I’m starting to write a new book and create a new course on what I’ve coined “The Re-Uncovery Approach.” Here is the story of how I came to The Re-Uncovery Journey.
What is Re-Uncovery:
Re-Uncovery:
A [self-directed] intentional meaningfulness approach to uncover the information and experiences from previous extraordinary states plus daily life to facilitate learning, understanding, and meaning making to catalyze adaptation to future extraordinary states through harvesting, practicing and embodying one’s human potential.
The Discovery of Re-Uncovery:
How did I uncover Re-Uncovery? In 2016, I was re-hospitalized for the third time in 14 months. The two previous times, I had the same psychiatrist who gave me a bit of an antipsychotic for the ten days I was in the hospital. Shortly after being discharged, I stopped taking the antipsychotic, as was the intention, and I continued taking the usual medications I did.
The third re-hospitalization was different—different psychiatrist, different approach—and she did not agree with me. She immediately started tapering me up to a high dose antipsychotic maintenance treatment regime, with the intention of continuance long after I was to be discharged. The problem was, immediately after starting on the antipsychotics, the akathisia I got from being on a different high dose antipsychotic during my first hospitalization in 2011 started to return. Akathisia is an agitation, an inability to remain still.
Back in 2011, it was so painful, giving me the feeling that I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. I had to resist the urge to walk to the nearest bridge, like a programmed robot on autopilot-self-destruct. From past experience I could project forward like a prophet and see that I’d end up in a long term care facility where I didn’t administer my own medication. I’d be a prisoner trapped in a numb, excruciating abyss I may never crawl out, of as pills or injections coercively cross my epidermal boundary. I was terrified.
Adding fuel to being crushed with fire, the psychiatrist refused to listen to my self reported health history, namely, that high dose antipsychotics don’t work for me—they work against me. Not only that, she refused my request to switch me to the psychiatrist who treated me the prior two times, and also refused to consult with her about the best treatment for me, other than long term antipsychotic maintenance treatment.
After what felt like an eternity, but according to my records was only a few days, I found a loophole. From the blur-excuse for memory, I recall coming up with a plan with a psych nurse. At the time, I happened to be on a few committees in the health authority, with various clinicians of all kinds, as a person with lived experience. In a lucky break that saved my life of potential untold suffering, the current psychiatrist I had was on a steering committee that I was to. I declared that it was a conflict of interest, and she quickly transferred me to the psychiatrist I wished.
I frantically reminded my new-old psychiatrist how she helped me before, and that the high dose antipsychotics were making me feel dangerously awful. She listened and agreed, considering her prior knowledge, to taper me down, as I was already over half way to the high dose.
Rather than seven or ten days in the psych ward, I was in there thirty one days. Though it was completely unnecessary, it could have been much worse. And it is much worse for so many people who are unable to find a loophole when they know a medication won’t be helpful from past experience [or instantaneously]. But from what I know, in nearly all cases, the psych ward is a blank slate.
For a person becoming a patient, there are no past health files on site, at a psych ward. Few psych ward doctors, where I am, ever consult the persons community psychiatrist of general practitioner. And the cherry on the top is, they don’t listen to the patients themselves, and they don’t have to. It’s kind of like saying you’re allergic to peanuts and getting a peanut butter sandwich for lunch every day.
I don’t know how many people survive this fork in road—where a paternalistic psychiatrist with a one-size-fits-all treadmill approach—to turn humans into chronic mental patients on seriously high doses of antipsychotics and polypharmacy through a “serious and persistent mental illness diagnosis” label. Sadly, I don’t think many do.
I avoided becoming a zombie trapped in my own skin, like Neo dodged that bullet in The Matrix. I know how lucky I am. Given that the psych ward is a silo, a roll of the pills, I didn’t want to take the chance and play that risky game. I set up my representation agreement and advanced directive, or Ulysses agreement, to make me feel safe about a possible next time, only to let the fact that it need not be heeded by the psych ward shrink sink in—I sunk.
I knew that I didn’t want to go back to the psych ward ever. I didn’t think I’d even call for that kind of help like I did before. I was too afraid. I was afraid I’d leave it too long before calling for help, and be too dissociated and psychotic to stop myself from harming myself or ending my life. My bipolar biorhythm—or cycle from crisis, through depression, to feeling fine, to manic, to psychosis, and back to crisis—was about six to eight months. I didn’t have that long. I had no idea what to do. I had to figure out how to save my own life before I tried to end it.
The mental health system encouragingly says people with serious and persistent mental illnesses can recover, and this is called “The Recovery Movement.” Since I was diagnosed in 2011, I had five happy years in the recovery movement. I got involved with everything I could, deciding to take the journey through the diagnosis, instead of resisting it, flushing the pills and hopping on a train to California, like part of me wanted to.
My 2016 hospitalization experience showed me that even if I, or anyone else for that matter, can have an excellent “recovery journey,” it could stomped out by one paternalistic psychiatrist. Despite all the community, resources, and support I was back at square zero. No amount of recovery could make me safe from paternalistic psychiatrists. Up to that point, I considered my journey a fairy tale experience relative to the horror stories of some of my peers, not to mention so many others from the institutionalization, ice pick lobotomy, and insulin coma days.
Escaping a complete chemical lobotomy, I had my freedom, my time, my brain, my agency, and my desire to live [for now]. As the last of the high dose antipsychotic trickled out of my system, I did something out of desperation, something only a crazy person would do.
I started talking to myself.
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