Popular Psychology

Drawing From Emotional Pain: One Artist’s Struggle With Mental Illness

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC2 Comments on Drawing From Emotional Pain: One Artist’s Struggle With Mental Illness
DestinyBlue's photo.
In psychology there has long thought to be a link between mental illness and creativity. While disorders like depression tend to affect many people, creative types such as writers, musicians, inventors and dancers seem to get hit twice as hard.
I will follow this post with a discussion on mental illness and creativity later, but today I would like to share something special.
One of my favorite artists, Destiny Blue recently shared with her fans her struggle with anxiety and depression. Her story was touching and powerful. The fact that she shared it on her birthday, May 22nd made it even more special as she was giving such a great gift to so many other people. She wanted her story shared and with her permission, I am thankful that she is allowing me to share it here in hopes that it will help others who think they are suffering alone or are ashamed of their illness. We both hope it will inspire others to reach out and seek help.

Destiny Blue

Hi I’m Blue, and I struggle with mental illness.

Some of you will dismiss me, some of you will be scared of me, some of you will blame me, but a surprising amount of you will understand me, because 1 in 4 people experience mental health issues. Considering so many people experience it, we hear so little about it; it’s the family secret you can’t tell anyone, the fake smile so know one knows, the calling in sick but blaming food poisoning. It’s hard for me to write about, but I write this hoping it makes it easier for the next person to speak about it.

I am going to tell you my story, of my path with mental illness. I don’t know if it has a happy ending yet…

It began with a tough situation at home, which triggered the anxiety. It’s hard to explain the exact feeling. It’s kind of like where you’re leaning back on your chair, and go that bit too far and you just about to fall back. That sudden jolt of panic inside your chest, that half second spike that makes you fling your hands forward and grab the desk infront of you to steady yourself. That ‘oh shit’ moment. It’s that. Only it didn’t last for half a second, for even a minute, it lasted years. I thought I’d just have to live with it until the situations improved, but even when it did anxiety still clung to me like a scarf of live electricity. That feeling could come when I was alone in a room, sitting comfortably, with nothing to do and a clear day ahead. The world would spin and tumble, and I’d want to put my hands out to grab the desk and steady myself, but there was nothing there. Nothing to grab onto. Over and over.

And so, through anxiety’s hot trickery depressions cold crept in, it sat at the back of my mind and laughed at me. “Why are you even trying? It’s useless anyway” and when you’re fighting a non-existent force from a chair you’re not even really sitting on it’s hard to argue with that. And this feeling spread.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t feel happy, and it wasn’t total sadness per-se, I did feel sad, but the harshness of depression is that it makes the process of living excruciating. It’s like walking through thick treacle, every movement pushed against and held back by sticky tar. Suffocating and exhausting. Even when there’s no energy left you still have to walk. This same tar is in your brain, slowing your thoughts, numbing your feelings, even when there’s no energy left, you can never stop thinking. Then everything feels overwhelming. Even the small things, one task in particular for me, washing my clothes, was a mountain, even to think about it required so much energy, I could wash my clothes, but then I’d have to pick up the dirty clothes, taken them to the washer, open the washer, put the clothes in the washer, close the door, open the detergent bottle, put the detergent in. It was just too much. So the clothes sat there. And you know it’s absurd, everyone else can do it no trouble, so, I thought, maybe I’m just lazy, I should push on, I’m a strong person, so I pushed. Now you can push yourself do enough to look like your functioning normally, but it doesn’t get rid of the tar, the sticky molasses in your veins, on the outside I was normal enough, inside I was decaying. My mind was ablaze trying to grab a desk and my soul was swallowed in the bitter treacle. The worst thing, was that I never felt at peace, however still I sat, however beautiful the morning, however hard it was searched for, no peace arrived. It was torture, and my own mind was the torturer.

