The Crash

In the fall of 1999 I had my first of two major spiritual/emotional life crises that some term madness.  I was 26.  I had just moved 3,000 miles to a graduate school in Massachusetts from my familiar and somewhat normal life in Oregon.The stress of this new experience was too much for me.  Within one week later, after little sleep and several wonderful, strange, and frightening experiences, I had totally lost grips with physical reality.
I eventually convinced myself that my car could fly and slammed into the back of a semi-truck while accelerating to 80 mph (preparing for takeoff) on a small country road.  I immediately blacked out.

Hello Psychiatry!

Miraculously I survived, but two days later, after the doctors heard about how I had been behaving from my mother, I was sent directly to the psychiatric ward of UMass Medical Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts.  I was terrified.  Visions of electroshock, lobotomy, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest flashed before me.

Of course, these days the treatment of choice is psychiatric drugs.  In the psychiatric ward we were lined up like cattle and I was coerced to take drugs I never wanted to take.
I was told I had bipolar disorder and was given the party line that I would need to be on these “medications” for the rest of my life.  Never a word about the “side effects,” and of course I wasn’t given informed consent.  After all, these drugs were supposed to be like insulin for diabetes, at least that’s what they told me.  I left the hospital on September 28, 1999 with a prescription for 2,000 mg of Depakote and 1.5 mg of Risperdal.  I also left determined to prove them wrong on all counts.
Shortly after my release, I got severely nauseas about 3 times per week and vomited uncontrollably.  At first I thought it was a reaction to the food I was eating, bad pizza or something.  One day I was talking to my psychiatrist, Dr. Attiullah, over the phone and mentioned my nausea.  She casually commented, “Oh, that’s a side effect from the medication.”   Hmmm.  Wouldn’t that have been nice to know a little earlier!?

In Search of Support

After seeing four psychiatrists during the course of a month, the second I walked into Dr. Ascher’s cozy University of Massachusetts office, he recognized that I was severely “overmedicated.”  Dr. Ascher reduced my dosage of Risperdal by .5 mg immediately, and then had me reduce by .5 mg every week.  Within two weeks, he helped me to get completely off the Risperdal without any “relapse” or withdrawal difficulties whatsoever.
Soon, however, I would be twenty-five pounds overweight due to the Depakote.  Always an athlete, the extra weight left me feeling sluggish, gross, and unattractive.  Subconsciously I realized the Depakote (or “Depacrap” is more like it) was turning me into a chronic mental patient.  Something had to be done.
Even while in a severely drugged state, I still had insight into how important having support would be in my withdrawal journey.  Even though I wanted desperately to get off of Depakote, somehow I knew that it would be extremely difficult to withdraw alone, without any support.  Everybody in my family trusted the doctors at this point.  I can see now that they cared about me and were afraid of losing me.  But I think they also feared I was “mentally ill” and wanted me to be “medicated.”

Steep Learning Curve, Gradual Withdrawal

During the course of a graduate school independent study, I took the opportunity to meet and interview people who had recovered from periods of extreme emotional distress and were now living psychiatric drug free.  I called David Oaks, the Director of Support Coalition International (SCI, now MindFreedom).  David affirmed how I was feeling and sent me a copy of the Dendron Journal (now the MindFreedom Journal).  Dendron illustrated for me that there were people who totally rejected biopsychiatry, were living psychiatric drug free, “symptom” free, and who were now organizing for social justice.  I finally felt affirmed for feeling extremely pissed off at how I had been treated!
By the end of the semester, after gradually weaning off Depakote, I had found the confidence to stop taking the drug completely.  My physical injuries had finally healed, it was spring, and I didn’t want anything holding me back.  To my dismay, Dr. Ascher, who had been so supportive, said he couldn’t recommend that I go completely off.  Something about liability or something.  He would still see me if I went off, but it would be totally my decision.  By now I was only on 250 mg and I felt I was ready.
In June, I returned home to Portland, Oregon for the summer.  I brought my pills just in case I felt I needed them.  I didn’t.  It had taken 9 months, but I was finally rid of the Depakote.  I felt free.

