Category: recovery

Recovery for Everyone

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I’m an Author Advocate and Visionary.

I believe in my vision of “Recovery for Everyone.”

Recovery is not and cannot be a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Today I realized the dilemma I face in championing recovery for everyone:

Not everyone WANTS to recover. I found this out on Monday.

It seems hard to believe – yet I have met a person who doesn’t want to recover.

If you’re basing “recovery” on becoming a CEO like a friend of mine did you’re setting yourself up for an impossible standard.

The point of recovery is not to achieve status in the world with a traditionally accepted job or relationship or lifestyle.

Rather the goal if you ask me is: “To Thine Own Self Be True.”

Recovery is possible when you first like yourself and are willing to go down your own path to get to where you want to be.

If you ask me it’s a realistic not just noble goal to want to do a little better and be a little better every day.

I will always get flak. It’s because I’m a Visionary who dares think recovery is possible.

What I know to be true–that having your own version of a full and robust life in recovery is possible–is often not accepted in the mainstream. My critics don’t accept this view of what’s possible.

Wanting or expecting to become a CEO isn’t in the cards for every one of us.

Yet whatever our individual limitations are we can and should develop “work-arounds” to make our lives as happy and healthy as they can be.

I will go to my grave championing that getting the right treatment right away results in a better outcome.

Getting the right treatment right away has the potential to halt or totally stop disability in its trajectory.

Need I say more?

Yet regardless of the degree of disability that any of us face:

I say giving up hope is a mistake.

I’ll talk more about getting the right treatment right away in the next blog entry.

Ongoing Psychiatrist Questions

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Questions to Ask Your Psychiatrist (Ongoing)

  1. What is my diagnosis and how did you come to that conclusion?
  2. What medication do you propose to use? (Ask for the name and dosage level.)
  3. What is the biological effect of this medication, and what do you expect it to accomplish?
  4. What are the risks associated with this medication?
  5. How soon will we be able to tell if the medication is effective, and how will we know?
  6. Are there other medications that might be appropriate? If so, why do you prefer the one you have chosen?
  7. What are the side effects of the medication? How long should I “wait out” any side effects before calling you?
  8. Are there other medications or food that I should avoid while taking this medication?
  9. How long do you expect me to be on this medication?
  10. How often will I be seeing you until the medication takes effect?
  11. If I’m taking more than one drug, when and how often should I take each one?
  12. How do you monitor medications, and what symptoms indicate that the dosage should be raised, lowered or changed?
  13. Are you currently treating other patients with this illness?
  14. What are the best times and what are the most dependable ways for getting in touch with you?
  15. What do you consider an emergency if I have to call you after hours?

Feel free to add your own questions.

New Psychiatrist Questions

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New Doctor Questions

  1. If I need to call you, how long do you usually take to respond?  Do you have another doctor on-call if you’re on vacation?
  2. If I ask you questions, will you give me detailed information about why you think I need a certain treatment? I need to know the rationale behind your suggestions.
  3. What drugs do you frequently prescribe to your patients? Have you had success with these drugs?
  4. How much experience have you had with atypicals?
  5. Will you prescribe drugs “off-label” if you think it will benefit me?
  6. Will you discuss any side effects of the medication you’re treating me with, and do you have a plan in case I develop a side effect?
  7. Is your focus on mental illness treatment and recovery, or do you have a general clientele? Are you willing to be creative in custom-tailoring solutions to my treatment needs?
  8. If my parents or a third-party person needed to speak on my behalf or talk to you about my treatment, how would you handle that?
  9. What would a typical session with you be like?
  10. Do you have an area of expertise with certain illnesses?
  11. Where did you get your degree? Are you Board Certified?  How long have you been in practice?
  12. What do you feel challenges and inspires you as a doctor? [This could tell you a lot about their personal work ethic.]
  13. What hospitals do you have admitting privileges with?
  14. Are you willing to coordinate my treatment with my primary care doctor or get the results of blood work or tests from this doctor to integrate my whole health care outlook?
  15. Do you have evening or morning or weekend hours?
  16. Do you test for tardive dyskinesia? Have you ever had a patient who developed this, and what has been your experience with treating TD?
  17. Do you take my insurance? Will you bill my insurance company or do you expect me to pay up front and then submit my own claim form for reimbursement?
  18. Do you believe someone can recover from a mental illness? [This question is the gold standard. If at all you get the idea that this doctor doesn’t believe recovery is possible it will benefit you to keep looking until you find a professional who is interested in seeing his or her patients succeed in life.]

