiences in a way that is grounded in more everyday human experience and issues.

Read the rest here.