Episode 22
Soteria Part 2 With Steven Morgan
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HOPE on the Other Side Episode 22 Program Notes:
About Steven Morgan:
Currently serving as Operations Manager at Intentional Peer Support, Steven hails from the state of Georgia. He, along with one sister, was raised by his own parents. He self-identifies as a “survivor” of psychiatric and mental health services in his early 20’s. He is an artist at heart. He became interested in mental health peer advocacy and then the Soteria house work of Dr Loren Mosher. He was the original project developer for the Soteria house facility in the state of Vermont.
The Episode:
To begin with part 1 of the Soteria project, the HOPE podcast episode #16, was mentioned. Dr Mosher’s work in Palo Alto and San Jose, California was reviewed briefly. Rapport building, caring and an understanding stance by staff were key factors to the program’s success.
Mr. Morgan reviewed his own lived experience, diagnosed with chronic mental illness, which began over 10 years ago in his early 20s. He characterized these as tumultuous and difficult years, including several psychiatric hospitalizations. He gave up on his life for a while. Through a series of meetings and relationships he began to leave traditional mental health services by his late 20’s.
His quest was largely philosophical, restoring meaning in his life through meeting others in groups of mental health consumers, psychiatric survivors, and ex-patients. He came to a new understanding and relationship to his experiences. Some of these people had learned to live their lives well, and transform the difficult experiences into having some positive existential meaning. These relationships helped his to restore his sense of belonging to “the planet,” and belonging to humanity. There was a process of “re-labeling” of the experiences formerly diagnosed as pathological.
With his own growth, Steven began to question the limited number of avenues for those experiencing these difficult experiences to achieve a good and meaningful life. He then got inspired & passionate to become a peer and psychiatric patient advocate. A regular meditation practice was part of his life as he left Georgia and moved to work in Vermont in “peer support” as part of a mental health agency.
The small town nature of the population of Vermont made it relatively easy for Steven to get politically involved. He networked effectively in Vermont, and expressed the importance of getting to know neighbors and local residents. There he got to know a wide range of parents of a loved one living with new onset psychosis and schizophrenia.
Steven encountered an equally wide range of attitudes in the parents. These ranged from adherence to the currently taught medical model of psychosis at pathological and the need for maintenance medications to another stance of seeing other forms of treatment. Some of the other parents he encountered held the seemingly bizarre and unknowable experiences presented by their teenage or young adult child as needing attention, yet they wanted non-traditional treatments. For most parents there is an emotional shock and trauma. Steven noted that it is hard to find other types of treatment options.
Next, we talked about the cultural aspect of mental illness. The traumatic and unsettling nature of the experiences of psychosis, and behaviors even ranging to the extreme case of suicide generate a sense of compassion in us. The search for a cultural context to accept, normalize, and validate the experiences of psychosis and schizophrenia is our common quest. Some practitioners advocate affirming the emotional reactions to their real experiences / thoughts/ deductions / perceptions while as the same time falling quietly short of completely validating the hallucination or delusion as real for all people. We touched upon Sartre’s existentialism.
Steven then gave his prescription for the path to normalize and accept psychosis and unusual mental experiences and phenomena. In order to continue the process of cultural change one may listen to those people with lived experiences (which are clinically considered to be signs of mental illness). Exploring groups and organizations such as the Hearing Voices Network, and peer respite houses can help. Science and psychology are providing new models of the human brain, mind and consciousness. Pragmatically the goal is to provide a narrative context to help the person with psychosis and the parents to integrate and to move through to a meaningful balanced life. Steven notes that the media in America focuses almost exclusively on mainstream psychiatrists and mental health providers to discuss schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Through advocacy efforts organizations are changing to add a spectrum of perspectives on this issue. These groups include NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association.
To achieve positive change Steven advised us to think about and to ask the big questions, and to seek the support of other people. Be open minded and open hearted, accept new and caring ways of living with change in the family system to have a better life.
Links
Intentional Peer Support
https://www.intentionalpeersupport.org/
You are encouraged to sign up and receive Dr Ken’s pdf document which explains psychosis at
Hearing Voices Network