A Second Chance at Life

Fully healed, I was striving academically, athletically, and socially.  It was in graduate school in the fall that I met Kristin, my future wife.
In March, David Oaks invited me to attend Support Coalition’s second Highlander strategy conference in Tennessee.  We met in the same room where Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks organized many of their great civil rights campaigns.  I was in awe of the center and especially of all the veterans of the (ex-)user/survivor movement, which included Gabor Gambos, the then chair of the European Network of (ex-)Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (ENUSP) and Dr. Loren Mosher, who directed the successful and well researched alternative to hospitalization in the 1970s known as Soteria.  I mostly just listened.
That summer, I interned for David Oaks at Support Coalition International directing their oral history project (www.mindfreedom.org/histories.shtml).  I interviewed over 50 psychiatric survivors about their experiences with extreme emotional states, psychiatric abuse, and recovery.  With every interview, I felt more affirmation for my experiences.
I found people who had gone through much more horrific experiences than me, yet were not only surviving, but thriving.  I interviewed people like Judi Chamberlin, author of On Our Own.  I sat in Leonard Roy Frank’s book filled San Francisco apartment as he patiently explained to me how he survived over 50 electroshock and insulin coma treatments in the 1960s to become one of the fathers of the modern day   (ex-)user/survivor movement.  I realized then that I was extremely lucky to have gotten rid of psychiatry so quickly.
Earlier that spring, David Oaks introduced me to Will Hall, a psychiatric survivor who had recently moved to Massachusetts.  That summer I found out that we received a small grant to start a group called Psychiatry Alternatives Support Group.  Little did we know at the time that this small group would turn into the now internationally respected Freedom Center (www.freedom-center.org).
With each new experience I was growing more confident.  Overconfident even.  I felt invincible.  There was no way that what happened two years ago could happen again.  I felt great pride that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

Destined for a Second Date with Psychiatry?

After completing graduate school I decided to work in the mental health field to see if it really was as bad as all of these people had been telling me.  My curiosity has sometimes been a problem for me, dating back to the time when I was 5 years old and stepped on a nail to see what it felt like.  It hurts.  And then you get a shot in your butt.  I got a job as the director of a group home for people with “severe and persistent mental illness” with eerily similar results.
I found out that the mental health system really is as bad as it is cracked up to be.  I found eight disempowered, heartbroken souls waiting for their weekly Prolixin injections surrounded by six well-meaning, but equally apathetic T.V. watching and solitaire playing staff.  And I was in charge!
Completely stressed out by all of this, I stayed up nights planning.  Within one week my thoughts and notes became more and more bizarre and desperate.  This time I recognized what was happening to me and I was terrified.  The fear just made it worse.
I knew I was losing it but I would rather die than go back to the hospital.  I was so desperate at this point that I even tried taking some Depakote and Risperdal that I had saved in the medicine cabinet.  Nothing helped.
Saturday morning, after another intense, sleepless night, I agreed to go to a hospital.
This time my experience was much better, mostly due to the wonderful support network I had developed over the past two and a half years.  Kristin proved to be the best advocate in the world.  She was with me the entire time and came to the hospital armed with my own personal Support Coalition oral history freshly printed.
I can’t overemphasize how important it is to have a strong support network that truly advocates for what you want.  My brother Abe was still living in the area at the time and he came to the hospital as well.  So I was surrounded by Kristin, my brother Abe and Kristin’s mother.  Their presence was crucial, perhaps life saving.  In fact, every time that Kristin left my side, I panicked and got extremely agitated.
I hadn’t slept for days.  Probably because of the excellent advocacy that Kristin and Abe provided for me, the hospital staff refused to give me any drugs against my will, something I am very grateful for.  Eventually though, my brother and his beard convinced me that it might be in my best interest to take some sleeping pills, as I obviously needed some rest.  Five minutes after swallowing the little white tablets, I fell into a deep sleep.
Thanks to the excellent advocacy of Kristin and my family, this time I was treated very well by the hospital staff.  However, the well meaning hospital staff was still very much entrenched in the medical model and soon I was prescribed a nice cocktail of Zyprexa, Depakote, and Klonopin.  After a week of attending their groups and swallowing their pills like a good boy, I was released back to the big bad world.

