I haven't made a video in about a week or so because I've been really busy with work but then what happens as the amount of stuff I write that I want to talk to myself about really piles up so I have a bunch to catch up on and also i'm probably going to start with what i've seen most recently and then work backwards i'm also going to try to start standing up because i am spending quite a lot of time doing this so it's better to stand as sitting is one of the leading causes of death even when i was editing my last videos i was walking in the park while editing and it probably makes me look like one of those people that just has their face in their phone but at least I'm among the trees I'm sort of working but among the trees and and also i need to keep the videos a bit shorter i noticed if they're about 10 minutes shorter they upload a lot faster and also if they go to the cloud before i edit them they should be easier to get out of the cloud if i don't make such long videos but i just keep talking and talking and talking and the point of my videos is there for myself really their self dialogue I don't have anyone to come and do open dialogue with me so it's just self dialogue and it's mainly for the purpose of unfolding context and making sense of my experiences and also sharing the insights and the extrapolations that I feel that I see I'm up to 58 videos on the playlist i'm creating and i feel like i barely scratched the surface of what i want to talk to myself about yesterday i went to an event put on by the hearing voices group in my area and i never gone to a group like that before but I had a feeling it would resonate with me to some extent as its voices and visions I've even seen a group called voices visions and extraordinary experiences if a person has visions that sort of implies that there's somewhat of a visionary perhaps and I identify with being a bit of a visionary sometimes what was exciting about the group was that they had two presenters speaking about their experience going to the hearing voices Congress in Paris France and they were two people that work in the mental health system that weren't voice hearers but in their position they work with people that your voices as well as I feel they they also have hearing voices group that they may or may not support that in terms of actually work in they support the group that's why they went to the conference but I was really blown away by their presentation because they gave a summary of four of the speakers that they went to see and everything that they said was related to everything that I've been researching in the last two years and it's more along the lines of the story that I choose to tell myself but I haven't really spoken out about except to myself on these videos for the most part and that was the point of me speaking on these videos so I have someone to talk to about it and give voice to it and not just keep it inside and so I was really pleasantly surprised by the fact that these two people that work in the system were sharing their perspective on what they learned at this conference as if they were somebody with lived experience in that they completely understood for the most part what it was that the presenters were saying what they were trying to illustrate and the things they shared were quite amazing and not surprising him that I didn't already sort of have those realizations myself but to hear people that work in the system who don't have lived experience saying these things plus they're going to be meeting with people this month and or next month and next year and they're going to actually hold a conference in my city regarding stuff related to it and they're kind of saying who should we invite to speak and then so I'm thinking wow this is totally amazing that this kind of conversation is going to start to happen around here and I just found it really interesting that it's sort of the same timing like I made a blog post that said something along the lines of I'm not going to speak about my turn myself in terms of mental illness like bipolar disorder anymore because I it just reinforces it and it's not it anyway and that was the same date that they would have been in Paris and learning about this stuff and then they come back and I went to this event and I was really tired I didn't I wanted to go but I was tired so I but I did go and i was thinking wow this is like life altering that they were going to be sharing with their mental health team and then they're going to be sharing with a larger team of mental health workers in the area soon and then they're going to be putting on this conference and I'm like whoa that is incredible and I almost feel like me talking to myself about this context is almost giving me some kind of like inner strength in a way if you put it that way like inner context it's almost reaffirmed it in my own brain cells by hearing myself say it and then editing the video and hearing myself say it again and then creating new memes and insights based on what I've said and building on that and so I feel like I'm ready to participate in having that conversation in the the D pathologizing aspect and and so was pretty exciting and I I was actually invited to speak at something and then this other lady asked me if I wanted to be interviewed on the radio because I was sharing that yeah I don't really believe in mental illness like if I have a diagnosis of some kind that's my psychiatrist business they go to school to learn that lens and it's a very specialized lens of how to view people and one of the things that saved me was never really believing that in my heart and I'm not saying it doesn't have an element of truth of course it does in the context of society I'm not denying how I might be interpreted by other people but that's not how I interpret myself and that's not how I want to speak about it going forward and even if I experience distress sometimes and that one that could be interpreted as Oh your mental illness is acting up sure if that's the only way they can help me right now then fine but I am also interested in unfolding different contexts and other options for people to understand their experience some people want to understand it in terms of mental illness and that's just fine but and some people probably don't know there's another way to understand it but would be happy to hear about it or if they heard it they would resonate