I’M WHAT MENTAL HEALTH RECOVERY LOOKS LIKE

 My latest mental health/mental illness writing, finished April 16, 2023, and submitted for publication in the Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  I think it's pretty much self-explanatory, and in combination with the other mental health writings on the Circle City Clubhouse, a positive statement on the whole process of actual mental health recovery back into "normality," not just the pseudo-recovery of being warehoused that the Clubhouse actually promotes. But on April 25, it was rejected for publication by the Clubhouse, which alleged it was but a "personal statement" and could lead to decline in participation in Clubhouse activities.  With good reason, I'd note:  the Clubhouse model is based on doing mindless menial labor for it for free.  Which is the very definition of slave labor!  Work for the Clubhouse, save the Clubhouse money it'd otherwise have to pay for janitorial and routine maintenance services, and get no reward for it.  Not even an encouraging "Job well done" from the Clubhouse staff, for that contradicts the Clubhouse definition of "equality" of members.  All are equal--in mediocrity and expectation of staying mediocre!  No wonder the Clubhouse has such massive turnover in active members; do more than what is condescendingly "expected" of you, become infantilized by the Clubhouse itself! --GF. 

Excuuuuse me if I toot my own horn, so to speak, but I’m precisely what full mental health recovery looks like—and can stand thus for Clubhouse members as a role model for mental health recovery.  Think of me as I am now:  a self-sufficient adult living fully on my own, with a full-time job at decent wages.  I live in my own apartment without the bother of having to have roommates to enable me to afford the rent, own my own car fully (a good one, by the way, a 2015 Toyota Camry, completely paid for), pay all my own bills, buy all my own groceries, without outside assistance from welfare, disability, or food stamps, and hold a full-time unionized job which is layoff-free, pays a decent wage with built-in wage increases, and has benefits and seniority protections.  I make $46,000-$49,000 a year through the combination of my wages, my Social Security (I’m over the age of 65), and my small pension through the union.  I’m now a normal, successful, self-sufficient adult, no longer living in poverty, no longer having to demean myself to qualify for welfare benefits, and what’s more, I’m also psychologically healed through a regimen of 70 months of excellent psychotherapy, which made up for (finally!) being stuck in 47 years of inept and malfeasant psychiatric care, which simply allowed me unconscionably to fall through the cracks.  I no longer have the outward signs or behavioral problems assorted with my psychiatric illness, borderline personality disorder with chronic depression.  I now live a normal life with a normal adult lifestyle. 

 

I haven’t had a major depressive episode since 2003, haven’t been on antidepressants since November 2004 (went off them in the first place because Gallahue CMHC of Indianapolis, the CMHC for my catchment area, in a fit of pique, denied me psychiatric care or access, as well as medicine, from June 2004 to February 2005), was finally moderated off antidepressants by a psychiatrist (at Gallahue, ironically) from February-December 2005, following which he ruled I no longer needed them.  And I haven’t since!  I’ve suffered no major bouts of depression since 2003.  Sure, I get irritable or melancholy sometimes, like any person, but no longer have recurring bouts of debilitating depression, bouts so severe they would immobilize me for days—

haven’t now for two decades! 

 

I have now finally “outgrown” my mental illness, and am no longer trapped by it.  You can too, many of you Clubhouse members, if you have the gumption to work on recovery instead of resigning yourselves, as though by unchangeable fate, to your diagnosis; and if you can get needed help to do this from the psychiatric system and from the Clubhouse staff.  (Unfortunately, getting such from either one of these is often challenging, to say the least.  But that’s why you need to be stubborn and demanding when dealing with both CMHC and Clubhouse staff!  Yes, you must demand the adequate treatment you need to recover.)  I was helped luckily by a private psychotherapist and a private psychiatric clinic which accepted my Medicare, so I was no longer in the clutches of the CMHC and university clinic system, which simply put my life on hold for 47 years (all the while getting paid for it by state agencies, either in Michigan or Indiana). 

 

Some of you will be able to do this easier than others; but do it anyway as you are able, and support and encourage each other in your efforts!  As my excellent private psychotherapist noted, “Recovery means meeting challenges and overcoming them.”  We’re all faced with challenges, but it lands squarely on our shoulders to overcome them, and not let them overcome us or defeat us.  So, go to it, I say! 

 

You too can be like me, a fully recovered mental health consumer; you don’t have to resign yourselves to the second-class status of a “mentally ill person” the whole of your lives.  You can go out and get a good-paying job (as I did), you can complete your education (as I did: earning my college degree despite my mental illness), you can maybe even buy a car, perhaps live without a passel of roommates needed to make rent affordable, and certainly, with a decent-paying job, live on what is no longer a poverty-level income.  It won’t be easy, but it can be done.  And I say finally, if I can overcome nearly 54 years of being trapped in “mental illness,” then you can too!  You may not all recover to the same extent; but I believe almost all of you at the Clubhouse are capable of being more than what you are now.  The Chinese have an apt saying on that, on making the effort to do better: “Don’t fear going slow; fear standing still.”  Too many of you at the Clubhouse are merely standing still, are merely stagnating.  But I offer you myself as an example that it doesn’t have to be that way.  It won’t happen overnight; it didn’t for me.  But it’s like climbing a mountain—sooner or later, you reach the peak if you keep at it!