Mad Economy: Let’s Change the World!

Karen,

This is a fantastic idea!

I would blog for you. My writing is already at: http://bpdtransformation.wordpress.com

I write about the pseudo-illness labeled Borderline Personality Disorder and how to heal borderline mental states. I can write about and other antipsychiatry topics. The one caveat is that I write under a pseudonym since I don’t wish my regular-world employer to know about my activism, as their knowing might be risky.

The Mad Recovery website is a great idea. Let me suggest a few resources that in America could be particularly valuable:

A database of peer mentors willing to communicate in various ways (email, phone, Skype, in person) with suffering “mad” people. Could be categories for free help and perhaps also for those charging a low fee (i.e. life coaches). Some might not like this but it’s undeniable that peer mentors being able to charge a low fee for their time would bring more people in.

A database of psychiatrists willing to work with people to taper off medications. Mad In America has some listed already but not nearly enough. If you don’t know him, contact Toby Tyler Watson (www.abcmedsfree.com) and ask him about his database of psychiatrists and mental health workers who support this approach.

A database of therapists willing to provide sliding-scale low-cost therapy to disadvantaged mad people. Perhaps mad people could enter their income level and find out what they would be have to pay / be able to afford to get psychotherapy. This would be subject to later income / tax return verification so that the system is not abused too much. This system could be attractive to young psychotherapists / trainees looking to get more experience of fill up their practice. . Check out http://www.ctvip.org/ for an innovative model of low-cost psychotherapy.

Regarding funding, here’s a good story about outside-the-system funding for something totally different but also analogous to your effort:

The late 1990s and early 2000s was a golden age for my beloved RPGs. These are Role-Playing Games, the type of computer games that brought Dungeons and Dragons to the PC, i.e. a game where you develop a character like a wizard or warrior and take them through a fantasy world fighting dragons and monsters. Games like Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and Planescape Torment revolutionized computer role-playing.

However, by the mid 2000s, game development studios stopped producing these games because they found more profit in violent, less story intensive games like Halo and Call of Duty. Hardcore RPG gamers were outraged but couldn’t do anything to stop the trend. Until recently. Finally, disaffected programmers at a development studio decided to put an idea on Kickstarter for a new modern RPG. They were astonished that within 1 year, individual gamers funded it to the tune of $4+ million. See here for the whole story:

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/project-eternity/1226102p1.html

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/project-eternitys-all-star-effort-to-revive-the-classic-pc-rpg/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-17-a-project-eternity-recap-what-USD4-million-has-funded

And the game is now available here – http://www.amazon.com/Obsidian-Entertainment-Pillars-Eternity-Download/dp/B00UXI36FU/

So if a small group of niche gamers could fund a $4 million game this easily, think what people involved in mental health could do for initiatives they wanted.

Here are two initiatives I think should be funded:

A major website linking those seeking peer support with those providing peer support for mental health problems. Could be broken down into many categories, like type of lived experience / “diagnosis”, mode of support offered (email, phone, Skype, in-person), free support, low cost paid / life-coaching support, etc. Imagine if you could go online in my city, Washington DC, and find a person with similar lived experience who would agree to meet with you for a set of 10 meetings in a coffee store, a library, or perhaps a more structured settign and talk with you about your psychotic experience, or your depression, or whatever.

Some major funding toward psychotherapy of psychotic states outside of the medical model. For example, what would it take to give 50 psychotic people labeled “schizophrenic” psychotherapy 3x a week for 3 years? Let’s do a crude back of the envelope calculation. Assume experienced psychotherapists would be willing to offer their services for 3-5 clients each, at a discount rate of $75 per session. Each psychotic client could then be given psychotherapy 3x a week, costing $11,700 a year or $35,100 for 3 years of psychotherapy. The cost to provide such services to 50 psychotic clients would be 1.75 million US dollars, and to 100 psychotic clients $3.5 million.

There would be additional costs to have a consultation psychiatrist, a study organizer, statisticans, etc, that might bring the cost to $2.5 million or $5 million in the 50-client and 100-client scenarios. In this type of approach, neuroleptics would not be mandatory and would only be provided if the client desired, with education on the risks involved before giving any drugs. The goal would be a low short-term use of neuroleptics, but it would be up to the client, family, and providers in each case working together to decide to use neuroleptics if at all.

If 25,000 individuals each donated $100, which should be doable on Kickstarter, such a program could be achieved at the 50-client level. The program would guarantee backers that the money would be used for psychotherapy of psychosis, or if the program didn’t come off, it would be returned. The point would be to demonstrate via various quality of life and functional outcome measures that low-medication psychotherapy of psychosis can be very effective and to be provide impetus for more funding and research. Ideally, there would be a comparison group of clients with similar demographics who would be given treatment as usual (i.e. neuroleptics, no psychotherapy). This could really undermine the drug approach to schizophrenia.

Much more in terms of organization and recruitment and planning would have to go into such a study, of course.