with it and be like yeah that makes more sense to me and with me doing all this talking the reason why I'm doing so much talking and not editing all of it out is because it's not about Oh pick out this piece and then learn it and then use it to inform your life it's no open up one's open up your own brain and start learning for yourself because if I tell you something or somebody tells you something that is not learning so this is me just talking and creating context that if any of it resonates with you that means you already know it and it's not something that I told you it's just something that resonates and then maybe you'll feel it within yourself and you'll see it within yourself and it makes sense within your own experience and that means it's yours this has nothing to do with me and that's part of my feeling is that it is a common experience and it has a lot of common context but that context hasn't been unfolded and with technology and things now we can communicate with each other and start to unfold some of that other context that unfortunately we've just been medicalized up to this point and that can still be a useful paradigm I would take some kind of mind-numbing drug if I got to insightful or got too terrified by the reality that we live in being sensitive and being hyper perceptive is actually a blessing and it's also a bit scary sometimes because one can really read into things and and what's going on behind the scenes and it can can resonate with that fear that that can take one over sometimes I want to talk a little bit about what they talked about at the conference so it's like I felt like I went to the conference in a way or went to part of the conference because they did it really good job of talking about it and so this is like third hand now me talking a little bit about it and it was interesting because now they feel kind of tense because they're working in a paradigm that's so pathologizing they realize based on what they heard at this conference that that is quite detrimental obviously and so they said they're going to remain working in the system even though some people probably would not because they feel like they can Pope make pokes at people from inside the system to hopefully change the system and and that is hopeful and I'm hoping that maybe one day I will be able to pull people in the same way because right now I'm working the system I was peer support but there's no real way for peer support to inform change in the system let alone say the way the system is perceiving people is wrong and so I don't know how long i'll last worked in the system but for now i'm trying she said a lady named Eleanor Langdon said we need to move away from the traditional medical model which belongs in a museum and that diagnosis makes us a passive victim of pathology and implies that we can't really do anything about it because its genetic and it's the brain and if you watch my videos you'll know that I very much think there's something one can be done about it and I also think that there's a way to get in alignment with what the energy is animating us as and it can actually be something that moves us towards what's really real and she also pointed out that a diagnosis is something that somebody else told you about you or somebody else told me about me and yeah somebody told me that oh you have bipolar disorder that's nice that's what you think that's your business I never believed it you know maybe it's five percent true in terms of the amount of time it actually negatively affects me or in terms of implying that there's some kind of disorder I think it's actually moving towards a greater order and getting an alignment with that is important so obviously from my videos I have a lot more to say about it from my own personal experience than what others told me about me in terms of oh you have bipolar disorder one of my thoughts was in terms of being afraid of the voices and things and I don't experience voices at least I haven't but everyone has their own voice in their own head and I'm wondering why we create our own voice in our own head and that's not scary for some reason but if we start to hear a different voice yet most often the things that we think we heard from someone else and then we memorized it and then we turned it into our own voice we recall it in our own voice and we think that's okay and normal but i think that process is just as detrimental and if a voice is created with a different voice than one's own it's like having more than one voice in one's head I've experienced more than one reality so I don't really experience alternate voices but I've experienced alternate realities and more than one happening at the same time and it gets confusing and scary so I was just sort of realizing that it's a similar process perhaps when when one gets confused by multiple realities I think the multiple realities has to do with quantum computation and one can actually exist simultaneously in more than one and it just depends which one the wave function gets collapsed around so if a person was able to go through that quantum state and collapse the wave function around being one's best self and successful and channeling that energy somehow one wouldn't necessarily get channeled into the psych ward and then labeled and that's the collapse of the wave function of the multiple realities and there was a lady Karen Taylor who said she believes in full recovery from psychosis yet she says it's difficult work and you really have to want to put the work in and so she doesn't believe just in having a full life but actually a full recovery which includes coming off medications so it was best quality of life she doesn't believe in best quality of life but full recovery from psychosis she said you have to face bottled emotions and also make the choice to recover she also talked about a people sculpture exercise that sounded interest but it's difficult to explain and there was a lady named Lucy Johnstone and she talks about formulation versus diagnosis so diagnosis is what's wrong with you and formulation is what happened to you and I talked about in previous videos and it sounds a bit similar to formulation how a diagnosis is like the apex but underneath the diagnosis is say a thousand stories or thousand occurrences that the diagnosis says this is your diagnosis so be quiet we don't need to hear any of the other stuff where is the