Belief Systems, Nuance, and Productive Advocacy Ideas

For those with lived experience, do people believe your recovery story? What restrictions do people put on you when you tell your story? What one-liners have you found to defuse people's concerns so that they can hear you? How do you stay in the advocacy game instead of getting frustrated at being the only one who knows the data? This is my story of disclaimers, advocacy friends, respect for religious beliefs, and sustainable advocacy efforts.

Full Article → http://www.madinamerica.com/2016/02/recovery-story-disclaimers/


I will be back with some comments, need to think about this one for a bit.

Here is the comment I made on the above MIA article, I improved it a little here.

When you deprogram people, you force them to think…But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they’ve been programmed to believe. They realize that they’ve been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again….

That is a quote from the Wikipedia page on deprogramming. It was edited out but its easy to look at old pages on the web archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://en ... rogramming

Get them to begin questioning: A chemical imbalance ? Can I see your lab tests ? Do you know anyone who has received a chemical test ?

Five stages of deprogramming

1. Discredit the figure of authority: Psychiatry the medical model ect

2. Present contradictions (ideology versus reality): “How can they call it help when they abuse people and deny informed consent ? Why if the drugs are supposed to make people feel better do they need force and coercion to get people to take them ? Why with all these new treatments of the last 50 or so years does the number of chronically ill people keep going up instead of down ? Why do people in 3rd world countries without access to modern psychiatric "care" have better recovery rates ?

3. The breaking point: When a person begins to listen to the advocate; when reality begins to take precedence over the lies of the multi billion dollar psychiatric and pharmaceutical marketing machine.

4. Self-expression: When the person begins to open up and voice gripes against psychiatry.

5. Identification and transference: when the subject begins to identify with the human rights in psychiatry message and starts to think of him- or herself as an opponent of psychiatry rather than a member, patient or advocate of it.

Are you claiming that altering brain chemistry with drugs can cause mental illness but that mental illness has nothing to do with abnormal brain chemistry?

Are you claiming that chemical changes don't occur in the brain when someone is depressed? If not, what's the difference?

When I get a headache is my brain low on Advil ?

How often are you experiencing these headaches? It's possible that something in your diet is causing them. Do you drink a lot of cafine or artificially sweetened beverages? Do you suffer from high blood pressure or nervous tension? I think that we need to check your hormone levels.