Transformational Stories: Voices for True Healing in Mental Health: Transformational Stories, #3

By Michael A. Susko

These oral histories describe transformative experiences which led persons to become advocates for reform, artists or practitioners in the mental health system. They include psychiatric survivors and professionals, many of whom have been leaders in the movement. These stories show the path to true healing—how, despite fierce resistance, persons found their voice and identity. Pioneered by those who faced wounding experiences, the way to deep healing can be found in these lived stories. We invite you to take a journey which conveys an uncommon psychological wisdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AllrOneofUs Publishing
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393721475

Michael A. Susko

The author, who grew up in northern Alabama and roamed acres of woods beyond his backyard, was also a frequent visitor of New River. He endlessly photographed  the river and the region all its seasons, and here imagines a somewhen. 

Book preview

The ideology, if I have one, may be called the ideology of transformation. That’s the process that not just people who get labeled mentally ill, but everyone will have to go through if we’re going to save ourselves in the environmental and political, economic situation that we now find ourselves.

– Leonard Frank

INTRODUCTION

IT HAS BEEN MANY YEARS since I edited Cry of the Invisible, oral histories of psychiatric survivors, some of which had been homeless. Although these stories showed how endings could cut either way, they all showed spirit and courage in the face of considerable adversity. In this second work, I focused on those who went through psychiatric hospital experiences and became advocates afterwards, showing a path to healing and supporting rights of those going through emotional-transformative experiences.

On the merits of the first book, I met leading advocates and obtained histories for publication. An initial publishing opportunity ran aground and finally some years later, I can present these priceless stories. Fortunately too, I have been able to update many stories. All represent real transformational experiences in which people became healers in a true sense, as well as advocates in the world of mental health. Some stories are from deep in advocacy's movement history, some of whom have passed. A few stories represent the next generation of the advocacy movement and hope for the future. This anthology also includes professionals, who were not necessarily in the psychiatric system, but have questioned the direction of their profession and have become advocates. But no matter what time or generation, or whether former patients or professionals, the stories remain evergreen, with a message and meaning that are timeless.

As I transcribed and edited these stories, I searched for a theme, and what surfaced was finding voice. For whatever experience people went through, it often involved finding their true voice. To this we could add, given the variety of experiences, finding one’s true vision and sense of mission. As one person said, he was having a wonderful spiritual experience, a poetic and visionary experience, while others were saying he was crazy. Despite rejection, these persons showed immense courage to not accept the judgement of authority that that would restrict the meaning of their visions and voices to that of mental illness. Finding their experience rejected, powerful treatments were often forced upon them. Somehow persons found the strength to resist and staying true to their self kept their radical freedom to choose.

In our drug culture today, the weight of authority tells us that experiences of emotional pain and being distraught, are not just ordinary experiences that all humans share and that may well find expression in symbolic or poetic ways. Rather, we’re told that there’s malfunctioning bodies, a chemical chaos, that only drugs can fix. This mythology is money backed, but not truly scientifically backed. If one carefully evaluates studies and also considers conflict of interest and bias, the limitations of evidence becomes acute and obvious.  As former President of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research, I became aware of the shortcomings of scientific research, especially when negative studies are not reported.  Chances are that in time, you will come up with a study that will back your position, especially if your livelihood and gain are involved.   

There are good scientific studies for the success of non-drug treatment, although they are little cited. There is also another type of evidence, that is not typically included in the scientific literature, the actual lived experience of a person. We are all experts in our own experience, and that evidence we cannot deny, unless we cast aside our humanity.

Although the drug industry, like the tobacco industry was, is probably aware of the acute limitations and harm of its methods, it will take help from other quarters to challenge their dominance. It’s not to say that there is no place for palliative relief by any type medicine, which has a lengthy history in treatment for mental health. But to reduce the psychiatric profession to  15 minute checkups for prescription adjustments, which often use problematic and outright harmful drugs, represents a vast historical failure. One day, just like the cause of slavery and the current black lives matter movement, this cause will come to the fro, and people will ask, What happened here?