I didn’t -want- to kill myself, that’s messy, and probably involved going out of the house, a body, sad friends. I just wanted to be dead. My brain fantasized about it. That sweet release of deep restful unexistence, it seemed so much better than existing like this. If only, I thought, there weren’t people who loved me. It’s a sick twisted logic you don’t have control over; to you it all makes sense. I didn’t even know I was depressed, I thought what I was feeling was justified, life -was- meaningless, I -would- be better off dead. It had been a slow decline into darkness, the light wasn’t just switched off, I had no ‘oh shit it’s dark’ moment, I didn’t even realise I couldn’t see properly, my eyes had adjusted to the dark as the light faded, my mind replacing reality with it’s own twisted night vision, of strange shadows and dark half logic.

Yeah, I won’t go out today, no I don’t need to do my essay yet, it can wait, they probably don’t want to hang around with me anyway, It’s not worth it, I’m not worth it, I’m worthless.

So I hurt myself. Mostly to feel better, or to feel something, I’m not sure, but it proved a point. When I saw what I had done to my own skin, I had a thought: “This is what sick people do” The thought turned over a few times in my head and twisted into a lump in my throat “Am -I- sick?” That was the first time I really realised. Despite crippling depression, despite feeling suicidal, being unable to properly care for myself, I had barely thought I was ill, I’d just thought I was lazy, or sad, or worthless. But I looked at the blood, and the damage I’d done, and knew I needed help.

So I went to the doctor, and yes, I was sick, and the slow process began. Full of relapse and recovery. It’s not over, and it may never be for me, it’s more complicated than I can say here. But now I can recognise the signs and know what to look out for and I have learned how to manage my condition. I took a break at the start of this year, and didn’t do any conventions, just focused on getting better and giving myself a steady foundation to stand on for the rest of this year. At the moment I am doing well, and I appreciate the peace in my head so much more now I’ve known such darkness. But life is worth living, and I try and do it with vitatily.

Depression is so disgusting because it erodes the you-ness of you, the qualities you like in yourself are taken over, even the things you enjoy doing you have to do in the tar. It is not your fault, though it can feel like it is, and others may think it is. I hate that some people think it shows weakness. It shows no more weakness than walking up a mountain with a broken leg shows weakness. Your brain’s broken and you must get on -despite- that, doing the washing can be a huge victory, higher than climbing a mountain with a broken leg, and a lot more sensible. People congratulate me for creating a piece of art, or running my own business. No one congratulated me when I did my washing. But really, in my darkest time, it was one of my greatest achievements. And, on some future day where I’m feeling bad, putting another load of washing on will be a big achievement again.

I juts wanted to let you guys know that you were a small light in the huge darkness. Thank you so much for all your comments and notes, I treasure each one of you. Thank you for always being there for me. It’s a wonderful feeling to know I can reach out and so many people would grab my hand to help. I know many of you are suffering with the same thing I did. Please reach out, and for those of you willing to, please offer a hand to someone when they reach out, they probably need it more than you know, they might even need it more than they know.

It’s my birthday, and if I have a birthday wish, it’s for this message to be shared.

Peace, love, and mental well-being,

Blue x

Popular Psychology

I AM: The Shortest Sentence In The Written Word, The Two Most Powerful Words In The Universe

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on I AM: The Shortest Sentence In The Written Word, The Two Most Powerful Words In The Universe

1609951_10153272920026605_3017107923737994968_nThe other day I came across this picture on Facebook and it immediately reminded me of a book I read called I AM: Discovering The Power of Who You Really Are. It’s still today one of my favorite books because it helped me realize how powerful those two words truly are.

The reason those two words, I AM, are so powerful is because those are the words that help us create our world, our realities. We are always saying to ourselves, largely subconsciously, I AM. It can be as simple as, “I AM bored” or as self-destructive as, “I AM nothing”.

What happens is that whatever we say we are, we will subconsciously start creating experiences for ourselves to confirm what we think we are. It’s the way we stay somewhat sane and try to keep our world in balance.

If we subconsciously or consciously say and believe, “I AM a loser”, we will continuously put ourselves in situations to lose. We will not try hard to win even if we are lying to ourselves that we are. We are expecting to lose and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if we somehow win, that will not be enough to change our thoughts of I AM a loser, we will just chalk it up to luck or even say, “I should have loss” or “It doesn’t matter that I won, I AM still a loser”.