Withdrawal: Take Two

I was raw.  For a few weeks, little things would set me off.  A dropped phone call would cause flashbacks of my altered experiences, causing terrifying panic attacks.
Amazingly, in this state I interviewed for a job Cheryl Stevens recommended me for because of my work co-founding the Freedom Center.  It was a job helping (ex)-users/survivors of psychiatry to pursue their personal and small business dreams at the Western Massachusetts Training Consortium (The Consortium).  It is the vocation I still enjoy to this day.
The worst attack came when I went to visit Dr. Ascher again.  The shame I felt was devastating.  This wasn’t supposed to happen again.  Not to me.  Not after all I had been through.  Kristin was driving me to the appointment and it was all coming back to me at once.  The car crash.  The car ride to Kristin’s parents when I lost it a couple weeks ago.  It all hit me at once and I felt like my heart would literally explode.  Terror invaded every cell.  I felt myself being pulled into the other world again.
But besides the all encompassing shame I felt, the appointment with Dr. Ascher went alright.  At least he didn’t have me locked up again.  And he did give me some insightful advice about the importance of sleep.  But even though he is understanding and better than most psychiatrists, he is still a psychiatrist.  In his mind, my “relapse” gave him good reason to stick with the psychiatric drugs.  He would not be such a strong supporter of my wish to withdraw this time around.
I decided to withdraw on my own this time.  I felt the longer I stayed on Zyprexa, Depakote, and Klonopin, the more difficult it would be to withdraw.  I was on average doses of Zyprexa and Depakote.  I cold turkeyed the Zyprexa and Depakote, but because I was still feeling a little shaky, I kept them for emergency use only.  I absolutely hated the Depakote so I figured it would have to be a warm day in a New England winter before I took that.  So as much as I also hated Zyprexa, after my next bad panic attack a few days later, I was so desperate for some kind of relief that I took some Zyprexa.  That was the last time I took either Zyprexa or Depakote.
For awhile I took Klonopin two or three nights per week to help me with sleep.  I was terribly paranoid about getting my sleep after my recent altered state where I convinced myself that I did not need sleep.  The connection between regular sleep and sanity was now very clear to me.  I was having such difficulty with sleep that I feared I would never be able to wean myself from the Klonopin.  And about once a week as I was falling asleep, I had mini-panic attacks which felt like heart attacks.
I noticed that when I took Klonopin for sleep I would have difficulty falling asleep the following night.  I would later learn that this is a common “rebound effect” of the drug.  This may be part of the reason that benzodiazepines are so addictive, especially if you are using them for sleep (besides being one of the few “feel good” psychiatric drugs).  I knew if I kept using them regularly, I would need more and more to achieve the same effect.
It was crucial that I reduced my dependence on Klonopin.  I only resorted to Klonopin when I felt I had exhausted all other options.  I experimented with Valerian, which worked when my insomnia was mild.  I feared that my psyche would not be able to handle even one night of minimal sleep.  Sometimes just having one glass of beer would be enough to settle my nerves enough to sleep through the night.  However, I also noticed a rebound effect with alcohol.
As my body and mind healed, I was able to reduce my use of Klonopin to once a week, then once every week and a half, then once every two weeks.  By the time Kristin and I moved 60 miles east to her hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts in May of 2002, I was taking Klonopin about once very three weeks.  The three months since my hospitalization in February felt like a year, but with every day I grew stronger.
Of course it helped that I enjoyed what I did during the day.  My sense of purpose remained.  I loved my new paid work at The Consortium, as well as my volunteer gig with the Freedom Center.  The fact that I lived 60 miles away from these vocations gave me a healthy separation from what I knew would be my life’s work.  I reserved weekends just for myself and Kristin, a policy I still employ today.
Still, I felt tremendous shame as a result of my “relapse.”  I had much respect for Rene Andersen, my new boss and mentor at The Consortium.  Yet it would be two years before I told her that I was in the hospital just a week before I started working there.  She couldn’t believe it.  I don’t think I’ve ever told David Oaks what happened the second time.  When facing the outside world I basically pretended my second hospitalization had never happened.
Internally, I was hyper-conscious of what had happened.  Never again would I have the attitude that this couldn’t happen again.  I now realized that if I encountered enough stress, combined with lack of sleep, that an altered state would likely occur.  This realization left me feeling quite vulnerable.
Reading Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America solidified my initial feeling that psychiatric drugs were not the way to go, at least for me.  Here was very Western medicine, very “scientific” data that suggested that recovery rates were actually higher for people who never went on psychiatric drugs in the first place.  The data also provided hope for people who had been on psychiatric drugs, like me, but wanted to try to live without them.  Part of my wellness or preventative maintenance was to avoid psychiatric drugs if at all possible.  I felt that taking these substances would increase the likelihood of future problems.
I had met several people through Support Coalition who had lived for years successfully without psychiatric drugs.  Ironically, because of the intense shame I felt, I did not reach out to these people at this difficult time for encouragement.  But just knowing these people existed helped immensely.  I knew it was possible, even probable, to live a healthy life without psychiatric drugs.
I started going regularly to the Freedom Center support meetings.  The more I went, the more I got out of them.  I found the peer support model exponentially more helpful than the top down doctor-patient model.  I also felt a sense of pride that I helped to start this group.  Typically there were 8 to 20 people who came to our weekly group.  We rotated the facilitation amongst the more experienced group members.  It felt so refreshing to be able to talk about whatever was on my mind and not be judged.
Not only did I find support for my wish to live psychiatric drug free at these groups, but I have had some of the deepest intellectual and spiritual conversations in this circle of so-called misfits.  I have also made some of my best friends there, including Will Hall.
In September of 2002, I took Klonopin for the last time.  I had the support of Kristin, the wonderful folks at the Freedom Center, and this time, my family as well.  Their support made the transition off the drugs much easier.  The only person I knew who did not support my decision was my psychiatrist, Dr. Ascher.  Not that it mattered much.  I had fired him months ago.

