TRANSCRIPT
[Music]
My name is Daniel Haen. Um, I have the opportunity to be the executive director with Voices of the Heart, 10 miles from here in Glenn Falls, New York. Prozac, SPlL, Clopin, Loran. I’m really excited. Um, I’m energized. Um, I’m nervous. Um, and I also feel very liberated. Ambient S, Squil Nar. This has been a dream for about a year and a half, two years, to be able to bring this together around this taboo subject of coming off psychiatric drugs.
I wanted to come to this training to be with my peers and to be open in a safe environment to talk about my experience with coming off of medication. I came to this training because I want to know how to safely come off from. I’ve been off from… I’ve been on psychiatric meds for about five years now, and I just want to be able to think more clearly and not be all drugged all the time.
In June of 2012, 23 of us, a far majority either users or survivors of the psychiatric system, including many who had been given some of the most serious diagnoses, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, came together for three days to discuss a subject near and dear to each of us: coming off drugs seems to be this, uh, topic that people are afraid to talk about. And at our organization, where we work with many users and survivors of psychiatry, people, um, come to us and talk about this.
I came to this training because I would like to be a better resource to people who would like to come off psychiatric drugs, who are so often seen as adversarial when they try to do that. I came to this training because about ten years ago, psychiatric drugs nearly killed me, and I pray every day that I can do something to help other people who want to get off them. I want it to come because I enjoy the truth.
What we realized is we didn’t have the skills. We didn’t have the support ability to wrap around people during this, uh, experience. I came to this training because it’s so easy to get on medication and so difficult to get off. Because I think it’s pretty easy to come off drugs and just quit taking them, but it’s hard to stay off and maintain your own wellness while doing that.
I came to this training to empower myself with more knowledge so I’m able to bring that to my community and help my peers in their quest to get off psychiatric drugs.
I do want to thank everybody for coming from all over: from Oregon, Alaska, South Dakota, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New York City. I came to this training in part to overcome my despair about our drugged human family. I’m in the life work of mutual support, and I’ve been off my psychiatric drugs for two months now. I came to the training because I’m going off my medications, and I want to help others go off theirs and also to become a more skilled help.
I don’t think there’s any two better people that could come here, share their expertise around this, the many years of developing this guide, the many years of organizing, the many years of fighting for people’s liberation and choices. So I want to welcome Will and Orx.
I wanted to come to the training because, um, coming off psych drugs was a huge part of my own recovery. To share what I’ve learned about coming off medications because I see too many people are trying to come off medications on their own, without support and without, uh, good information. And to hopefully start a movement that’s led from the ground up, which is the only way I think that real change is going to happen.
In closing to that, I do consider this, uh, historic. I don’t know of, uh, any place in what I call the consumer survivor ex-patient movement and what’s now becoming a united movement around words such as mental diversity and recovery, um, and human rights. Um, so I want to turn this over to two great experts to, uh, share with us, um, this great opportunity around coming off psychiatric drugs.
[Music]
Although our gathering was formally defined as a training, we realized quickly in the first hours that it was much more than that. That it was a summit, or as I felt inspired to call it due to the wealth of knowledge in the room, a meeting of the minds. A lot of this workshop summit is asking you to participate. We’re going to be asking you to talk about your experience and to do exercises and be involved, but everything is optional, and this is, of course, one of our key values.
I’ve been on psychiatric meds for 26 years, and I’m experiencing some side effects, some undesirable side effects. So I’m looking forward to getting information on how I can get off. I’ve just recently, uh, come off the last psychiatric drug that I’ve prescribed. It’s been probably a 20-year, uh, a 20-year stint approximately, um, uh, of various medications.
I’ve been very excited about coming here today because I’m all about giving people choices. We understand what happens when people are forced to do things that they don’t want to do. That’s happened so much in the mental health system. I was 17. I entered the system involuntarily, and I turned 51 a few weeks ago, and, uh, just came off of psychiatric drugs a couple of months ago, and I feel 17, um, in many ways.
And, um, having 17-year-old emotion, have a pimple. I’ve spent the last year sort of, um, sort of, uh, sort of a love-hate, most more ambivalent, maybe a better way of saying it, with the psychiatric meds. And spent the last year sort of, um, coming off, um, off some medications, and I’m still kind of ambivalent about that. I’ve been, um, pretty much off them since December, and it’s that hasn’t been an easy road and still exploring that.
I’ve been on psychiatric medications three different times in my life and taking myself off three different times. I also work as a provider in the, uh, as a psychologist in the public mental health system in New York. The reason I’m here is because I’m seeking out places where that seem to be the most constructive ways of helping people. This definitely seems to be one of the approaches that really needs to be part of our work with others.