So what is the answer to people going through a transformational experience on their journey to true selfhood? What is the method offered? It’s perhaps presented here in most detail by John Weir Perry, who worked with Carl Jung and developed a method to heal deep states of emotional transformation. Basically, the formula is to be with people, help contain their experience in a humane, nonviolent way. Go with their experience without psychological jargon, and you will see the person change in front of your eyes, in a matter of days. There is no need for lifelong drug treatments and a life not fully lived. This method truly works and has legitimate studies, which shows that it does. But those who do such projects, and those who have come to their voice in those projects, find their work and stories being tossed in the historical dustbin. As one author said, the wisdom is here to help others, but it’s being rejected.

This book is, in part, an attempt to preserve history, to present both old and current stories of transformation, to show how leaders in the advocacy movement found healing. The ones who discover and help pioneer the healing process are often those who went through the transformational experience themselves. The wisdom they gained is not limited to them, as caring professionals have joined this discovery.

Perhaps I could try to sum all the answers here, but they are really found in each individual and their own experience. Yet if I had sum things in a sentence, healing occurs because of the individual’s persistence to their true self, paired with a measure of love they receive from others.

I will also give a word about the images used on the book’s cover and before each story. Butterflies were known in ancient Greek as the Imago, the true image, the result of transformation. The biologic process is not fully described, even to this day, and remains hidden from easy observation. Sometimes, I have chosen images which are blurred in motion, suggestive of the mystery of becoming.

Last, I invite all to read these amazing stories of human discovery and courage, examples of persons who lived their voice and made a difference in the world.

Michael A. Susko, Editor

December 8, 2019

I laid down on the floor and said I was Jesus Christ. Now I knew in my heart that I wasn’t Jesus Christ. My feet were on the hospital floor. I think it was a cry for something beyond what I was in.   

– Irene Lynch

IRENE LYNCH’S STORY

DURING MY FIRST BREAK, I started chasing blue fire plugs because I had confused in my mind blue and yellow, thinking of the Beatles. I knew I was sick. I had Bob, my husband,  head toward the hospital to the emergency room, while I was seeing all these blue objects, particularly blue fire plugs. We got there late at night. After they had kept me in the emergency room for so long, instead of saying to me, I can see that you’re really tired. Why don’t you go home and sleep, and we’ll come back and try something, they chased me with a needle. The facility was on the third floor. I somehow managed to get out of the ward, get on the elevator and go to the basement. It was dark and empty. I had nowhere to run.

The orderly came down the stairs and grabbed me. He was a very wiry man. They took me up and put me in the Quiet Room. First, they tied me with four point restraint in a chair. I got out of it three times. Then they tied me into the bed. I was given Thorazine, and—I’ve forgotten— another more hideous drug. When I woke in the morning, I was almost catatonic.

Once you are in the system, it’s virtually impossible to get out. That started more than 25 years of hospitalizations, five or six jail terms in municipal jails and county jail, and lots of racing around doing wild things, always running. Even that first hospitalization at Riverview in New Jersey, I laid down spread, like in that diagram by Leonardo de Vinci, and said I was Jesus Christ. Now I knew in my heart that I wasn’t Jesus Christ. My feet were on the floor. I think it was a cry for something beyond what I was in.

That’s the thing that’s not very evident to the professional. We have a language that we develop when we’re in these states that has a meaning. But it’s not the meaning that they perceive. If the professionals would take the time to explore that and say, You know—gee, you thought you were Jesus Christ. That’s kind of a good thing. He is a good person to be.  With that sort of language and caring, I think it would make a big difference.

I was born and raised in Kansas City Missouri, but my problems started when I moved to New Jersey. As a child I was very shy. In our family my sister and I adored our father and kind of ignored our mother. She was a very quiet woman. It turns out that after I had my own children that I learned more about her. She had lost her father when she was three. She and her mother had been farming, and they came into the city with her new husband.

My grandfather was an interesting guy. He ran a pharmacy. He was a photographer and a veteran of the Spanish American war. He used to do blueprint photos in front of his shop and would just lean them up against the outside window. So he died when my mother was three and it devastated both of them. They were both very internal and not able to be the kind of warm people that we know that’s very healing for us.

So I grew up that way, with that kind of shyness, not feeling that I knew who I was, and kind of seeking things. In high school I had been in the senior play with a bit part that got press news. So I went on to college away from home and majored in speech and dramatics, being scared to death of it.