When we say those words, I AM, we are defining ourselves, how we view the universe, how we experience our experiences and our state of mind.  We control all of that. No outside forces, no other person. Even someone in prison has power in choosing how he defines his I AM, his experience.

Our internal dialogue is very powerful, that’s why it is important for us to take control of it and redirect it, especially when it’s being self-destructive or not pushing us in a positive direction.

Those words, I AM are with us every second of the day.  They are so powerful and help us create so much of our emotions, our reality and our experiences that they help us create matter! They help us create matter because they help us decide what matters in our lives.

Sometimes when I am working with people that are extremely emotionally charged about something, I’ll stop and ask them, why does it matter? Often times they will stop crying or yelling and look at me with a puzzled look on their face. Then I’ll tell them that it only matters because they are making it matter and if they decide that it no longer matters, it won’t. I could almost see the burden being lifted from them as they realize that they have the power to let go of whatever emotions they had been holding on to (sometimes for years) because they decided to no longer make it matter.

Of course it’s not always that simple, but a surprisingly amount of the time it is.

So many people are in various degrees of emotional pain right now because they have no real control over their I AM. Who they are, their emotions and who they tell themselves they are on a subconscious level, is heavily influenced by other people and the ups and downs of daily life. If they only knew how powerful they truly were they could bring an end to much of the angst, depression and anger.

The Basics

  1. We create our reality.
  2. Fear tends to bring about the very thing that is feared.
  3. Faith (not necessarily religion) tends to bring about powerful outcomes.
  4. People tend to be products of their environments (but this doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t change).
  5. You cannot go back in the past and change anything you did (so don’t keep beating yourself up over it).
  6. Failure does not define who you are. You do.
  7. You create and experience your life. No one can live your life for you or is responsible for how your life turns out.
  8. You are the exclusive author of your story. You are the creator of this experience called life.
  9. You and only you can choose your interpretation of and reactions to your life experiences. You control your emotions.
  10. You are making it all what it is.
Popular Psychology

Setting An Intention To Pay Attention: A Crucial Step Of Mindfulness

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on Setting An Intention To Pay Attention: A Crucial Step Of Mindfulness

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Earlier today I was sitting in a meeting, but instead of paying attention I found my mind drifting away, thinking about other things I needed to do that day at work, what I wanted to do when I got off work, a co-worker who was in a bad mood this morning and somehow I had allowed her to get me off center.

And then suddenly I came back to the present, back to the sound of our CEO’s voice realizing I didn’t hear anything she had said over the last five minutes. Not a good thing. It was then I realized that I had to set an intention to pay attention.

It’s so easy to get distracted by all the noise in our heads, our phones buzzing with messages or even a co-worker in a sour mood. This can be helpful of course when you are doing something like pumping gas and need to notice the suspicious looking person approaching, but it is not very helpful when we are trying to engage with another person or pay attention in an important meeting.

Mindfulness doesn’t just happen, you actually have to make the decision to pay attention. This can be part of an intentional practice such as paying attention to our breathing during meditation or paying attention to a loved one and ignoring our phone or any other internal or external distractions.

This is even helpful sometimes in the middle of the day when we realize our minds are all over the place, especially when it’s in the future or the past and not in the present. That’s when we need to bring focus back to our loved one that is talking, or our child that wants our attention or like this morning, our CEO who is lecturing. And sometimes we just need to bring our attention back to us, what we are doing in that moment, even if it’s just walking or breathing.

This may sound very small, but it is actually often difficult to do because we aren’t always aware of when our thoughts and attention have gone away from where they need to be.

The other day I was sitting with my future wife watching a movie, but I realized my mind was somewhere else and instead of enjoying that moment with her I was creating anxiety for myself about a situation that I had no control over. When I realize this I brought my mind back to the present, back to that moment and the anxiety I was feeling dissipated.

It’s a powerful thing, that moment when you realized you aren’t focused on the present and then bring your mind and attention back and choose to live in that moment instead of just letting that moment pass you by.

Choosing to pay attention is such an easy thing to do, but at the same time it’s easy to forget and harder to do consistently without practice.