Finding Intimacy

Without a doubt, the most important ingredient to my successful recovery is my life-affirming love with Kristin.  She was there for me through it all, even when I doubted her loyalty.  She stayed by my side when she didn’t know if I would ever come back.  And Kristin trusted and still trusts my judgment about the medications.

Exercising Life

Another key to my wellness or enthusiasm for life (a term I like better) is that I have interests I pursue outside of work.  I have a strong love for sports and competition.  I play in basketball leagues every year.  Basketball is awesome because it keeps me in shape during the long New England winters.  There are many times during the course of the year where I get stressed out from work.  When I feel the tension starting to build and recognize that I’m having more difficulty with sleep, I will go play basketball or go for a long run.  Getting a good sweat in breaks up the tension.  Almost immediately after I work out I am much more relaxed and my sleep patterns return to normal.  For me, I find exercise an excellent alternative to psychiatric drugs.
The sport I am most passionate about right now is golf.  To play good golf, your mind and body have to work in perfect harmony.  In this way, much like yoga or Tai Chi, golf can be an excellent grounding exercise.

A Real Future

Kristin and I were married on June 12th, 2004.  In a country where I once could have been forcibly sterilized and institutionalized for years, and where people labeled with “mental illness” are still brutalized on a daily basis, I now have a real future.
I have a few final reflections.
I see my so-called psychotic breaks as perfectly normal reactions to extreme stress.  People cope with difficult situations in different ways.  Some turn to drugs, some exercise for six hours per day, some watch television excessively, some obsess about sex, some get angry, some do yoga, some meditate, and some medicate.  There are any number of ways that people cope.  Twice in my life I have coped with what I experienced as overwhelming situations by retreating so far within myself that I created my own imaginary, yet very real world.  I see madness as a coping strategy no less valid or human than any of the others.  The difference to me is that I lost conscious control, and I believe a part of wellness is making fully aware, conscious life choices, even in the most difficult of circumstances.  At present, I consciously choose exercise, yoga, acupuncture, golf, sleep, friendship, love, and meaningful work.
Still, life is not always easy.  There are times when I overextend myself.  If I feel myself getting extremely stressed out, and I feel I have exhausted all other alternatives, I am not averse to taking an over-the-counter sleeping medication to make sure I avoid problems.  This has happened maybe once in the past year.  Overall, if drugs were used as a last resort, temporary tool, I think our society would be a lot better off.