If anyone wants to work with me on a Kickstarter aimed at either of these two ideas, contact me at bpdtransformation (at) gmail (dot) com

We are pleased to be hosting Ron and Karen again in Ashland, Ohio this Tuesday (Oct 27) for a ‘Hearing Voices’ training. I think they’re doing very important work and madeconomy.com is just the latest example.

Swing by and see Ron and Karen MIA readers if you’re in the area. Training info at http://www.ashlandmhrb.org/hearingvoices

David

This is a great idea. 🙂

Recovery and resilience are notions deeply embedded with both the economic and the social imperatives of contemporary neo-liberalism.

http://www.academia.edu/3366809/Introduction_The_Politics_of_Resilience_and_Recovery_in_Mental_Health_Care

I am not convinced that how ever well intended that “mad” as used by psychiatric survivors and the language of the market place sit easily with each other.

Just saying.

I disagree with the transformation of shame to pride of “mental illness”. The treatment received by the “patient” after a psychiatric diagnosis creates a lifelong problem.

Social workers like to thank psychiatry for the Government disability payments from the medical paperwork psychiatrist submit, but neglect to recognize the hospital is a jail (without a trial), the psychiatric medicines given or forced are poisons that make people become their “diagnosis”. The family who believes the prediction create the bad future out of fear of the unknown future.

Intellectual disabilitiesy ( lack of intelligence) that prevents someone from having a job and holding on to the job can be recognized as the real reason for a Government disability cheque. To use “mental illness” as a reason comes with the baggage of psychiatric drug treatment.

If someone is reasonable and can be communicated with, they can no longer be called/named/judged “Mad”.

The organization of the “Mad” is contradictory and paradoxical.

Funny, when you imagine “recovery” starting with a slap on the rear. If it ends with shovelfuls of dirt, you may wonder what it was that was being “recovered”.

Yes, the “institutionalized”, formerly “institutionalized”, and mad, need a way into the economy. Is this that way? I can’t make a judgment over such a hypothetical matter. I would worry about it producing a further excess in “self-help” junk–fit fare for a ghetto full of “self-help” junkies. That said, I see a need for intentional communities supportive of ex-patients, and mad friendly communities, perhaps mad friendly enclaves within communities. Additionally, skill development and sources of income divorced from the “mental illness” system, and, with it, government maintenance of manufactured invalidism (hypnotic incapacity). Yes, contradicting mad ethos or no, we need to get people back into the workforce. There’s got to be money in that proposition somewhere I imagine. The idea that the world should be divided into mental health workers and their charges though leaves me cold. If this is about employing more and more patient/ex-patients as mental health workers. Excuse, please, the sign on your door reads, “out to lunch”.

That is a wonderful idea :). I’m on board.

My recollection, from my research, is setting up ways of financially supporting each other is how the gay community helped garner strength within, so this sounds like a potentially great idea. But, as others mentioned above, many of the survivors of psychiatry get to the point they realize their “madness” was completely iatrogenic, so don’t necessarily want to identify as “mad” forever – especially once they’ve regained their sanity, by way of escaping from the defamatory, gas lighting, psychiatric stigmatizers and their toxic, torture drugs.

Perhaps a “survivor economy” or “psych drug survivor economy” may attract even more participants? I’ve met quite a few children / young adults who were drugged, escaped, and ended up in the work force, who are really disgusted by today’s psychiatric child drugging up system. But they don’t discuss the situation, unless they know you’re anti-drugging of children, then they talk, and talk, justifiably with great disgust. A survivor oriented, rather than, illness “mad” oriented economy might likely do even better?

I’m in.
This fits exactly what I and a few others are trying to do.
No government funding, no grants, fueled by the desire to reach people.
Connecting with voices that aren’t part of the mainstream peer movement.
I’m in.

Fantastic idea. I am in.

Love the notion of a mad economy that is giving birth to R. D. Laing’s prophecy: If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness… They will see that what was considered ‘schizophrenic’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break into our all-too-closed minds.

Which reminds me of my first dream of a world without money, after a fervent prayer to God, to give me a sign and show me what I should do with my life. Of course I didn’t expect a 3 decade involvement with the paternalistic modus operandi, of the developed world’s mental health systems and the delusion by which we exalt language above nature, to flow from that life challenging moment of fervent prayer.

Especially, the effort involved in understanding, in both body and mind, what R.D. Laing meant by: We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy. The self-deceiving seduction involved in words of communication with Self and Others (another of Laing’s insightful books) IS the reality of our motivation. A fleshy sense of self, which wonders if Mother Nature views us all, as terrorists, these days?

Keep up the great work Karen, although I do wonder about normalizing, recovery?

Some folks enjoy their “Stockholm Syndrome” life of “madness” and psych drugs….
I’m NOT one of them. The LIES of the pseudo-science DRUG RACKET known as “psychiatry”
have done, and continue to do, far more harm than good…..
So, yes, have your little “mad-economy”….
I want no part of it. I find it disgusting, and counter-productive.
And sad. Very, very, very SAD….
May God have MERCY on us ALL…..

Does this project still exist? I can’t get the site to load.