Popular Psychology

8 Things About Your Mind You May Be Unaware Of

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on 8 Things About Your Mind You May Be Unaware Of

SharpenYourMind_articleThere are many things I love about psychology and one thing is how much it brings us altogether and yet makes us all unique individuals. There’s so much about our minds that we often aren’t aware of and don’t even know is happening most of the time.

Here I’ve shared 8 things that affect most of us to one agree to another, many of which you are unaware of even when it’s right in front of your face.

We all have a capacity for evil

Most people like to think that they could never be convinced, tricked or manipulated into doing something wrong, but the 1971 Stanford prison study showed how social situations can affect our behavior. In the study led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a mock prison was created in the basement of the Stanford psychology building and 24 undergraduate students were selected to play the roles of prisoners and guards.

Researchers then monitored the prisoners and the guards and watched in dismay as ordinary college students began to do unimaginable things to each other. The guards for instance became physically and psychologically abusive to the inmates who in turn began to exhibit extreme emotional stress and anxiety.

The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but the researchers ended it in just six days due to the abusive behavior of the students playing the roles of guards.

“The guards escalated their aggression against the prisoners, stripping them naked, putting bags over their heads, and then finally had them engage in increasingly humiliating sexual activities,” Zimbardo said.

These were all thought to be physically and mentally healthy college students who within days had turned into someone else.

This reminds me of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib where seemingly normal American soldiers began to ruthless abuse, humiliate and torture the detainees committing humane rights violations that included rape, sodomy and murder.

We are all susceptible to “change blindness”

In 1998, researchers from Harvard and Kent university did a study where they had an actor ask a stranger on the street for directions. While asking for directions, they had two people carrying a large wooden door walk between the actor and the subject, completely blocking their view of each other. The actor was then replaced with someone else of a different height, build and voice. Half of the subjects in the experiment didn’t even notice the change!

“Change blindness” suggests that we are very selective when it comes to visual cues and that we rely on memory and pattern-recognition more than we realize. The same study has been repeated many times, including changing a main actor on stage with someone of a different build and voice and half of the audience didn’t realize that the actor had been swapped at all.

Some of us are more susceptible to “change blindness” than others.

Delaying gratification is inherently difficult, but is worth it

This one may seem like a no brainer, but researches in a 1960s Stanford experiment gave pre-school age kids one marshmallow and told them that if they could avoid eating it for 15 minutes while the researcher stepped out, they could have two marshmallows when he returned. Most of the students tried to wait, but struggled and eventually ate the marshmallow. Those who were successful in waiting used avoidance tactics such as turning their back to the marshmallow or covering their eyes.

The children who could delay gratification in the study also turned out less likely to use drugs, become obese or have behavioral problems later as teenagers or adults. The good thing is that delaying gratification is something that can be taught.

We can have strong conflicting moral impulses

In a famous study done in 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed just how far people would go to obey authority figures, even if it conflicted with their own morals. Part of the study was to try to understand how so many Nazi war criminals were willing to commit unspeakable horrors during the Holocaust.

In the experiment, one participant was called the “teacher” and the other the “learner”. The teacher was instructed to give an electrick show to the learner, who was in another room, every time they got a question wrong. If the teacher was reluctant to give a shock, he was urged on by the researcher. During the experiment, most participants, even though they were visibly uncomfortable and stressed, administered increasingly painful shocks, all the way up to the final 450-volt shock which was labled “XXX”.

This study was originally considered a study of blind obedience to authority, but recently has been thought of as a study in deep moral conflict, suggesting that many of us, in the right conditions, can be pushed to do things we are uncomfortable doing, even if that means hurting others.

We are corrupted by power

We’ve all known someone, most likely a co-worker, who was one person before they got promoted and then a totally different (not usually for the better) person after they got promoted. Research suggests that when we gain authority or power, we tend to change and not always for the better. Those in power sometimes act with a sense of entitlement and/or disrespect.

Many studies show that even implied positions of power can change the way many people act. “When researchers give people power in scientific experiments, they are more likely to physically touch others in potentially inappropriate ways, to flirt in more direct fashion, to make risky choices and gambles, to make first offers in negotiations, to speak their mind, and to eat cookies like the Cookie Monster, with crumbs all over their chins and chests,” say psychologist Dacher Keltner.