Feel free to ask any other questions that come to you that aren’t listed above and when you begin treatment also develop your own questions in addition to the ones listed below.

How to Find a New Doctor

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This upsets me: I made a promise I couldn’t keep, and I regret this.

As the Health Guide at the HealthCentral SZ website I was sometimes asked to recommend a shrink, from people in India and Saudi Arabia of all places.

When I talked to a colleague recently, he suggested it’s not as simple as handing a person the name and number of an M.D.

In the interest of providing a better answer, in this blog entry I’ll detail my experience with choosing a doctor.

Then in the next entry I’ll list Psychiatrist Questions you can ask any prospective shrink.

The M.D. has to know the patients history: their unique constellation of symptoms; track record with taking meds–and numerous other details.

In 2003 I researched the names of three doctors and called them on the telephone to screen them.

One shrink required that I sign a waiver of liability releasing him from any responsibility.

I thought: if he doesn’t trust me, how can I trust him? Further: it revealed that he wasn’t confident enough in his own judgment and expertise in treating patients. If he was confident, no waiver would’ve been needed.

Shrink #1: ruled out.

Doctor #2 operated out of a low-income clinic. The person who answered the phone told me point blank that I wasn’t a candidate for a low-income clinic. (I kid you not.)

M.D. #3 had decided to retire and no longer had a practice.

Dr. A was the final choice that a former friend recommended.

As soon as I entered his office and he shook my hand, I thought: “This is the guy I want treating me.”

He hadn’t even opened his mouth. He hadn’t even started the intake.

You should always go with your intuition. The first time I met Dr. A I grilled him in detail. I had walked into his office with a list of 20 questions.

I recommend grilling 3 doctors and using your intuition to choose the shrink you think is the best one to treat you or your loved one.

(I’ve also had success using my intuition to choose a therapist and an apartment I wanted to buy.)

Now I’ll sing off and post another blog entry with a list of Psychiatrist Questions.

Recovery is an Open Door

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Tonight I’ve changed the wording in a couple of sentences in the book description for Left of the Dial on Amazon.com.

You live–you change your mind. I deleted the reference to achieving a “pre-illness dream.” I replaced it with wording that you can have your own version of a full and robust life.

Going on over two years since the memoir was published I’ve learned something profound, more realistic, and hopeful in terms of what is possible:

That when we get older we can discover that we have a new talent that we didn’t have before we got sick.

This is the real hope. The truth is that the illness can attenuate for a lot of us in our older years. So the point isn’t that to be considered successful we must–or can–achieve our pre-illness dreams.

The point is that I didn’t achieve my pre-illness dream of getting a Masters’ in Journalism.

This is the far more remarkable thing: that a person can have better life after they’ve had a breakdown than before. And this life isn’t always the one we wanted or expected to have.

Nothing succeeds like persistence. Recovery isn’t quick and it isn’t easy–it’s challenging and hard at times. Yet it can be a beautiful expression of the potential within each of us to do some kind of personally meaningful “work”–paid or not.

There’s an ending to the expression: “When one door closes, another door opens.” It’s this: “Yet we often look so longingly at the door that closed that we don’t see the one opening before us.”

It’s a mistake to regret what cannot be. It’s a gift to embrace what life has in store for us when we dare to walk through the open door.

No one else has stated in these exact words what I’ll be the first person to tell you now:

Recovery is an open door.

Reclaiming Ourselves in Recovery

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Keep on taking action in the direction of your dreams. A goal is a dream with a deadline according to a fortune cookie message I cracked open.

I’ll be 52 soon. I can tell you that the future can be better. There’s no crystal ball to peer into to predict what will happen of course. Yet it makes sense to have hope.

Each of us is capable of having our own version of a full and robust life.