formulation is what happened to you so space to tell one story and the system doesn't have time to listen to our stories and even if they did I'm not sure how helpful it would be if they're just looking at us in terms of pathology they'd have to have a greater context through which to receive it and I think one of the ways would actually be peer support learning some of these new skills of open dialogue because they would have a tendency to be more understanding than people with clinical training she also mentioned that somebody said it's important to have a dialogue with the psychological underpinnings of the voices well I'm having a dialogue with myself with the psychological underpinnings of manic consciousness and mania and so-called psychosis and she talked about how it's important to retell your story well that's what I'm doing in these videos too so a lot of what they talked about just stuff that I've been doing and talking about in these videos so was exciting the exciting part for me was that somebody in the system saw it too and then something that they were really blown away by was hearing will halt speak about his harm reduction guide to coming off psych meds and I saw that thing a couple years ago and I did attempt to go off medications and it didn't work and and basically there is no proper tapering support and strategies that's why I've looked into things like EMP which is true help or micronutrient support calm and point of return dot-com my thing is point of return or point of balance and and of course we'll halls harm reduction guide and there's not it's not designed in the system that people can come off when they want and a lot of times people try and it's not successful because the tapering strategies used are not slow enough right now i'm only on lithium and it might be the EMP product that will be best to take me off of it at some point not in a rush because i'm working the system i'm living on a noisy ass street and i need to move somewhere more peaceful and maybe have a bit more peaceful life at least while I'm tapering off medication they're watching TV it's nice music in the background but anyway they talked about the system is in the business of putting people on meds and it's designed to help people take meds and the lady that went actually talked to will halt after and said this is kind of radical like I work in the system how would I even present this and he said is it radical to give people a choice in their treatment they talked about a study where there was a group of people that their meds were reduced and a group that they weren't and after two years they checked up on them and the people on the Med reduction did way way better than the people that were on the maintenance dose there was a person there named Ian Kelley and he said that he's not afraid of his madness and Westerners are just really afraid of it and with my videos I've been showing that I'm not afraid of it it can be scary at times but I'm not afraid of it I'm fascinated by it actually they also talked about how a lot of people in psychosis actually have a trauma history at least one-third of psychosis is probably caused by trauma so by medicating the psychosis it's not really addressing the root cause she talked about an open dialogue study that's being done and they're doing a lot of research on it and so far they found that seventy two percent of people that go through open dialogue approach return to work within two years and that's for first break psychosis and that's incredible because a lot of people end up medicalized and say on disability for life after that and it's very difficult to get people back to work and back functioning so I don't know why they're hesitating on that they're like oh we need more result of course they I realized that they liked science in the slow process because in the meantime they can figure out how they're going to make their next buck so while they're waiting ten years for the study they're busy creating the next problem so then whoever is going to continue to profit off people's misery and suffering and they talked about how someone there said something about it's some kind of collusion about child abuse and societal inequalities because it's easier to medicate a personal psychosis than it is to fix child abuse and societal inequalities and I've talked about that a lot how it's not a personal problem it's not an individual brain disease its brain disease with trauma and societal inequalities and I've talked about that quite a bit and she also mentioned that someone there said that anti-stigma campaigns create mini psychiatrist and I feel that is true and that's the same with all this mental health first aid staff it's creating people with the psychiatrist lens looking for symptoms of mental illness and one of the quotes from the event was just keep poking people with these ideas and also gather the healthy voice hearers I would say with my videos gather the healthy maniacs that can embody their mania as well because not everybody that goes through different states of consciousness hears voices that's one experience but there's a whole spectrum and I'm not on the voice hearing spectrum part of the spectrum they talked about the myth of normal and also illness versus extreme states and when I introduced myself at the beginning of the group before we saw any of that information I said I'm on the visions here and extraordinary experiences end of the spectrum so extreme states is one and extraordinary states is another it's all the same somebody mentioned slow psychiatry and the parachute project in Vermont and they were talking about how they felt a little bit like hypocrites and so yet they're going to be working to change the system so I felt like saying to them while you're going to be in recovery from hypocrisy then and somebody mentioned having different parts there versus multiple personalities and I feel like I have different elements of myself as well and that's part of the non consistency thing they also talked about medical colonization how the medical system sort of goes into countries that don't have mainstream medicine they're like oh you want this well yeah you do and sort of put it on the people when they have their own systems so that was the hearing voices group that i went to i think i might want to start a group maybe if I stay here

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