We seek out loyalty to social groups

In a social psychology experiment in the 1950s, an experimenter took two groups of 11 boys, all age 11 to a summer camp. He gave one group the name the “Eagles” and the other the “Rattlers”. They spent a week apart, bonding, having fun with neither group knowing the existence of the other. When he finally brought the two groups together they failed to integrate, instead they stayed in their tight knit groups, began calling each other group names, competing against the other group in various competitions, creating conflict and even refusing to eat together. This is only after each group bonded together for only one week!

This is one reason I disbelieve the thought that if everyone were the same race/color, there would be no racism. There will always be some type of prejudices against groups we perceive as different from us, even if the difference is only in name (the “Eagles” versus the “Rattlers”). It’s just the way humans are wired to bond socially. Even if we all looked alike, we would find something to separate “us” from “them”.

Love is all you really need to be happy

That may sound hokey, but a 75 year Harvard grant study that followed over 250 men around for 75 years suggests that love is all you really need to be happy and satisfied long-term. Psychiatrist George Vaillant, The study’s longtime director says, “One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”

That is for many of us the hard part. We want to be loved, are afraid to love, to hurt or be hurt, therefore we find many, often creative ways to push love away and most of it is subconscious. We end up telling ourselves we don’t need love to be happy and that simply isn’t true. Even if it’s not romantic love, we all need to feel loved even if it’s the endless quest for love or passion for something.

We are always trying to justify our experiences so that they make sense to us

One day I’m going to sit down and write a whole post about cognitive dissonance. It’s such a fascinating topic. What cognitive dissonance says is that we are cognitive-dissonanceconstantly telling ourselves lies to make sense of what is going on around us, especially when what’s going on around us doesn’t make much sense. We want the world to be a logical and harmonious place, which of course often it is not.

An example of cognitive dissonance is someone who smokes, knowing that it is bad for their health, but they justify it by saying that they enjoy it so much that it’s worth the risks, or that it’s not likely they will suffer serious health effects, or that they are going to die of something anyway they might as well enjoy smoking, or that if they quit smoking they will become an irritable, angry person no one wants to be around. So, they continue smoking because it is consistent with their idea about smoking.

Cognitive dissonance is another one of those things that is largely subconscious, but we all do it. We try to make sense of a world that often doesn’t make sense and when we can’t make sense of it we are often put into an uncomfortable, upsetting state of mind. We become unbalance and try to figure out away to become balanced again.

These 8 things are just some of the reasons I love psychology. It unites all of us, while at the same time making each of us different.

 

Popular Psychology

Andreas Lubitz; The Plane Crash And Mental Illness

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on Andreas Lubitz; The Plane Crash And Mental Illness
Andreas Lubitz; The Plane Crash And Mental Illness

Andreas-Lubitz-Germanwings-PilotThere’s been a lot of talk about the mental health of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot that crashed the Germanwings plane into the French Alps.

As more details come out, it appears obvious that he was suffering from some type of depression, psychosis and/or personality disorder. Without having examined him myself, I can only speculate by the information covered by the news outlets, but I do know that there are certain forms of mental illness that make a person more likely to not only kill themselves, but to take the lives of other people with them.

Sometimes severe depression can include psychotic features that come and go. This is often missed when the person sees a clinician because the psychosis may not be present during the examination, only the depression, therefore the person is treated only for depression.

If a person has psychotic depression combined with grandiosity, egocentricity and lack of morals/conscience, that can lead to a person who almost has a god like complex where they believe that not only is their lives in their own hands, but so are the lives of other people. Thank goodness that this type of condition coupled with violence is rare.

Usually people who are depressed and/or have suicidal tendencies are only focused on harming themselves. They would never take the lives of another person, much less that of a stranger. Depressed people and people who suffer from a mental illness in general are not dangerous, it’s only when these mental illnesses are combined with other conditions such as psychosis and/or a personality disorder that they can become disastrous.

For example, as we stated above, some forms of depression can have short episodes of psychosis . Conditions such as bipolar disorder sometimes may also include psychotic features, where the person may be depressed and hallucinating or manic, grandiose and delusional. The contents of the psychosis may or may not be aggressive.