I had a chance to go to Europe, thinking I would never get there. I went home and told my folks about this program. I knew that I probably couldn’t go. I went back and a month later I got a letter from my father. He wrote, Your mother and I never got to go to Europe. We’re going to send you. So that was a really unique for my crowd. It changed my life because it introduced me to the world out there, of Europe and people from the international community. So I came back and graduated.  

Work can really be dumb jobs in the beginning, and one company was very disturbing to me because it wasn’t a very ethical business. I ended up in a stock company, mutual funds. Then I got married, and that was a tremendous trauma in a way because I was leaving home and going to this very busy east coast. I was in a community that was foreign to me. People that my husband worked for, a major corporation, AT & T, were mostly Easterners. Their culture was different. It was scary and very lonely. We were out in a farmhouse because we wanted to get away from the busier parts of New Jersey. That’s where I had my first postpartum depression. I have six children now. With the third child, I had a real postpartum depression.

My husband was scared to death. He never talked about it. He just got frightened. I had a regular medical doctor who prescribed some kind of peppy thing. It reacted on me like I was Woooooo, and that scared my husband more. The doctor said, All right, stop it.

I went on. I had another child. I moved out of the first house into a more settled community, but I was still very lonely. The neighbors were just not my kind of people. We were only there for two and half years, and we got our final home where we finally settled. By that time I had six children. I was terribly overworked because I was a perfectionist. I washed the floors, scrubbed the windows, the whole spiel with not much help.

I went back to teaching and got involved in Montessori schools. All of my kids went to at least one year of Montessori school. I wanted very much to teach Montessori because I always wanted a school of my own. So I went back to public school teaching, and that was tough, rough stuff.      

Along comes Chicago democratic convention and the civil rights movement. I was one to go down to Washington for the Poor People’s march. The last march I went to, and one of the last that they had, was very frightening. It wasn’t too long after that, in 1972, with all this overwork and not having good friends and being lonely, being a peacemaker and an artist in a community that was a very corporate community, I just broke. I couldn’t handle it. I ran, and I ran. That started a series of running away, getting on a plane and going somewhere, or driving somewhere.

There were four hospitalizations in close succession in the early 70s. Then nothing for about eight or ten years because I had a medical doctor who realized that people went through these things. I didn’t even use a psychiatrist. It was this man who was just incredible said, You know, you’ll get through this, and I did. I wasn’t on medication for those eight years.  

Then came the time when I became the artist. I had gone to a community college when I came out. I discovered clay. I discovered painting. At the local community college, I got an associate’s degree. I got encouragement from two wonderful painters who I just saw recently after thirty years. They encouraged me to go to Mason Gross School of the Arts. It was midyear and you don’t go up to a school in midyear. But I took my portfolio, talked to the Director, and he said, I think you can get you in this half year. And I did.

I studied there for about a year and a half or so. There was an intensity of meeting artists, real artists. We’d go into New York City. I had an art community in my own home county. It was overpowering because all this had been in me. I had been an artist all my life, not realizing it.

In 1983 Bob and I went to Europe. My sister had been living with us for four and a half years. She’s an old maid, a fundamentalist Catholic woman, and she thought she could tell us how to run our children. When we were leaving, I left her a note and  said, My daughter’s coming home and she needs her room back. You’re going to have to find yourself somewhere to go. That really threw us apart. She did go.

So we went to Europe. When I came back, the guilt of throwing her out, which was overwhelming, and coming back to all this stuff, led me to end up in the psych ward again. That was a very rough ten years from 1983 to 1993. It was in and out, and in and out, and running to California. You name it. I ran for President twice.

I ran away from home to get away from work. My family said they were supportive, and they were in their way. But I didn’t feel supported, mainly because of the art. Who do you think you are—an artist? I knew I was good. But I didn’t have that family support for it. I also had the experience of those four years, where once a family feels that you’re possibly crazy or mentally ill, they always feel that way, unless they understand it. So the family was sensitive, thinking that I might go off again. And I did. It was always running away from the responsibility of all those kids, and the lack of support in the wonderful field of art.

I met a wonderful artist—a met a lot of wonderful artists—one man who not only knew my art love. He knew my other love, which is education, the Montessori method. So I came home knowing even more validation from outside, but not from inside.

