Friday, September 4, 2009

'Mad’ men and women embrace their mental health issues | KATU.com - Portland, Oregon | Local & Regional

'Mad’ men and women embrace their mental health issues KATU.com - Portland, Oregon Local & Regional:

"More than eight million Americans with either bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia are fighting the stigma of mental illness by embracing their “madness”, not suppressing it.

Will Hall has schizophrenia, but he said years of medication only made his condition worse.

“All my life I’ve experienced really difficult extreme states, hearing voices, seeing visions,” he said. “I felt like my creative emotional self was blunted and shut down and it really didn’t help me with any of the anxiety or fear I was experiencing.”

Hall chose more holistic treatments such as yoga, vitamins and a new diet over pharmaceuticals.

This idea came from the Mad Pride movement, a new and growing grassroots movement of people (as reported by ABC) with serious mental disorders who are rejecting traditional psychiatric treatments and standing up against the shame associated with mental illness.

“I’ve learned to really accept this as part of who I am rather than seeing, like oh, being very terrified of it and saying I have to get rid of it or have to stop everything but accept it as part of a natural rhythm and cycle of my life,” said Hall."


Working across the world to spread positive and hopeful messages about the experience of hearing voices

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

we all have to subscribe to what works for us as individuals even with medication to some of us poor people it is one of the few things we have got left. Medication protects me against unbearable stress. I know the time when I was a trustee to HVN in England and the chairman late Mickey Devalda refused his medication we hear stories of bizzare behaviour about him then but we had to follow committee rules and regulations to deal with any comments about his alledged behaviours - for me personally medication is not something I could totally come off only partly even after 8 years of therapies such as CBT and counselling and psychotherapy and hypnotherapy - maybe Mickey Devalda had it right in doing cold turkey on medication or maybe not only he would know? but then again Ron Coleman would not recommend cold turkey in his first book "Recovery an Alien Concept" to anyone else? subscribe as individuals please?