Back when I was battling with what a State Hospital labeled as schizophrenia, I had little reason to trust mental health workers. Prior to the catastrophic occurrences that rendered me a ward of the state, I had survived for seven years as a mental health professional. I knew what a lot of mental health workers said behind closed doors and in team meetings.
I longed for a day in court where I could rectify everything that happened to me, but the mental health workers at the hospital simply rolled their eyes when I tried to share my story. At key points I was mocked. This is the story of how I’ve lived with mistrust for mental health workers ever since.
Initially, as a mental health worker, I thought I was doing good work. But once incarcerated in a state hospital I realized how delusional I once had been. I had not realized how much I dehumanized mental health patients until I was one of those dehumanized patients. I saw the way the staff demeaned, mistreated and put themselves on a pedestal in front of me. And they took home good salaries for treating me this way. I initially decided not to return to work in mental health.
My therapist of seven years had told my parents I would be in and out of hospitals the rest of my life while I was trying to escape to Canada to seek asylum. My parents believed her. Right before I was released from the longest three months of my life, my father begged me to stay in the safe hospital for another nine months rather than allow myself to be released.
I had been restrained and punched in the back by staff because I was confused. I was seriously threatened by a veteran with a history of violence. I had received offers to join a gang and I was a person of interest among those connected to the local Mexican mafia. I survived dangerous and deplorable conditions. I didn’t need nine more months of this.
I had devoutly followed this therapist for seven years and ignored the part of me that felt she was an ivy league snob who grossly underestimated me. Now I could see her as the mental health worker she really was, one that was there to control and suppress me.
Control and Suppression
Streeted to a Greyhound Bus Depot in snowy Montana, I made my way to sunny Fresno California. I did okay. I managed to find a job and establish an apartment until I ran out of meds at the end of the month. Hence my battle started with housing insecurity and underemployment. It would take years and years to return to secure professional employment with weekends off. Somehow on this recovery journey my mistrust for mental health workers never changed.
In Fresno off medication, I believed that the government sewed a tracker in my dog when the pound fixed her. I believed that the men who drove white trucks were in the mafia. I believed that all the oranges in the streets were left there to let me know that the mafia could take my life if I snitched. See, I had this unique knowledge about the reality of the drug war based on recent epiphanies I gained on my last social work assignment in Seattle, Washington. I believed that my father was a high-profile crime boss on the east coast working under the umbrella of the society of friends (or the Quakers) and that he was funding this negative attention I was getting throughout Fresno to silence me and protect his fortune.
When my meager savings got low enough my aunt in the bay area offered me an arranged job at an Italian delicatessen if I moved to Antioch, CA and endured a ten-mile bike commute and hour-long BART ride to work and back. Only then would my parents help me. And I had to see a shrink for $125 an hour.
I was making $9 an hour and the shrink made me see her two hours a week ($250) and she just could never understand why this might anger me. “Why sweat the small stuff?” she said. And she was very critical of me for giving my power away and letting the rich kids who worked at the deli bully me. “I too shop at AG Ferrari,” she said. So, this relationship didn’t exactly heal anything. I did learn to lie to her and compromise and balance my emotions.
Returning to Mental Health Work Without Blowing the Whistle
Although it’s true I hadn’t wanted to go back into mental health, after 10 months of poverty, isolation and deli work with this long commute, I changed my mind. Getting a new education was costly and I was desperate to get back control over my life.
I returned to taking medication which enabled me to get a job in social services working with developmentally disabled individuals as the manager of satellite housing. After six months of this low wage work, I healed enough to return to mental health work. The first job back in mental health I failed to attain because I had a panic attack in front of my clinical supervisor on the first day. They used me for three months and cut my per diem hours. Luckily, I landed on my feet and managed to get another per diem at an outpatient psychiatry program.
I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. As I heard them compare the schizophrenic mind to that of a dog, I dealt with this by working harder and longer than them. I felt so afraid of falling into homelessness I blindly followed people I secretly did not like so that I could work. I saw a lot of things go on that I had used to speak out against. Now I had to accept them and prove that I would not again blow the whistle so that I could survive.
In early internships, which I maintained after the clinic hours to get the required 500 child and family hours necessary for California licensure, I kept a low profile and did not disclose my history of madness to anyone. How was I to make healing relationships when I was forced to hide parts of myself that are vital to understanding my mission and purpose in life?
I worked six years in silence. Half of this time I worked without any time off, seven days a week. In 2008, when I finally got my license, I started running a group called special messages in which I disclosed my history of madness and institutionalization to the clients so we could collaboratively share the contents of psychosis. It was at this point where other professional therapists I had largely ignored started to get my attention again.