It was right after I came out a hospitalization at a posh private hospital, that the Commissioner of Human Resources held a hearing at the state hospital that was very close to me. Senator Richard Codey had gone undercover and learned the hideous things that were taking place with mental patients. They asked for my testimony, so I decided to do it. I had somehow met this man Bill Butler who had known about the hearing. So I went, and I gave my testimony.

The hearings were located in the State Capital House in Trenton New Jersey. Representative Sheila Oliver ran a marvelous hearing. Afterwards I made an appointment with her assistant in South Orange, and we talked for over an hour and a half about my background and her background. She too was from Missouri and we had all these things in common. Right now the legislature is on terrorism and the economy. They’re not talking about mental health issues at the moment. The aide said she would make sure that I get an appointment with Sheila. I hope to take her some materials and a section of a book that is about alternatives starting with a Belgium psychiatrist from the 1970s.

Through Bill, who had told me about the hearings, I learned about the manic depressive society meetings which were local. Then from that, I learned that there was a group called Collaborative Support Programs, and I thought Wow. I went to one of their meetings and I started volunteering there.

That’s when I went to my first Alternatives conference in 1989. On the way there I got lost. I insisted on driving. I can’t take buses. So I got lost, started getting kind of manic because I was doing this on my own. I was really nutsy when I arrived in South Carolina at the university. In a way I wasn’t.

That was the beginning of meeting all the people that I know in Advocacy: Howie, Sallie and Joe. I worked, I volunteered around that office. I did a lot of side things that I really enjoyed. I went to the physics lab there, the Jazz club. From that time on, I got connected up with Sylvia, Howie, the first madness group. I started to go to various conferences. I went to many government conferences and focus groups. I have a long list of them. I did a lot of testifying, making connections, talking to people until about five or six years ago.  

In 1991 we protested at the psychiatric convention. We realized that there were a bunch of us that were protesting, and David Oaks said, Let’s go over and talk about it. Janet Foner, myself, David Oaks, Linda Morrison met and I don’t even know what we called ourselves at that point, but that was the beginning. We just kept in contact. David took off with it and became the head of Mind Freedom.

One year I went to an Alternatives to Psychiatry conference in Ohio. Every time that I had gone to Alternatives, I’ve kind of gone off. This one, the morning I was to leave, I informed Bob that I had been off the medications for six months. Sylvia Caris and Howie the Harp are the ones who helped me through that. I did it very slowly. My psychiatrist knew it. It was a different one. She said, It looks like you’re doing fine. The morning I was to leave I told Bob, and he went ballistic. I could just see it in his face. I looked at him and said, Bob, it’s no longer my problem. It’s yours. I know now what causes me to get me excited and so forth, and I know how to stop. I just take it easy. I just walk away and do something else.

So I went to the conference and came back perfectly fine. A few days after I got back, I was kind of excited one night, and there was a reason for it. I went up to Bob and said, You know I’m feeling kind of edgy. I’m going to call Alice in the morning. She was my psychiatrist at the time. I went to bed, called her up in the morning. She said, You’re doing fine. It took him years to realize that I had really gotten through it. But I hadn’t quite completely gotten through it because of our husband-wife relationship.

I don’t remember what year it was, in the early 90s, Bob filed for divorce. That was devastating. We had a meeting the psychiatrist in a very posh private psychiatric center, a wonderful space out in the country. They had a swimming pool, a library, a crafts place, and a gym. I had this terrific psychiatrist. I loved her. So Bob walked into the room and sat at the far end of the sofa, and I could just see him seething. I think he had said something about it earlier, so I said, You’re not going to file for divorce?  He said, I already did!

I think I was ready to leave about that time. So we went back to the house. By that time we had separate rooms. He was upstairs. I was downstairs. I thought to myself, You know, this is ridiculous. Then I thought, What am I going to do? So I went to Divorced, Separate Catholics and I found out what was out there. I wasn’t very happy about the people who I met. There were no prospects. So what am I going to do? Go to bars? By that time I was fifty. I started to think about it, and I thought, You know we really did love one another in the beginning.

I had one more hospitalization in 1993, which was a hellish one. I think the psychiatrist who ran it was a fiend. He had a handlebar mustache, and he lorded over us. I was by that time using walkers and was very weak. I told him, I need a wheelchair to help me. He wouldn’t give me one. I was on Respiradol, and he started upping it. I felt like my system was closing down. Because of the insurance change, he only kept me six or seven days.

