Mental health month/week

Makes a lot of sense @Eden1919 - but I don't know much about psychosis to even dare comment on what anyone has said. But you have made some very valid points.

@tyme yes well that highlights another problem, many people know nothing about psychosis and this lack of knowledge leads to more stigma against people with it. i am not saying it is your fault you dont know much about it but there should be more education on it like there is now for depression and anxiety. if you are interested in learning more about psychosis there is a youtube channel i could recommend but wont name here in case that is against the guidelines.

All good @Eden1919 . I will do a search myself. Thanks for the offer.

Wishing you all the best, tyme

@tyme well the channel starts with the word "living" if that helps you find it lol.

@Eden1919, @tyme, @Zoe7, @wellwellwellnez, @FloatingFeather
Hi Eden,

I agree with what you are saying. I was having a conversation with the CEO of one of the major consumer mental health advocacy organisations last week. He was telling me about the way in which powerful vested interests were blocking reforms. I have no doubt that these people with vested interests are a significant problem but when I said that I thought it was much more of a cultural problem as anything else he looked very surprised.

At first glance it might appear that resentment toward people who experience psychosis is simply prejudice. There is no evidence whatsoever that people so diagnosed are anymore likely to be a danger or nuisance to the community than anyone else but in my opinion the problem goes much deeper than that. What I believe that people are reacting to is the fear that their own subconscious tendencies will be triggered and they won't be able to control them.

Psychosis like almost all mental health problems is not an all or nothing situation. Psychotic episodes vary in both intensity and frequency. Where they happen is also important. If they occur and can be contained within one's home than it is not likely to be noticed by anyone except family etc. If they happen in a public place then police or other authorities are much more likely to get involved and the incident reported and recorded.

Psychosis is probably far more prevalent in the community than the statistics about formal diagnosis would indicate. A common and frequent example of an undiagnosed psychotic episode would be "road rage" which is frightening and often dangerous enough if you are on the receiving end of it. I am sure that psychosis also occurs frequently in domestic violence situations.

The point I am making here is that psychosis is a huge community problem that is ignored, misunderstood and seldom talked about. There is a significant and growing amount of high quality research that has been carried out over the last 30 or so years but this information has not made its way into the public domain. The biomedical model of psychosis simply compounds the problem.

The roots of psychosis would also appear to have a bearing on all aspects of mental health including depression, anxiety, PTSD etc.

I postulate that by bringing psychosis out into the open we can gain a significantly improved understanding of all areas of mental health which in turn will lead to better ways to manage and improve things.

It is not all that far back in my memory when talking about depression was a taboo subject. That has fortunately changed. These days people are much more open to talking about these sorts of things.

I believe it is now time to start having a decent public conversation about psychosis.

As for getting rid of involuntary treatment etc, my impression from the mental health support work that I do on two international online forums is that the situation is significantly worse in Australia than in most other parts of the western world including the USA and UK. Australia is certainly not compliant with World Health Organisation standards so this seems to me to be a pretty good place to start the conversation.
Regards
Willy

@Willy I disagree that road rage is an example of psychosis road rage is just anger in an extreme form but is not really psychotic in nature at all. i do agree though that psychosis is perhaps a lot more common that we think and can come in many different forms and is different for each person who experiences it. we also absolutely do need to have more education on psychosis in the community without that the stigma will continue for sure.

@Eden1919

As you say psychosis can come in many different forms and is different for each person who experiences it. It is also well recognised that behaviour in one culture or situation that is defined as psychotic can be considered in a different culture or situation as normal or even laudable.
In the case of extreme anger, perhaps one way of deciding whether or not it is psychotic is to determine whether or not the anger was rationally justified by the situation. That in itself is of course a subjective judgment.
In the case of road rage, I would say the extreme anger is very often not justified.
Here is an example, I sound my horn at a driver who appears to have not seen me to try and avoid a possible collision. He pursues me, tail-gateing my car for a few kilometers. Then on a quiet section of road he forces my car off the road. He gets out of his car and approaches my car. A fight ensues. I hit the guy and he goes down but I keep hitting and kicking him until he is nearly unconscious. At that stage I don't care what happens to him. I am far beyond rational thought. I then get into my car and drive off. Nothing ever comes of the incident. I assume it was never reported to the police. Was either of us psychotic? I know for certain that I was and that situations like this happen much more readily when driving cars than say walking in the street. Disney made a cartoon about this in 1950 and I believe this tendency is just as predominant today as it was 70 years ago.

Disney "Motor Mania" cartoon
Regards

Willy

@Willy I still disagree psychosis at its core is a break from reality which isnt part of road rage, many things can be irrational but that doesnt mean they are psychotic for example anxiety is often highly irrational but it isnt psychotic. this is the case for road rage it is irrational but not a break from reality. thinking that rage and violence are core elements of psychosis is harmful and is used to perpetuate stigma.