I came off of medications, uh, back in September 2010, and it’s given me a new life, and I’m really, really passionate about helping others who want the same. I was on medications sporadically from age 14 to 18, and then from age 18 to 27 for, um, a bipolar diagnosis, um, that I left behind.
I just want to recognize all the different roles in the room. Does all of us have different relationships to psychiatric medications? There’s people who are on psychiatric medication here. There are people who maybe come off medication, people who are in the process of coming off, maybe people who maybe never taken medications, their family members, uh, professionals, activists, advocates.
I was a therapist in New York for 10 years, and a lot of my practice was helping people, uh, come off psychiatric drugs safely, and was a constant issue, something I heard about every day. I actually have never been on psychiatric meds, and, um, the main reason for that is because of the peer movement. It sort of swooped in right when I was getting a huge amount of pressure from therapists and from my partner at the time.
I actually wanted to make a film with Will, oh, about three years ago on coming off psychiatric drugs, and the timing wasn’t quite right. And it turns out, like, three years later, they were going to do this training, and they told me about it, and it’s just like, I thought I actually wasn’t going to do any more films. I hadn’t taken up this camera in a year and a half, and suddenly it’s like this struck me as this is something that’s really important.
I started becoming a part of the Freedom Center and, uh, by proxy the RLC, and then, um, doing, you know, alternative practices like yoga and meditation, and, um, I had a lot of peer support and saved my life.
[Music]
Although some of us felt we’d been helped by the mental health system and even at times by medication, many of us had been harmed by mental health professionals in positions of power and authority. Because of that, we felt that a discussion on the subject of expertise was…
Vital to any serious exploration of coming off psychiatric drugs within the word expert is the word experience. So, well, I mean, you know, they’re similar words, basically from the same group. So I think that you can only be an expert on something if you have experience with it. There doesn’t seem to be as much care as I wish there were with how we feel we’re the best, we’re the E best experts on how our brains and bodies feel.
I think there’s a clinical bias when you use the experts and doctors. I believe they’ve worked in the medical model so long that they can’t see past the medication. My daughter is in medical school and went through a Psychiatry round, and when I encouraged her to read Anatomy of an Epidemic, she said, you know, we’ve got to get this information into the students. Because by the time we get out of medical school, we’re—I don’t think she said brainwashed, but something similar to that. Any conversation you have with most of them is a bias that, whoa, you know, don’t step away from your medication.
From what I’ve read, 80% of people who are prescribed psychiatric meds go off or stop taking it within two years. I’ve seen that statistic. I’m out sitting with doctors who are trying to figure out how to taper it. I say, why not get the people who have done it? I mean, how can you guide if you don’t know? And in my experience of working in the mental health system, there’s very few doctors who will support a person’s decision to want to go off by providing meetings or family meetings or suggesting alternative ways of coping with stress that may come up. Um, you know, so there’s just a huge void.
I see this so much about knowledge and the creation of knowledge and who is disseminating the knowledge. And so much of the knowledge that currently exists in the medical world is false. So I was just having this fantasy that you guys would be teaching, you know, the doctors, ’cause they don’t know. They don’t know. The doctor’s a so-called expert, but not really. Who really knows what’s going on with these medications? Just what’s been uncovered. We’re the expert, even if people don’t perceive that we are. We don’t think that we are. We’re not aware of any MDs who are willing to step up and talk about this and say that this needs to become part of our medical practice.
It’s really important to point out that people are already coming off, and that statistic is—that’s primarily the anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. So we should remember that people are already coming off these drugs, and there’s a bias in the science. And so any time you have a liberation movement, you’re also having to challenge the science and the medicine. There was an upheaval in gay men’s health. There was an upheaval in the feminist movement around women’s health. So we’re just basically doing the same thing.
Also, I just want to say this is already happening in every other area of medicine. One of the number one Google searches is for personal health information. People are getting second opinions. They’re learning things themselves. They’re educating themselves. They’re questioning their doctors. They’re forming a more collaborative relationship. That’s all we’re doing here is the same thing. But because of the stigma and the bias and the oppression, somehow we seem as not capable or we shouldn’t have the same rights to that kind of medical collaboration as anybody else in society.
When Will Hall mentioned the subject of stigma and bias in society, my mind traveled back three years to my initial attempt at this film project when I spent a winter afternoon and evening in New York’s Washington Square Park studying the public’s perception of psychiatric drugs. Now, it seemed that a sampling of that footage might be particularly relevant.
When you hear the word psychiatric medication, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Mental patients? Like straight jackets, that sort of thing? Violent images? Drooling? Lithium? Adderall? Crazy people? Honestly, I think crazy. Prozac? Anti-depressant commercials? Medication that helps people with psychiatric issues? That helps, you know, any kind of chemical imbalance in the brain? I have positive feelings for it.
