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.