It wasn’t just because I was aware some of my colleagues were calling me “crazy Tim” behind closed doors that I left the job three years later. I knew what I was doing was unconventional and for that reason I produced extensive write-ups of my group curriculums to document what the clients and I were creating. Sure, colleagues took those write ups to the manager with concerns trying to get me fired. I really thought that the institutional mentality of the staff was unnecessary and possible to escape. In doing this I stopped facilitating the groups which were wildly popular and beautiful. I left for greener pastures. I took a pay cut and entered a county recovery project where they used recovery language.
Racing into the Arms of Recovery
As a Recovery Services Administrator working in the county’s pilot program merging three best practices called CHOICES, my lived experience was to be considered an asset. Even the author of the project admitted that he had once been in a cult. The organization I worked with were all peer counselors.
But alas, I walked into a political hornet’s nest—and the person who was going to get stung would eventually be me. The company that hired me was from Arizona and several people in the multicultural county were having issues with one of the owners and her openly color-blind views on race. Her attitude that race didn’t matter, only qualifications, was not well received. I also heard enough of what she had to say to be offended and set boundaries with her. I would not promote her racial ideologies that were alienating her staff and the local professionals who worked with us.
But there were other players in the county who weren’t offended and who were willing to partner with the company owner, and they seemed to be giving her bad reports about me and my behavior in the team meeting. I worked against these negative senses of things while I was getting bullied in the team meetings, working towards a brighter outcome. The teams I was working on were often hostile and superior to my workers and I had a need to defend them and often faced a room full of people being unfair.
It wasn’t long until the professionals in the county became very concerned about what I had to say about psychosis, enough so that one time the project director set up an ambush in which I was the target. All the professional therapists in the room were mad and wanted a client who as a gang member forcefully medicated and I pointed out that it was illegal to do so. They all knew I was right.
They accused me of being against medication and dangerous!
I said, “Why would I be against medication? I take medication. I am for self-determination and choice.”
One other professional saw this political ambush and pointed out it was unfair, and she got written up by her boss.
I left that job and the 60-hour work weeks after a year and a half. I got demoted because the owner said it was dangerous to have me working with clients. She agreed with the recommendation of the director of the program that I was better off just reviewing charts.
I saw one of the other directors after I left. He couldn’t believe that I had found a job within Alameda County.
I had gone back to the hospital where I had a supervisor who believed in my work and where others called me “crazy Tim.” I didn’t tell this director that they barely let me back in the door as a per diem employee. I didn’t tell this director that they would work me a year and a half before they gave me back my benefits. I just looked at his glaring eyeballs and said yes.
Going Up the Food Chain
On the one hand, my recovery has brought me a life I never believed would be possible when I was incarcerated in the dank Montana State Chronic Unit that was only heated to just above freezing at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, my ability to heal that original world view that mental health workers were there to control and suppress has not changed.
As a licensed marriage and family therapist I have been able to go up the food chain and study with experts to renew my license every two years. The focus of the field and my own studies has been understanding how to heal trauma, something that I believe is needed when people have experienced extraordinary experiences associated with psychosis. Indeed, using these training opportunities to help myself and others heal from trauma, I hoped that I could change my relationships with my coworkers and thrive.
Fifteen years ago, I went to a 24-hour CEU training in San Francisco with Bessel Van der Kolk, who made fun of psychotic people three times and presumed that the audience had all been to school in Massachusetts.
A few years later, I went to an EFT training where the trainer referred to people who were unable to benefit from EFT as being annoying and “reversed.” I was unable to benefit from the tapping and had let that fact be known. Others had told me that it was because I was too dissociated. The trainer got bolder as the training wore on. “What is wrong with them?” he said. “They are unable to know when something is helpful; they should just let themselves be helped.”
In 2016, I was researching trainers from where I wanted to get my forty-hour EMDRIA training. In one course, the trainer made fun of one of her subjects as not being smart. In fact, she failed to notice all the code-switching that indicated that he had clearly been born and bred as a mobster. As someone who experienced a year and a half of believing I was being harassed by the mob, I was outraged that she depicted him as being non-intelligent. She clearly had no kind of understanding of the lifestyle he lived or what it’s like to survive in those circles.
A few years ago, I took an online PESI training course, and the trainer made fun of people who heard voices. Now there may be some context to his comments that I am not capturing here. But by the time I had heard this it was just another microaggression put out by just another elite trainer.