Because people with bipolar disorder often only go see a doctor when they are deeply depressed, they are often misdiagnosed with depression and given antidepressants which can then send that person into a manic episode. I’m not saying that is what happened to this pilot, but his girlfriend reported that he made statements such as “One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.” This is a very grandiose statement.

There’s even some reports that his vision problems he was so afraid would cost him his career may have been psychosomatic, meaning that they weren’t organic kn nature but psychological. His mental illness could have been causing him to believe he was losing his vision.

On top of that, perhaps the thoughts he shared with his girlfriend only alluded to even more grandiose and obsessive thoughts. Some people with mental disorders suffer from painful,  oppressive, relentless, intrusive thoughts that may be scary and constant.

For example, a person with Obessive-Compulsive Disorder may know that they turned off the oven before they left the house because they checked 10 times, yet they can’t get the thought out of their head that they may have left it on and it will burn down their house so they recheck it again and again causing them to be late for work every day. Or the husband who has the obsessive thought that his wife is cheating, although he knows she’s not, yet he can’t get the thoughts out of his head so he is constantly accusing her, checking her phone, going through her things and driving her crazy.

Also, in some personality disorders and psychosis, there can be very grandiose ideas where the person thinks they are better than everyone else and that no ones life really matters. This could have played a role in the airplane crash and would help explain the selfishness and egocentricity of killing oneself with no regard for the lives of the other 150 people and their families.

For the most part, people with mental illnesses can maintain very successful lives and careers, such as being an airplane pilot, but only if they are diagnosed and treated properly. Often people with mental illness are misdiagnosed or don’t ever get treated because they don’t believe they need help or because of stigma.

People who suffer from bipolar disorder often like the high of the mania therefore they don’t get treated or take their medication accordingly. People suffering from psychosis often don’t realize that they are psychotic and therefore decline treatment.

I once spent several weeks trying to convince a successful business man suffering from bipolar disorder that he was not only bipolar, but needed medication to help control himself. At the time he was manic, had been arrested 3 times in 2 months for various reckless behaviors and was on the brink of losing everything. It was only after he had a long time to think in solitary confinement did he start to have some insight and agreed to treatment.

This pilot, suffering from real or psychosomatic vision problems he believed would end his career, seized the opportunity to not only end his suffering, but to live out his grandiose fantasy of going down in history, once he was alone in the cockpit. In his right mind this pilot wouldn’t have did what he did, but his mental illness made him impulsive and in that moment he did something that could never be undone.

Often times suicide is an impulsive act. A person may have the thought, but without adequate means they won’t harm themselves. However, if the impulse is strong enough and a weapon of destruction is within reach, the urge to kill themselves may win out over any desire to live.

Once again, at this point it is pure speculation as to what was actually going on inside of Andreas Lubitz mind at the time he made that fatal decision. However, this gives us a great opportunity to have an open discussion about mental illness no matter if it’s our own or others.

Popular Psychology

Post Dramatic Stress Disorder

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC2 Comments on Post Dramatic Stress Disorder

748Today I counseled an inmate who was upset because he had been diagnosed with what he called Post Dramatic Stress Disorder (PDSD). What he meant and I quickly corrected him, was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Initially my colleagues and I had a good laugh at the fact that he mistakenly called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post Dramatic Stress Disorder, but then I thought about it. Can exposure to too much drama create a milder form of stress that can have a negative effect on an individual’s life?

Every day most of us are exposed to some type of drama, either in our personal lives or through the media where we are bombarded with images of war, devastation and danger just from watching the  news. We are faced with even more murder, betrayals and violence from the television shows, books and magazine articles we consume.

Most of us don’t give a second thought to these images that slip into our brains, but for some of us, prolonged exposure to drama can create anxiety, difficulty sleeping, a sense of helplessness and agitation.

Think about it. How many times have you watched or read something that was provocative, suspenseful or violent and then found yourself dreaming about it that night, perhaps even having a nightmare that the dramatic even was happening to you?  Many of us will push this aside as we wake up and get back to our realities, but for a few, they will remain hyper vigilant and uneasy for days.