@WillyIn response to your original post of several days ago, I think that, far more important than simply writing disjointed, arbitrary letters to MPs, we need our community to really start to visably contribute to the public inquiries that are held in these matters.

Last year, there was a somewhat scaled-down fedral government inquiry in to the mental health system. Despite all the modern hoopla we hear about "bringing more lived experiance voices in to the mental health conversation", the submissions made to that inquiry were overwhelmingly from therapists. There were only a handful of submissions from patients - and that's even if you make the best possible assumptions about the hidden submissions.

The hundreds of therapist submissions were largely bemoaning the fact that the government throws more money at "clinical" therapists, as opposed to "non-clinical" ones; while the "non-clinical" therapists were proclaiming that they deserve more money then "non-clinical" therapists because they are better. 😕

Interestingly, one point that kept cropping up was that the "non-clinical" therapists felt betrayed, because the therapist union is almost entirely lead by "clinical" therapists; and thus, the union's official advice to government tends to reccommend great favors be extended to the "clinical" therapists, while the "non-clinical" ones generally get treated like crap. Most of the "non-clinical" therapists disputing the patronizing stance of their union did so anonymously; no doubt because there would've been harsh consequences if the elders of the industry could identify their in-house critics. That tells you a lot about the culture.

I think there's a lesson to be learned in that for us patients, in trusting so-called representative organizations to speak accurately and fairly to the government on our behalf. They may not end up speaking for the patient community, but rather for just a narrow caste within the patient community who make up said organizations' leadership ranks.

All the more reason why each and every on of us needs to speak out for ourselves.

Getting back to my original point about the abundance of therapist contributions, and that limited number of patient contributions to the inquiry; you can guess how the inquiry turned out. The therapists' repeated concerns about poor funding for "non-clinical" therapists was addressed as one of the inquiry's major final conclusions, whereas the concerns voiced by patients barely got a mention at all.

We weren't listened to, because we never even turned up.

You make the point that it would be difficult for an MP to get away with ignoring 50,000 like-minded letters. But how would the media even be expected to know that they had gotten so many such letters. I don't know if there's any legal requirement for politicians to publish reports on how many letters they recieve, and/or the general subject matter of such letters.

By contrast, these sorts of inquiries are usually public; as are the bulk of submissions they recieve (except when the submitters request their submissions to not be published). If an inquiry refused to acknowledge or address 80% of the submissions it recieved, that would be a very public spectacle, and much more likely to produce an outcry. Public submissions also offer us an elevated chance to be able to communicate past the politicians and directly to the general public. Although virtually no members of the general public will ever read the submissions to such inquiries, at least our testimony is out there in the public sphere, which I guess is better then nothing.

@Eden1919 @Willy I think that part of the problem is that there's no doubt a large gap between the official textbook definition of "psychosis", and what the average person on the street is likely to call "psychotic" behavior.

Regarding the prejudice against people with psychosis... It's a complicated issue, because there are two sides to the story. Yes, people with psychosis understandably want their freedom and to be treated well and respectfully. But non-psychosis people want to feel not only safe, but also connected to their community; they want their neighborhoods to be their home. The more you flood those places with incomprehensible alien mindsets, the less and less of a home they will have.

There is also a level of compassion for the victims of (apparently rare) psychotic assault, and a yearning to view such tragedies as lessons that have been hard learned, and which action will be taken to insure they don't happen again.

I can't help but think of the story of a certain famous actress - I'll call her Cauley Cerrette (😉). She got attacked and injured by a psychotic homeless guy, for no reason, several years ago. Fortunately for her, a cop just happened to be in the vicinity and detained the guy before he could do too much dammage to Cauley.

She hailed him (the cop) as her personal hero and sung his praises all over the internet.

A couple years later, the same hero cop, walking the same beat, got ambushed by the same psychotic homeless guy. This time, the cop got messed up really bad.

As you can imagine, Cauley Cerrette was outraged. Why hadn't the lesson been learned? Why hadn't anyone taken notice that this guy was a menace to society, when he had clearly demonstrated himself as such? Why hadn't steps been taken to insure he couldn't harm any more innocents? A good cop lay in hospital, seriously injured, as a result of the failure to learn those very basic lessons. But instead, a tunnel-vision focus upon appeasing the minority of people with psychosis has left that community with a revolving-door system that turned the guy loose in a jiffy.

You can understand the anguish from people who care about that cop. "What can we do to insure this never happens again?" They fairly cry out.

Is our answer to be: "Sorry, there's nothing that can be done. The contentment of psychotic people is most important. Your literal safety, and sense of safety is secondary. You just have to politely tollerate the fact that your community now has a mildly elevated risk of harboring a potentially dangerous person."?

I'm not suggesting it's fair for the entire psychotic community to have to pay for the misdeeds of a slim minority, such as the man mentioned above. Certainly, the vast majority of them are harmless. I'm just saying that the concerns of so-called regular people are not unreasonable, and shouldn't be lightly dismissed as irrellevant, or baseless.