As I get older I remember the city of my youth that has been long gone. You’re only young once. Yet it’s possible to have a youthful outlook your whole life.

I want to publish three other non-fiction books in addition to this second one I’m writing now. What I want to write in here in the blog now is about some of the topics of these other books that await wings.

Reclaiming ourselves in recovery is possible.

I will always maintain that I succeeded despite my time in the CMHS–Community Mental Health System–not because of it. Today we have more and better options and we can create our own options too.

The goal as I see it is to be happy and take joy in living. Sometimes  you need to have a Plan B when what you wanted to do isn’t working out. It takes guts to give up one thing and start to do something else.

Yet the older I get in my life I see the beauty in focusing on the elemental: having a core set of values that determine what you prioritize as being meaningful work you want to do now.

Get rid of the extraneous things and the negative people that weigh you down. Do only what suits you. My motto is: be bold. Be innovative.

To that end I have created another idea about goal-setting that I’m testing out now to see if I want to include it in a book.

In the coming blog entries I’m going to talk about some of the things I’ve written in the next three books.

 

15-Year Advocate Anniversary

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This year I’ve been a mental health advocate for 15 years.

In this time it feels like I’ve been preaching mostly to the choir.

I’ve been attacked when I claim that most people can recover.

This fall I’ll have been in recovery for 30 years. In the summer I’ll have been in remission–that is symptom-free–for 25 years.

I’ll be 52 in two weeks. I’ve taken some kind of pills for these 30 years. Today I take Geodon which has been a miracle drug. Before that I took Stelazine for the first 20 years. Neither drug caused weight gain.

I credit that fact that I recovered to my mother’s one courageous act to drive me to the hospital within 24 hours of my break. Luckily, I was admitted and given medication. Three weeks later when I was released the symptoms were gone.

In the time I’ve been an advocate since 2002 there has been some progress–thought most of us would think the progress has been limited.

Wherever I go when I give a talk it’s an honor and a privilege to connect with peers and family members who share common struggles.

I’ve been in the vanguard in terms of what I’ve written and spoken about recovery. No one else has quite yet reiterated what I’ve championed.

I credit having made fitness my number-one priority as having made all the difference in the last six years of my life.

On the cusp of 52 I believe fitness must rightly encompass body, mind, spirit, finances, relationships, and some kind of career–even if it’s just working on your recovery and not a paid job.

For years now I’ve hailed the work of the cheerful cashiers in Rite Aid. Unlike most people, I don’t care about status and I don’t think we should judge a person by whether they’ve achieved traditional markers of success.

Not everyone can and should aspire to become a J.D. or a famous writer. The peer support guideline tells us: “We expect a better tomorrow in a realistic way.”

I’ve learned in the last 15 years from some kinds of failure that expecting a better tomorrow in a realistic way is indeed the way to go.

Lynn Tesoro is quoted at the end of the Bobbi Brown book Living Beauty. I’ll end here with what she said. Tesoro doesn’t waste time focusing on what’s not achievable.

That wisdom if you ask me is the secret to success in recovery as well as life.

It’s far better to focus on what you can do and be and have.

Choosing Goals

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It’s clear to me that you and I won’t succeed if we succumb to thinking we have to do what other people tell us is the only right thing to do.

It’s 2017 and we have more and better options for living in recovery.

You’re only going to make yourself miserable and have ill health pretending to be someone you’re not just so you can please other people.

We should not be puppets–either of our government or of anyone else who attempts to pull the strings to get us to conform to a so-called norm.

We will only succeed if we are invested in the goals we set and have the starring role in deciding what we want to do with our lives.

When a person says another person has a ton of self-determination that really means that this individual had the courage to go after getting what they wanted without being deterred by whatever obstacle they faced.

Self-determination sounds like a fancy word however as I define it it’s simply the right of everyone living on earth to determine how they want to live their life and the direction they want to go in in their life.

No other person should be telling us what to do without soliciting our feedback on this course of action. Any treatment plan needs to be created with our input.

Choosing our goals should be up to us first of all. Yet really we shouldn’t set the bar so high that we can only fail. The dilemma is that historically for people diagnosed with mental health conditions the bar wasn’t set at all. We weren’t expected to be able to do much of anything.