My oldest sister had to stop watching one of her favorite movies because it would cause her to go back to work the next day angry. Why? The dramatic events in the movie didn’t happen to her, yet they affected her on multiple levels triggering an agitated response.

What’s the solution? Certainly I am not advocating boycotting television or books filled with drama, but instead to take a break from it every now and then. Go for a walk, take up yoga, spend time with someone you love, try to avoid real life drama, do anything relaxing that can help bring you centered. Also, try to pay attention to how dramatic events affect you, which ones and how. Most of us are much more affected by the dramatic events in our real lives than in the media, but maybe watching a suspenseful movie before bed isn’t the best idea if they generally give you nightmares and poor sleep quality.

What started off this morning as a good laugh (with the seriousness we deal with every day we are always looking for a good laugh), a real topic was brought up. Post Dramatic Stress Disorder may not be a real disorder, but the effects of being dramatized are. The less drama (real or fictional) we have in our lives, the healthier we will be both mentally and physically.

Popular Psychology

TRAINING OFFICERS TO DEAL WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on TRAINING OFFICERS TO DEAL WITH MENTAL ILLNESS

istock_000005236471largeThe other day my girlfriend was looking at a video on Facebook. I wasn’t looking at the video, but what I heard was a lot of shouting and then finally multiple gunshots. It was obviously a violent video and I didn’t want to see it.

The next day I saw that she had shared the video on her page which to me meant that whatever the video was about, she felt either passionate about it or angered by it so I decided to watch it. What I saw was an unarmed man, surrounded by five overly aggressive, untrained police officers who end up shooting him.

You can find the video at the end of this post. Warning, some my find it graphic and hard to watch.

During my research for this post, Los Angeles police leaders insist that all of the officers involved in this altercation had some training on dealing with the mentally ill, with some having as little as 11 hours of training. They went as far as they say that the skills learned in the training were used during this encounter, which in some part may be true, but when I see officers taking violent punches at a person and being overly aggressive with little control or coordination, it’s hard for me to see that any crisis intervention techniques were appropriately used.

For over 4 years I worked in a psychiatric hospital where every day we had to deal with at least one hostile patient, some who had just been released from jail and brought directly to our facility. These patients in particular were aggressive and violent and often needed to be restrained for their safety and the safety of others. We often had to “take down” these patients with as little as three staff members actually going hands on. Patients very rarely got hurt. Matter of fact I can’t even think of one incident I was involved in where a patient got hurt. Staff rarely got hurt as well and when they did it was generally superficial scratches. No one ever died. Ever. No patient, no staff member.

Unlike in this video we weren’t armed with more than latex gloves and training in non-violent crisis intervention training. We practiced what is sometimes called “therapeutic hands on” actions, which means that when we did have to put our hands on a patient we did so in a way to quickly gain control of them without trying to hurt them, no matter how violent they are responding to us, unlike in the video where you will see at least one officer swinging away at the inmate as if he were in a mixed martial arts fight.

The officer who says the suspect was reaching for his gun and the officer who appears to have been the most involved with the suspect was the newest officer on the scene with the least amount of training in dealing with mentally ill people.

I’m not saying that all police officers are this way, but many officers when dealing with individuals are overly aggressive and don’t have the patience it takes to appropriately deal with mentally ill people. This is why we see so many unarmed individuals getting killed by police; over aggression and lack of patients. I know their job is dangerous and tough and often times they can’t wait to see what happens before putting themselves in danger.

However, when you have a job where it’s pretty much excepted if you kill someone it’s okay, it makes having to be patient and cautious a lot less likely. Working in the psychiatric hospital, if we killed a patient while trying to restrain him we would most likely get fired, loss our licenses and get sued by the family. Too many officers operate with impunity.

Where I live we are lucky to have Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) officers who have went through specialized training to deal with mentally ill individuals. Whenever I had to call law enforcement for someone I believed was mental ill I always requested a CIT officers for that individuals safety. CIT officers are more likely to approach mentally ill individuals calmly and take them to the mental hospital instead of jail. They generally don’t over-react or act aggressively. Unfortunately, not all police and sheriff’s departments have CIT officers or good training programs.