Thus, in training I found elite trainers to exclude people who do not fit their “trauma” culture. This process of othering is passed down through the institutions into the mental health workers. It is passed on to the most vulnerable who must battle with it in their minds. I have found the best way to deal with it publicly is to be humble and submit to those in power even when it isn’t warranted. What becomes most important is to not internalize their sense of superiority so that it affects your own sense of self.
I Have Survived
So now that it’s been 25 years since I have been hospitalized in a state hospital, I work part-time at the hospital and part-time in private practice. At work in the hospital, I use my tenure and popularity among the clients to challenge the suppression and control of the clients and do my best to promote practices that support healing and recovery. I often feel like I am all alone in my views as I offer the sole dissenting perspective. I try to stay positive and amicable toward my coworkers even when I don’t like their views.
I have had some coworkers I have connected with over the years, particularly when I have functioned in the role of a supervisor. At times I have been able to demonstrate how my dissenting views actually do coincide with the values and ethics of the profession. It’s true that working in the psychiatric system, I must have a sense of willingness to compromise; however, I do my best to honor my sense of recovery first and foremost.
It is still easy for me to feel othered in training and via associating with other professionals in networking circumstances. But I am glad to have survived what I have survived even if I haven’t healed my relationships with coworkers or changed my views about psychiatry being about control and suppression.
Wow, this is largely a description of why I didn’t buy into the “chemical imbalance” deluded professional and peer movement, nor pay to go back to school to become one of them, when requested to, by “mental health professionals” of my ex-religion.
The entirety of today’s “mental heath professions” is about caste systems, and defaming those perceived as lower.
I have no interest in partaking in the stupidity of the “mental health” industry’s caste system. Instead, I’ll say, if you must partake in belief in a caste system, I’ll take my proper place, with my father, as a member of an ethical banking family … and, of course, the ethical banking families, who’ve actually been keeping track of the money, are going to be much wiser than the largely insane, unethical, money only worshipping, scientifically debunked DSM caste system deluded, “mental health professionals.”
I’m sorry you’ve dealt with such BS, Tim.
Report comment
Thank you for reading and caring about my journey. I must admit that I have encouraged people to join the system of treatment and fight to make it better as I do. I know there must be some other way to make a living, I am just limited with not knowing about how to do it any other way. I tend to benefit from writing about my experiences and have been dominated by parts of me that are frustrated with the mental health system which I realize come out in this piece. On the other hand, fighting to help people who are marginalized and not part of the economy realize their gifts and worth has given me meaningful work that has helped keep me off the streets and out of trouble. Someone Else, your comments make me realize that I am grateful to do something that I care about. Sometimes I feel bad about getting paid while others aren’t and when I do I express that and tell the people I work with that they could get paid for doing what they are doing for free. I do see the value of what I do when people join the community I work in who otherwise might not be able to deal with it and make it a better community.
I agree with you it is a caste system to many and many are comfortable with perpetuating it and making it worse. I just hope that you can understand with my skill sets I am doing the best I can to disrupt this from the inside and make it better for a few. For some of us that is the best we can do in this time of fascism.
Report comment
Dear Tim, I too was institutionalized for mental illness in a poorly equipped hospital, and went on to become a mental health professional. I have written about my time in the institution (I hesitate to call it a hospital because it never met high-enough standards) for Mad in America (“State Hospital Memories: More of My Story,” and “Committed at 16: State Hospital Memories”). Unlike you when I worked as a mental health professional, I sought to keep my own illness and hospitalization secret. I agree with you that those in the profession badly degrade the mentally ill, and regards them as less capable than they are. I was sure if I had made my own history known, I could have been subjected to no end of abuse, and would eventually be terminated. It was always a source of anxiety for me that I would be exposed. I am on file with the FBI for my hospitalization and diagnosis of Schizophrenia, which many employers would know through their record check of new employees. How far this information traveled within the agency, I never knew. I know I was never confronted by persons knowing of my history from this source. However, I did have a job where I encountered persons who were aware of my past. I worked for a public mental health agency in the county just north of where I had been hospitalized. It had once been part of the catchment area for the hospital, but was no longer. However, many of their former patients resided there in foster care. Several recognized me, and knew I had formerly been at the hospital. I always denied this was the case and told them they were mistaken. I was also mentioned in the chart of a patient I was formerly hospitalized with who I was asked to see, who, of course, recognized me. I also had the rare experience of my former Psychodrama therapist from the hospital recognizing me when he was there for a job interview. I likewise denied to him I was there. Worst of all, the Psychiatrist who gave the shock treatments I found so abusive (see my articles for details) worked there in another department. He recognized me when he saw me in the hall, but I likewise denied I knew him. Because of his abuse, I found his presence threatening, and made a decision to leave. My point is that it is highly anxiety provoking to be in a situation like I describe, or even in others where discovery is always lurking in the background. Unfortunately, the alternative of full disclosure was even more anxiety provoking for me. Most mental health professionals see themselves as “liberal” regarding the rights of the formerly mentally ill. I still doubt that this is true. I only dared to write about my own mental illness and hospitalization after I retired and had no plans to return to work.