When I got home, Bob took me to my current psychiatrist, a very intelligent man, not necessarily a CSI type guy, but brilliant, who really knows his stuff. He took one look at me and said, Oh my God. I told him, I cut it cold turkey because I know it’s killing me. He said, OK, I’ll watch you. He gave me a couple samples and said, If you need it, take it. If you don’t, don’t. And I haven’t had anything since.

I don’t think I ever will because Bob now has seen the difference. First of all, we’re talking. We can talk to one another which we never could before in a very honest way. No marriage is ever perfect. Ours will never be perfect because they aren’t perfect. But they work, and they’re worth working for. It scares me that these generations are not understanding that.

They’re not understanding work. They’re not understanding the use of hands and nature.

So we didn’t divorce. We stayed together. He’s here at this conference. He’s a very wonderful helpmate. It’s just that there’s some issues he doesn’t understand about me, the intense part of me. He’s an artist, but he doesn’t do it anymore. He’s a genius in his work, and he doesn’t think he is. I’ve been told that by his co-workers.

Just before I went to that last hospitalization, I took my work into Leo Castelli which at the time was the biggest gallery in New York City, the old gallery on West Broadway. One painting was rolled up on my back, and I had my portfolio. I walked up to the door which you don’t do in New York. I said, I’d like to see Leo, please.

They went back and came back saying, He’ll see one painting. They took me into this cavernous backroom. I sat there, and I sat there. And Leo came back in his white suit. He didn’t look at me, looked down at the painting for a long time. He looked up and said, I think you should see Michael and make an appointment. That validated everything that I had known about myself. I never made that appointment, and it’s a good thing, because I could never produce for a gallery. Galleries want you to produce a series. But it made me know that I was good, and it made my husband begin to realize I was good.

I had a professional photographer do my eighty six paintings, but the one that got me into Leo Castelli’s is a six by eight foot raw canvas, hand rubbed with ochre and sienna mixed together. It’s kind of a dark brown background. First it was gessoed, then it was hand rubbed. Then I took an oil stick, like a big fat crayon, and did the outline of a truncated female from the neck to the top of the thighs. I was facing forward—it was my form—arms outstretched. The left hand was touching the back arm of a male figure, also truncated. It’s called Woman and Man. That was the one I did at Mason Gross for Leon Golub, at a famous gallery in New York. He was a very political artist.

That was in a series of five or six that were connected in my mind. The second one of the series was called Threshold and there’s this flaming foot. Nobody reads it the way I do. That was sort of like going from insanity out into the strange world out there. For John Salminen, another famous New York artist, I did a series of self-portraits. One of those was the only painting that ever showed in a New York gallery.

I’m very focused about my advocacy. The people that I will interview hopefully will be able to actually do either filming or voice recording. I’m sticking with Senior Citizens. You can’t be working for an agency. You can’t be working for the government. So that you have no vested interest. I think that way we have a certain validity and hopefully if we can get—even if ten legislators in the state begin to understand what our experience really is, then maybe there’s hope for them to being able to make better laws.

It’s my feeling that the best way we can make changes is to get to know the legislators, to explain to them the work that the various Consumer, Survivor, Ex-patients organizations are doing. The work that they are doing—how much superior it really is to the places where you’re locked up and controlled. To explain to them that we have this feeling that mental illness, that we’re really sick, that we’re helped by being given a label and told that you’re never going to get well. What helps is to be able to talk things through, to meet other people who’ve been through it, and to get on with your life.

I’ve done everything. I’ve done pottery, weaving, and photography, and movie making – the whole spiel. So that’s my story. I’m very, very happy now. I do acupuncture with traditional Chinese medicine. I practice the mindfulness of Thích Nhat Hanh, which is not a religion but a way of life. I’ve learned to breathe.

(Editor’s Note: Irene Lynch, activist and artist, passed away in 2018. She was interviewed and recorded at the Alternatives Conference in Buffalo NY,  October 29 to November 2, 2008)

I was afraid of the other patients, but then I saw that they were the most normal people there.

