May 23, 2013

The last four years I’ve been running Poetry for Personal Power, a stigma reduction campaign funded by SAMHSA.  Poetry for Personal Power has been going to Missouri Universities and asking students what they do to get through hard times and …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Uncategorized | Tagged as: mental health stigma, overcoming adversity, poetry for healing, social inclusion campaign, stigma reduction, wellness tools

May 10, 2013

My goal now is to focus on solutions for emotional distress, not talking about medical harm. We all know about the problems with medical harm, but not all people are clear about solutions. I’m not that clear, either, but I’m working on it. I’m not talking about revolution any longer, just trying to make my piece of the pie work.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: complete mental health recovery, Corinna West, mental health activism, mental health social entrpreneurship, mental health social messaging, overcoming adversity, Poetry for Personal Power, spiritual emergency, UnDiagnosing Emotional Distress, Wellness Wordworks

February 18, 2013

The primary lesson of the mental health civil rights community is that we have to learn to lean on each other to get though adversity, which means opening up and admitting when things aren’t moving in a direction we want or expected or try to typically project publicly. We have to ask for help. Here’s what I’m chewing on or what’s chewing on me.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Common Ground, love and outrage, mental health businesses, mental health social entrepreneurship, overcoming adversity, Pat Deegan, peer support, Poetry for Personal Power, Scattergood Foundation, social innovation

February 13, 2013

Many advocates for a long time have been unhappy with federally funded conferences that have a budget in the six figure area that are only held at luxury hotels. I’ve tried to come up with an alternative to Alternatives. I’m partnering with Paul Komarek of Defying Mental Illness to host our very first event. We’re calling this the UnDiagnosing UnPlanned UnConference series. Our first event is in Cincinnati next week, Feb. 15 – 17, and we’d love for you to come.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

January 25, 2013

A lot of posts on this site are about the problems in mental health care. This post is about some solutions. Many of us can do small, simple things to move advocacy forward. We can all make a difference so people can learn how to handle emotional distress without using disease based approaches with chemically based “solutions.” Here are 5 things you can do in the next five minutes to promote UnDiagnosing Emotional Distress.

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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: crowdfunding platforms, disease based model, Medstartr, mental health advocacy, mental health revolution, mental health social entrepreneurs, overcoming adversity, Partnership with Patients, patient advocates, peer support, Poetry for Personal Power, spiritual emergency, travel scholarships for advocates, UnConference, UnDiagnosing Emotional Distress

December 25, 2012

The more we worry about the separation from reality, the more scared we get and the more separated we get. This month I found out about another trap. When you can see the beauty and spirituality and mystery and magic of what is going on, it’s tempting to do things to make it last longer and help yourself get further into it, like skip sleep or skip meals or use drugs. I had to fight those temptations often through this month, and still am, to be honest, because there is so much of this process that was not just scary, but glorious and giganticly interdimensional and impactful.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: biochemical basis of mental illness, bipolar recovery, bipolar without medications, complete mental helath recovery, emotional breakdown, insomnia and mental health, mental health crisis, nervous breakdown, Psychosis, schizophrenia without medications, sleep deprivation, sleep distrubrances, spiritual emergency

November 23, 2012

I’ve figured out there are five types of mental health advocates. We need to respect all five types of motivations and viewpoints in order to support or combat their agendas. The question for us, is how can we each of us maximize our own impact to share awareness of this situation and then impact change? The answer is that each of us has to work from our own passions and interests and talents and skills and motivations.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: DBSA, drug induced problems, Geodon, Geodon side effects, mental health advocacy, mental health advocates, Mental health America, mental health recovery, mental health social entrepreneurs, NAMI, poetry for social change, power of art, power of poetry, reaching emotions, schizophrenia without medication, tardive dyskinesia, trauma survivors, types of advocates

November 17, 2012

I wasn’t sure how to judge mental health first aid. I kept asking friends taking the course but it’s hard to get a good assessment if they don’t understand the risks of labels and medication. People need to understand that in order to hear how sometimes things that are intended to help can actually harm.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: bipolar without medications, Carter Center, complete mental health recovery, Dan Fisher, eCPR, Emotional CPR, first psychotic break, friend with psychosis, Joplin tornado, Mental Health First Aid, NAMI Joplin, National Empowerment Center, Singapore mental health, social inclusion, stigma reduction

November 15, 2012

I want to keep urging people to move toward the entrepreneurial approaches, because I think they are very powerful and not well understood or trusted in our community. I have chosen to build a business because I think it’s one of the best ways I can impact on our world. After looking at the results of different types of advocacy work, this is the pressure point I’ve found most likely to make a difference.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Ashoka foundation, Changemakers, Common Ground, complete mental health recovery, Kansas City Sourcelink, Kauffman foundation, Mary Ellen Copeland, mental health social entrepreneurs, overcoming adversity, Pat Deegan, schizophrenia without medications, Sharon Wise, social entrepreneurs in psychiatry, WRAP

