My name is Dmitriy Gutkovich and I am the founder of Usorum, which is a part of a new collaboration with Mad in America that you can find here. Through my journey as a person with lived experience of hearing voices, I have learned that each person is unique. Their individual creativity has been honed by the vantage point of the life they have lived and the challenges they have overcome. This uniqueness, in turn, is invaluable for solving problems. I built Usorum around the belief that we can tap into our collective experience and begin building the generational knowledge to improve everyone’s quality of life. With each person having had their own challenges in life, we all have something to contribute, and our ideas can be just as valuable as our money.
I have been hearing voices since I was a young adult, and have largely overcome the obstacles associated with my situation. I have learned how to navigate hostile voices, avoid confusing beliefs, and to focus my attention on the physical world. Usorum is born out of both hope and sadness. The sadness is that it took many years to succeed, building my techniques from scratch and solving every challenge without any generational knowledge to stand on. Later in life, I wrote Life with Voices to help others have a better foundation in these challenges, and I encourage anyone to write me ([email protected]) if they would like any personal help. The hope is that it does not have to be as hard as it was for me. With initiatives such as Usorum, we can tap into our collective experience and begin building the generational knowledge to improve everyone’s quality of life. If in the beginning I knew how to tap into voice allies, or what logical tricks can hold the voices at bay, then that would have given me back years of my life. Imagine how much similar collective wisdom is among us?
“Lived experience creates insight.” That is the founding principle of Usorum. The way Usorum works is that we place forum on different nonprofit organizations sites, and then connect those sites and their people across the web to create a bigger conversation on lived experience. As the old adage says, we simply go further together. Nonprofit organizations are the perfect candidates to combine communities as they are mission-driven and are in the same spaces without being in direct competition.
The organizations Usorum collaborates with pose questions to generate collective wisdom, like the questions posed in the current Mad in America brainstorm: “What do you wish your doctor had told you before starting you on psychiatric medications?”
From the digital conversations we create, we believe that invaluable insights will arise. After all, there are countless people not only struggling, but also succeeding against adversities such as mental health challenges, communicating with allies, and overall daily living. Instead of relying only on top-down solutions from academics, institutions, and pharmaceuticals, why not ask the people who discover their own answers for their secrets to thriving and well being? A healthy conversation across our lived experience community can create the insights that will lift quality-of-life for all those participating. Given Mad in America’s history of creating alternative discourse from the usual top-down narratives of mental health, we are particularly excited for this partnership.
The secondary purpose of Usorum is to bring nonprofit organizations closer to their members. Nonprofits are often run by compassionate well-meaning people, but we are all human and have our limitations. By brainstorming directly with the community, we can gain perspectives on how to allocate resources, and design new projects that maximize impact. Bringing in the whole community into the topics of boardroom discussions is our answer to furthering the mission at the core of nonprofit existence, and in that, we ask for your honest help across the topics of this co-created digital space. To this end, as you explore the Usorum space, we also hope that you take note of the various organizations fighting for a better world, and consider supporting them or at least joining their mailing list for updates on the good fight. To those interested, there is a donate button on the top right of your forum experience to help Mad in America. For any other questions or feedback on getting involved, please email Karin Jervert at [email protected].
I look forward to creating a better world with Mad in America readers.
Sincerely,
Dmitriy Gutkovich
If we are creative, as alleged, then the guiding themes for the contribution can limit and condition the answers and leave little room for creative elaboration and expression. Perhaps we have wisdom that defies socially conditioned themes altogether. The only questions that would not have this effect would be questions about life and the world itself – how do you see the prospects for society, can society survive, what are the prospects for psychiatry and what we call mental health within this society, and what are the solutions to this society and psychiatry. I think it is in these open questions that the wisdom of mental health conditions break through, not what therapy helped you and how did you quit drugs, so the questions should treat the people answering as eyes onto the world, as oracles into life, not as consumer feedback or psychiatrically constrained themes such as withdrawal strategies. That’s my two pence worth. You can blow my head off I’m wrong. You can buy me a bag of jelly beans if I’m right. You can turn my head into jelly if I’m too unclear to be understood. Have a nice day people of the watermelon glade
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Hello Dmitriy and others, I wish I was told “If we put caustic soda into you. you can refuse to take it.” That way I’d be off it. NaOH the chemical name for caustic soda is used in medication. It is an excipient ingredient, so not even the active ingredient. Other excipient ingredients like ethanol can seriously damage the Central nervous system kidney liver etc of young children who don’t have the metabolism to deal with ethanols toxic effects.
Other expedients used are ‘antifreeze’ or propylene glycol and peanut oil, and lactose monohydrate. So for allergy sufferers… do your own lookout on these. They do and can make up the majority of the pills and potions. Swollen intestines, auto-immune disease, dizziness, lower back pain are some additive or exipients side effects.
in Fluoxtine the main active ingredient is a salt which is addictive- called fluoxitine hydrochloride.
Wish I’d been told.
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I wish the VA doctors who told us in 1991 that the f.d.a was going to approve 2 new drugs “that will change the lives of vets with PTSD” would’ve told us ‘we’ were taking the drugs ‘they’ were approving for the f.d.a and that those drugs may induce Suicidal and Homicidal Thoughts.
I wish they would’ve told us in 1991 that the experimental Antidepressants they were prescribing to prevent our suicides were addictive and there is ‘no’ treatment for withdrawal.
(You can either take more of the drug or take your chances of surviving 11.5 days of cold-turkey withdrawal.)
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I wish my PCP hadn’t lied to me, and incorrectly told me a dangerous, addictive antidepressant and opioid were “safe meds.”
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Self-awareness cannot be taught.
Furthermore, the philosophy of science teaches scientists to deny their own perspective or subjective experience as this information is not ‘scientific’.
Now this is fine for all the other academic fields, but with psychology, we are both the researcher and subject of research.
The fear is, if this dichotomy is dropped, it will somehow compromise understanding.
However, what is necessary is to drop the boundary. To allow researchers to be comfortable with introspection as a valid information source. To allow them to be human.
Now, in some ways this is dumb. Everything I am saying is how its done even if its not explicitly stated. However, there is a logic and hierarchy to thoughts/concepts, and psychology needs to reexamine how it uses theirs.
More science is not necessary. Logic is.
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