2017 is here. It’s time to challenge this status quo. It’s time to speak out on the things that matter to us.

I say: engaging in goal-seeking behavior can make all the difference in a person’s recovery.

Choose your goals with care and attention. Choose goals that make sense to you.

Discarding Goals

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I firmly believe that everyone living on earth has the potential to do some kind of work.

For one person this might simply be doing volunteer work or working on their recovery. For another person yes this could be getting a JD.

We are not to frown on those of us who are less fortunate than we are in this regard.

In two months I’ll be 52 years old–and the older I get it’s become imperative to prioritize what I want to do. You too will turn 52 hopefully at some point if you haven’t gotten here now. Prioritizing goals at mid life is the way to go.

In keeping with setting priorities each of us should know that it’s okay to discard a goal or goals that don’t have the chance to be achieved.

At 52 life is getting shorter thus the requirement of choosing wisely what we focus on.

At 52 I’ve discarded a number of goals that used to burn brightly in my mind as things I really really wanted to do in my fifties.

You like I did will plan at 40 what you want to do in the future. Yet the view is different 12 years later at 52. Thus the beauty of discarding goals that weren’t meant to be.

This doesn’t mean you’ve failed just because you’ve quit wanting to do something. You can only fail at something you’ve actually done that didn’t turn out right. You can’t have failed if what you wanted to do you didn’t try to do to begin with.

Bingo–that’s the difference in succeeding at goal-setting–especially at mid life. When we give up focusing on one thing we can replace it with another thing.

Recovery is the gift of a lifetime that we give ourselves in which to heal and be whole and well and happy.

We cannot rush or cut corners when it comes to achieving our life goals. Better to have entertained a goal or two and not acted on it than to sit home throwing ourselves a pity party and not even trying to set a goal because we think we can’t.

Banish the word “can’t” from your vocabulary I tell you. Replace it with “I’m willing to try to see if I can do this.” That’s more like it even if not everything we try will always work out.

I want to continue to talk about setting goals. What I’ve written here is the short version. A book years ago was published that talked about the benefit of quitting.

The difference is: quit when it’s not to your advantage to continue. Persist when the goal is so life-changing that to not risk trying to achieve it would fill you with regret at “what might have been.”

The quote is: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

The view from the cusp of 52 is grand.

Yes You Can

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I’ve changed the quote at the top right of this blog.

Years ago circa 1989 when I was shunted into the day program a woman I met told me: “Not a lot of people with a disability could do what you do.”

It’s true that I took offense at this because I thought it was possible to do these things.

As of today the proof that Yes You Can really is that we are “individuals” living with a mental health challenge. Not “consumers” or “schizophrenics” or any other label.

Each of us has the potential to do the things that give us joy and happiness. Each of us has the potential to heal and have optimal mental health. Each of us has the potential to flourish doing what we love.

Harboring jealousy at other people isn’t the way to live our lives.

Today in 2017 I can adamantly rebut that woman’s decades-ago comment with this:

You don’t have to become an Ivy League lawyer or a famous writer to get on with  a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life after you receive your diagnosis.

That’s the distinction I’ve always made in the various incarnations of my blog:

Often our internal roadblocks limit us more than external factors.

The goal I dare say is to be happy and healthy–that’s the true aim of living in recovery.

Each of us gets to define what happy and healthy looks like for us in our own lives.

Again it goes back to what I’ve written about self-stigma. If you’re trashing yourself or someone else because they’re a cashier in Rite Aid, that’s NOT right.

The woman who commented to me that way in the mists of time was an exceptional baker. She could cook like you wouldn’t believe.

So if you are a creative chef creating culinary wonders that’s your version of happy and healthy.

I thought about this woman’s comment today because I was talking with my literary agent who’s as visionary as I am in championing mental health.

Years ago when I first started blogging I had the audacity to claim that most people could recover and go on to have your own version of a full and robust life.

Frankly I’m tired of so-called experts claiming that no one can recover. I’m tired of getting attacked because I choose to focus on on the positive instead of dwelling on symptoms and lack and deficits.

The point is: if you can bake a souffle you’ve got that over me.

Any questions?