What I am advocating here is for more training like the training done by the Clark County Sheriffs Department.

With the appropriate training on how to calm a person down, even when restraining them, the number of unarmed killings by law enforcement officers would go down drastically, mentally ill or not.

Popular Psychology

Beyond Punishment: Taking An Inside Look At Child Abuse

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC2 Comments on Beyond Punishment: Taking An Inside Look At Child Abuse

When I first saw this video yesterday it broke my heart. What I saw was not only in my eyes child abuse, but an angry man who probably not only beats his children like they were strangers on the street, but also probably abuses the women in his life. On top of that, what I saw was a culture where this type of physical abuse is not only excepted, but encouraged, hence the person video taping it and most likely the other people in the house who never intervened.

From my understandings, this father was “punishing” his thirteen-year-old daughter for being “rude”, “disrespectful” and talking to grown men. Obviously these are things that no parent would want from their child, but beating a child purposely with a belt on her face is not discipline. I can almost guarantee that this is not the first time that she has been beaten and yet her inappropriate, most likely defiant behavior hasn’t stopped.

Chances are that this parent has no real idea of how to be a parent or raise a child, if he did, there would have never been a need for him to discipline her physically because she would have been raised, taught, guided and disciplined more appropriately over the last thirteen years. If this father had any real ideal of how to raise a child in a loving way, he would have punished her in a way that wasn’t to hurt her necessarily, but to teach her right from wrong.

Most parents punish their children from a place of love. I didn’t see any love for this child during this beating. What I saw is a father who is psychologically disconnected in so many ways.

From a psychological point of view we have a young lady who is acting out for one reason or another and physical punishment isn’t going to stop that. She is acting out and only talking and trying to understand why she is acting out is going to stop that.

Secondly, we have a man in a wheelchair who probably already feels emasculated if not just outright angry at the world for whatever condition put him in a wheelchair and therefore is always a ticking time bomb. He may have been a mean and angry man before whatever put him in a wheelchair, but many people become more angry when they are injured, in pain or handicapped.

Read my article on physical punishment to understand some of the ways it can affect a child’s mental and emotional health. From my experience in working with children who have gotten punished like this, they rarely learn to stop the undesired behavior, but learn how to be more sneaky. The sad part is, a valuable lesson this girl may have learned from this is one many girls who grow up in abusive homes learn which is:

  1. If a man really loves me he will hit me to show it
  2. It’s okay if a man puts his hands on me, it’s all part of being in a relationship
  3. I need a man who knows how to “handle me” and put me back in my place when I step out of line

To most of us those three responses may seem trivial, but I’ve worked with enough abused girls and young girls who ended up in abusive relationships to learn that many of them came from abusive homes where either they themselves were abused or where they witnessed abuse in their homes. They grew up thinking that it was not only okay, but the norm. Some even felt like it was a vital part of being in love because that is what they grew up seeing and thinking love is: Mom and dad fight, but they love each other and I see that. OR, mom fights with her boyfriend and then they go make love afterwards.

One young lady in particular saw her dad not only beat her mom, but he also beat her. Every relationship she got into as a teen and young adult was an abusive one. She didn’t understand it, but she unconsciously would seek out abusive men. She had two kids, each from an abusive man and the last time I met with her in counseling, she was with yet another abusive man. She couldn’t break the cycle. Her young boy and young girl are going to grow up witnessing and maybe even experiencing abuse.

This father in the video, in an attempt to raise a virtuous young lady may be in fact creating a woman who will go through a lifetime of troubled and abusive relationships because of the abuse she receives from her father.

No doubt some people may look at this video and see nothing wrong with the way he is disciplining his daughter and believe that people should mind their own business, but I personally hope that child protective services sees this video and rescues this child while the law punishes this “man”.  I wrote this post not only because I am passionate about protecting children from abuse, but also in hopes of increasing the exposure of this video so that maybe someone will recognize the child and the father and contact child protective services in whatever city, state this took place in. It’s a new video so chances are something can be done relatively soon.

***Warning, the video may be hard for most people to watch.***