November 11, 2012

I just got back from the Carter Center Mental Health Symposium on Social Inclusion. I guess this is a prestigious invite, and I was expecting to meet people on the cutting edge of mental health research. I got invited based on my work with the Poetry for Personal Power program where I’ve helped get together over 1800 young people to talk on stage or listen to each other talking about what they do to get through adversity.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Carter Center, mental health entrepreneurs, social inclusion, stigma reduction

October 1, 2012

1) We need to unite with other health care improvement advocates. 2) We can make money doing this. 3) Time to get more mental health folks on Twitter. 4)Have a good conference networking system. 5) Allow serendipity to happen.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Dave Cornthwaite, mental health advocacy, mental health speakers, Partnership with Patients, professional advocates, professional patient advocacy, Regina Holliday, seredipity in action, Swim 1000, Trashboat Regatta, Twitter for health

September 18, 2012

I am committed. Fully committed to creating a solution. Are you with me? I think medications and labels for people experiencing emotional distress should be almost entirely eliminated, and should not be applied first, for everyone and forever, to people experiencing extreme states. Our current mental health system is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. We need mental health exit ramps, we need human ways to help each other in crisis and through adversity, we need compassion and love and friendship in times of struggle. We need each other.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: advocacy agenda, advocacy values, Connect Power, crowdfunding, Indiegogo, mental health advocates, mental health businesses, mental health entrepreneurship, mental health vision, psychiatric survivors, recovery movement values, scalable peer support, social entrepreneurship, Wellness Wordworks values

September 10, 2012

I get a lot of ideas from other advocates from online forums like the Alternatives Facebook discussion group,  where we have a gathering of about 750 psychiatric survivors who want to find non-mainstream ways to approach emotional distress. We started a …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: antipsychotic side effects, complete mental health recovery, Connect Power, crowdfunding, cure for bipolar, disease model, dishonest advocates, emotional distress, forced treatment, Indiegogo for Wellness Wordworks, mental health entrepreneurship, mental health research, NAMI lies, schizophrenia without medications, social entrepreneurship, uninformed advocates

September 5, 2012

I’ve been working for 2 1/2 years on a system to provide non-medical care for people with emotional distress. I want it to be evidence based, peer provided, non-clinical, completely voluntary, cheap enough to pay for ourselves AND available nationwide …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: complete mental health recovery schizophrenia without medication, Connect Power, Corinna West, crowdfunding, Indiegogo, mental health exit ramps, overcoming adversity, personal Power, recovery fundraising, underground railroad, Wellness Wordworks

August 20, 2012

I’ve been hearing about translational medicine for a long time and wondering what it was. For the most part, it’s a huge subsidy to pharma for more drug development, but there is a section of it that is focused on …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: causes of mental illness, citizen researchers, excessive government spending, federal research dollars, government fraud, mental health advocates, mental health bloggers, mental health research, NIH, NIMH, NIMH waste of money, recovery without medications, science research funding, Tea Party politics, Thomas Insel, Translational medicine

August 12, 2012

There are two main problems with the term “medical model.” First, it automatically frames the debate in the terms of the oppressor, and secondly, it’s confusing. Many people in our community say “medical model” when we mean, “The idea that something wrong in my brain caused my emotional suffering.” So why not just use a term that says this? When we say “Disease Model” we can clarify exactly what we are against. With just one word changed we can say we do not believe that a mental “disease” came from nowhere to put us out of action.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: David Oaks, disease model, distress model, don't say medical model, mental health civil rights, mental health language, MindFreedom, overcoming adversity, UnDiagnosing Emotional Distress, working on a Saturday

August 2, 2012

This morning Kayla Harrison won the first ever Olympic gold medal in the history of USA Judo. Kayla has overcome many, many obstacles on her route to a medal, including sexual abuse by a previous coach. Kayla testified against that …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Childhood Adversity/Trauma, Children and Adolescents, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment, Trauma/Distress, Videos | Tagged as: depression recovery, Judo gold USA, Kayla Harrison, mental health advocacy, mental health recovery, Olympic Judo Champion, Olympic Judo Team, pedophilia, Penn State University, Sandusky, schizophrenia without medication, sex abuse prevention, sex offenders in sports, sex offendors, sports and pedophiles, USA Judo

July 26, 2012

I competed in the 1996 Olympics in Judo before I got sucked into the mental health system. I got sucked in due to a spiritual emergency, a marital mismatch, a career that didn’t fit me, and using too much pot. …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: 1996 Olympic Team, Atlanta 1996, chemical imbalance myth, Corinna West Olympics, Judo Olympics, mental illness, Olympic Judo Team, Olympics and Mental health, schizophrenia without medications

July 20, 2012

Right now I am working on the Connect Power site build to make an underground railroad to help people out of the mental health system. It will have both unpaid and paid peer support, since people need jobs but also …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: blog ideas, chemical imbalance, Connect Power, mental health outcomes, peer support business, SAMHSA feedback forum, Wellness Wordworks

June 28, 2012

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller. This is why entrepreneurship is our way out of the mental health mess. It …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: coming off psych meds, consumer movement, forced medication, mental health advocacy, mental health social entrepreneur, psychiatric medication withdrawal, recovery movement, social entrepreneurship, Wellness Wordworks