Report comment
Thanks for sharing your story. On the surface, what could there possibly be to mistrust about mental health workers? After all, aren’t these just people who have taken the time to learn the tools of sanity or psychology or healing with the intention of making their skills available for others?
As someone who identifies as carrying the trauma of misdiagnosis, I very much relate to your experience. I think something that’s particular to the experience is how unrelenting the pressure to “trust” a certain credentialed class of person is. In Erik Erikson’s stages of development, you don’t ever form the virtue of hope without being able to incorporate mistrust. If I were a mental health professional telling you this, it could reasonably be assumed I was meaning to imply: “Therefore you need incorporate your mistrust and eventually develop hope and trust in me.” Reasonable, though I think, only if there are other reasons to believe that this person enjoys speaking this way with clients — coercively or sadistically. It can be hard sometimes to distinguish between what existential about roles and what’s endemic to an individual… and I tend to be cautious about the idea that all roles or hierarchies should just disappear, that they can’t be used in moderation or for the good. This is to say, I think it can be incredibly important for those who have experienced misdiagnosis to create space for themselves to merely just not trust, or to adequately mistrust, those who actually did or are reminiscent of those who did seek to hurt them into mere fawning appeasement and compliance.
I’ve never been a mental health worker, but I try to keep in mind there are both good and bad, competent and incompetent, kind and compassionate and secretly sadistic and psychotic individuals in the field — like any other. I used to stand-up comedy and a phrase I read in a book by veteran comedian hoping to guide newbies toward a wiser relationship with other comedians has stuck with me: “As it turns out, despite what the enchanted might like to believe, they’re not all the healthiest kind of people.” It’s funny, thinking of how I used to think that maybe anyone who succeeds in stand up was maybe in some deep way the healthiest? Isn’t laughter the medicine? It’s funny and obviously not true. I feel like the same applies in mental health, though here it might be a bit less funny. But why should mental health professionals be somehow the healthiest people? Why wouldn’t the profession attract plenty of those seeking a certificate saying “You are not one of the crazy ones”, or seeking to use this kind of power against others in an uneven dynamic, or hoping to use their learning primarily to deal with their own deep issues?
My hope is that you are able to find others like you, peers in your profession, and forge those vital relationships of trust in your time. Maybe some of them you already know. My therapist I think is overall a good person. I don’t think he got into the field for the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t say 100% that his only interest has only been in helping patients, but as I’ve learned about his personal narrative (which involves some psychosis and forced hospitalization in the family) and about how he operates, I feel strongly that this (maybe inevitable?) double interest doesn’t interfere with his putting his patients’ first in a lot of his work.
Mistrusting mental health workers when you are one has nearness to mistrusting what you are, so I can only imagine greater layers of vulnerability and courage in sharing what you’ve shared. I hope by G-d somehow your real tribe opens up to you and you are matched in courage and compassion.
I’ve been working on MisdiagnosedAnonymous.org for a while now, and am seeking to include more peers as well as add to the core team. Please let me know if you are interested.
Report comment
MIchael, Thank you for sharing your story here and I am going to look up your stories. I am curious whether my schizophrenia is on file with the FBI and if it was known by my employers before I chose to let it out. I think back to all of those ironic situations where people said things to me about schizophrenia that made me really not like them or want to share my experience and I wonder if they knew.
Ben, Thank you for your caring words and I hope to one day find a tribe. And yes I am interested in knowing more about misdiagnosed/anonymous.org. I have never heard of it before and maybe I can find a tribe there.