- Oryx Cohen

ORYX COHEN’S STORY: PART I

IT WAS WHEN I MOVED out to Massachusetts for graduate school that I first encountered the mental health system. I was in the graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and 26 at the time. I had moved from the West Coast, and I didn’t know anybody there, really. I had some family, but I didn’t know anybody else. So it was a very new, very stressful experience.

Being in graduate school was stressful, and I didn’t know if I could do it. It ended up being too much for me to handle at the time. A bunch of circumstances occurred, which led to me having what can be termed a manic experience. I experienced it as a very spiritual experience, an experience that had a lot of meaning. It was a wonderful experience in a lot of ways, but everybody else around me interpreted it as me going crazy.

I think my experience is pretty similar for a lot of people who go through manic states. All my senses were heightened. The sky was a deeper shade of blue. I could really see everything a lot better, as far as the details in the grass and trees. I could feel how everything was connected with everything else. It was like all of the sudden everything was really real. Everything had such meaning. Meaning came out of everywhere. So for the first time in my life I felt really connected to everything, to the universe.

I am still trying to make out the meaning of it. But what happened is that the ego starts taking over and thinking that maybe I am different or special, when it’s really not necessarily a special or unique thing. I was going through a spiritual awakening of sorts. In other cultures they have a guide, or a shaman who helps you navigate it. If you’re trying to do it by yourself, your ego takes over, and it ends up consuming you and getting really distorted. That’s what I think happens when mania gets out of control.

I ended up spinning out of control and going into the hospital. One of the things I did in the wildest stages of it was that I convinced myself that I could fly or teleport myself in my car. This turned out to be very dangerous. I’m very lucky I’m still alive. I accelerated into the back of a truck going 80 miles per hour, thinking that I would just go right through it. I guess I lifted the truck up off the ground, then spun around, and crashed into a parked car on the other side of the street. Luckily, no one was hurt except for me. I was terribly injured. I broke my collar bone. Like I said, I’m lucky to be here. I was life-flighted to the hospital.

Two days after being in the trauma unit, I was transferred to the psychiatric ward because of the way I had been behaving the previous couple of weeks. I was introduced to our wonderful mental health system. Basically, they diagnosed me as being bipolar, and said I had to be on psych drugs for the rest of my life. They put me on a lot of medications, Risperdal and Depakote. I never wanted to be on the drugs in the first place, but I could tell that I wasn’t going to get out of there unless I cooperated. I did get out in about a week.

The next few months were probably the hardest of my life because I didn’t know what was going on. I thought maybe I was mentally ill, that I really was sick. But in my heart, I knew I wasn’t. It was just having a normal reaction to life and to what had happened to me.

I don’t think, however, that it’s normal to drive your car into a truck. In my story some people focus on that part because it’s weird and interesting. It was a small part of my life, one moment in my life when I did something really outrageous. I think what is normal and what a lot of people don’t understand and we’re not educated about it, is that if you don’t get a lot of sleep, if you are under a lot of stress, that a human manic experience can happen. Your mind will start to speed up. The less sleep you get and the less you eat, eventually your thoughts are going to be totally self-consuming and irrational. It’s almost like you’re in a dream state because you’re not getting the sleep you need. So you’re dreaming while you’re awake. Then these crazy things could happen. You can convince yourself of almost anything. That’s a total break with physical reality. So I think that’s normal, even though it’s not normal behavior viewed by the rest of society. It’s a normal process of the mind that can happen for anybody.

I started in the movement when I got hospitalized. I was still kind of manic. I’m actually glad that I was still manic, because I wasn’t really putting up with anything of what they were telling me. I was arguing with the doctors. Right in the hospital I started meeting other patients and talking to them. At first, I was really afraid of being in the hospital. I was afraid of the other patients, but then I saw that they were the most normal people there. There were some nice nurses, but everybody there was a victim of the system.

I started strategizing right in the hospital with some of the patients who knew the whole thing was wrong. I exchanged phone numbers and kept in touch for a while with some of the patients. You get really close in just a little bit of time, when you’re in that situation.

When I got out, I met more people who had gotten out of psych hospitals, and started getting more and more involved with giving back. When I was in the hospital, I was so motivated to give people alternatives that I didn’t have. There were no alternatives. It was just go to the psychiatric ward to get your drugs. That’s it. I wasn’t presented with any choices, and I wanted to help give other people choices.

It’s not like these experiences are going to go away, especially when we live in such a crazy