Report comment
I spent 35 years as a mental health professional fighting with managed care, rejecting the insular cliques in the educational and social power structure of every agency I worked at, the unbelievable incompetence of 24 year olds with an MSW and -0- life experience, the emphasis on billing for “productivity,” the terrible neglect and mismanagement of services and psychiatrists whose only concerns were a full prescription pad, a hot cup of coffee and being able to leave “on time.” I didn’t stay in it for the money or prestige or because I hoped it would get easier with time. I stayed for the people. The ones who needed a total bitch to monitor the inpatient providers who liked to talk down to them and the group home staff who wanted to sit on their asses in front of the TV while the residents called for help because they had fallen or thrown up or couldn’t find their favorite lovey. I sat in rooms with angry, terrified and even homicidal people who needed me to help them wind down, not to freak out and call the police. I was hated by my co-workers and staff at other agencies for being a hardass about the rules and quality of care and person centered treatment and respect for those with disabilities and psychiatric illness as humans first, not just DSM diagnoses and case numbers. I didn’t want to hear about how someone didn’t read the assessment or check the med book or forgot to document or didn’t know whatever. No mercy. Do it properly with love and care or get TF out and find another line of work. So when this author talks about not trusting people to provide treatment in the best possible way, I get it. I am sorry he suffered so much just trying to get well. I make no excuses for the state of mental health care, not from 25 years ago or now. It’s about money and fear and the notion that if you have a mental illness or disability you are a 4th class citizen instead of a genuine and valuable member of society.
Report comment
Good for you. I’ve worked “behind enemy lines” myself and eventually felt I had to give it up. So little real care is happening!
Report comment
Thanks for the way you fight for better care in your position. I relate to feeling very unliked and it’s nice to know someone else is out there trying to make things better.
Report comment
As a member of many groups I went into the mental health world as a huh? I didn’t get it . And I found oh my they didn’t get it either. My late husband just stuck it out and he had an op to get out but others things in life like Stage III cancer just kept him there. But he would have been fine with the radicals. I don’t know how he kept on because he was not unaware.
It’s a mess and the sooner certain folks come clean with truth the better for all.
Report comment
I guess I am in the same situation your husband was in, but on the ground in the clinic where I work I can see value in what I do even though there is a lot of BS to deal with. Trying to share the truth is what my intention is in writing, but the truth is multifaceted. I try to remember how grateful I am not to be stuck in the system myself and stay motivated to make things a little better for some of the people I work with. Maybe that is what kept your husband going. THanks for sharing.
Report comment
Dear Tim, I follow your blog and I admire your work. I hope that you will give workshops in the future for individuals and families who are distrustful of mental health workers but who are reliant on the services they offer and must therefore appear to be compliant and grateful so as to prevent further harm and traumatization. Thank you for sharing, as always.
Report comment
thanks so much Sarah for your support and for encouraging me to do another workshop. I need the support and will keep you posted if I do do another workshop.
Report comment
It is not only those labled mentally ill who are falsely accused. Someone who wants to harm another can report anyone as mentally ill. Police will immediately arrest and imprison.The accusation of mental illness is equal to being guilty of mental illness. The requirement of a hearing? In practice, it can be ignored.
In custody, drugs will be forced. The damage from those drugs will be “evidence” of mental illness. The induced physical illness is likely to persist for the life of the victim.
So let us urge these mental health grifters to “Get the help that they need!” (Laughing icon here)
Report comment
Were you collected by the authorities and treated as though you were a threat to society?
Report comment
We have for generations ignored the reality that we have divided manners of teaching people how to react to illnesses. There is one view for those illnesses we name physical, and another for the illnesses we label mental. The text books differ the lectures differ the curricula differ.
Though that view is changing to a degree, long learned lessons, practices, are not easily overcome.
Report comment
I think what struck me the most about my colleagues in mental health is how psychologically unhealthy many of them were. One used to drink and drive. Another perpetually looked like a deer in headlights due to extreme anxiety. Yet another thought she was allergic to light. At the time, I wasn’t doing too well, either, as I suffered from depression. With maybe one exception, I didn’t see the evidence of superior knowledge of the human condition this field was supposed to provide. I did eventually find what I could never find in the mental health field — but in Christ. 🙂
Report comment
In conversation with a former psychologist, she said that workers learn “to go along to get along” and that the psyche workers with good intentions bury those to make a living. Courage and resources are necessary to study for a new job. No one needs more student debt.
Is this an explanation of why the abusive situation remains? Is this why a false accusation is seconded by coworkers who had no contact with the object of the report? Making a false entry in a client’s record is punishable as a misdemeanor to felony (in my state) Making a false report to police is a crime. I asked police how to report these violations. Specific to false entry and false accusation: police-person said that the accused must prove that the false entry was false. This is not how law works. Did the officer believe this or did this person think that I could be fooled?
I have witnessed unlawful behavior when I should not have seen it, HIPPA violation?
Report comment