Psychiatric medication is whack. I mean, take it from me. I’m a medical student in my last year of medical school. So for me, I see them as a very productive and positive, um, I guess, yeah. I mean, when I hear, I think of something that can really help people. As a youth, I got in trouble and this and that, so I was put inside of a group home out of North Carolina. And instead of going to the core schizophrenia people who really need help, when I talk to my problems with the psych, he’d say, well, oh, well, this is what’s wrong with him. We’re going to put him on, um, Haldol, Prolixin, or Thorazine.
I actually have ADD, so I was put on Ritalin when I was 8 years old. If used appropriately, it’s a very valid modality of treatment that, yeah, I was on it for about 8 years, restoring chemical imbalances and, you know, getting people back in line. You know, it affects how you interact with people. So I think, um, maybe relationships would be improved.
No, I don’t really like trust psychiatrists anymore after that because, like, they always just kept trying to give me more medication. What they do is give these kids medication when all the kids need is attention. They weren’t really listening to me or my issues. I tried like Vyvanse, Concerta, Adderall, and like all these things, and certain things actually made me like depressed as a 10-year-old. It’s lousy. I don’t recommend it for no one.
The only danger is if it’s being used inappropriately by someone who’s not thorough and competent. If dispensed or prescribed by a competent, responsible psychiatrist or psychopharmacologist, there should be minimal risks. This is very interesting that you’re asking me this right now. My roommate actually just got off his medication and was actually in a psychiatric ward last week because he was having withdrawals.
You’re talking to a mental health practitioner. There were a lot of mood swings going on when I went off of Ritalin, like for good. Like, I just—my body had to kind of get used to it. And, you know, I ate more. I was able to get off of it. I don’t think I need them, but, um, the way that the world is, I mean, I think everybody is crazy. I just think that if there is an opportunity to not go on medication, I think that’s the best way to go because what’s crazy? There are persons that are misunderstood, and if you don’t understand it, then it’s crazy to a person that doesn’t understand it. Everybody just needs love and attention, and that’ll make this world a better place.
Returning to the training, we next moved into the subject of collaboration with prescribers such as psychiatrists, which many people have found key to their success at coming off psych drugs. However, we knew going into it that this topic was sensitive and walked a fine line between the practical and the profoundly philosophical.
For collaborating with providers, a really important thing is to win their trust. When they feel like they can really trust the person that they’re with, sitting there, that I think a lot of psychiatrists, especially, they’re willing to do things that otherwise will be risky if they know that the person with them is agreeing with them on some things.
I like what you talked about trust, Daniel, and I know for myself trying to, as much as possible, develop a trusting relationship, you know, with the psychiatrist. Sometimes it’s not always on both ends, but the more you get to know them and the more that relationship develops, you can come in with a plan. A lot of the people that came to me had tried and failed repeatedly with psychiatrists to get anywhere. And what I found was that if they could use me as an intermediary, I could approach psychiatrists from a very different angle, and the psychiatrists didn’t feel threatened. A lot of times, I could do some of the work that was a lot harder for someone when there was a lot more for them riding on it. For me, I could schmooze with a psychiatrist and talk their language a little bit.
They would soften a lot of people who never taken people off beds were sometimes willing to try. So sometimes they will, they will soften and they will open. And there’s going to be other times if I kept getting that same reaction, I would just try and find a different prescriber. But especially if you’re locked into a situation where you have to stay with that prescriber, then do your best you can to really present a really good solid case.
And then offer to have them talk to another family. Someone else calling on a person’s can often be very… they love it. They love it if family members are on the same page. If the family members are non-confrontational, if the family member is saying, “Read Robert Whitaker,” and you know, challenging, you’ve got to look at the studies. And they often see the family as also the problem.
Yeah, it just feels important to, you know, to keep higgy backing on the point of the approach to the psychiatrist to not attack. I want to agree with what Daniel and others said about the other provider because I worked with… I think Primary Care is an important partner. My primary care doctor was one of the first to casually say, “Do you think you might be able to make it without medication?” My primary care doctor didn’t know me as long as my psychiatrist, but nonetheless was very open about just raising the question.
And then because of that, I put them together. They’re in different facilities. Also, nurse practitioners can prescribe. Primary physicians can prescribe in Oregon, maybe other states. Naturopathic doctors can prescribe. I used a primary care physician who was helping me withdraw, and he basically was just a typical… he was a nice guy, a typical primary care physician who just doesn’t have much time for anything or anyone. So he just didn’t care that much.
I mean, he basically, you know, said I could withdraw and sort of left me to my own devices for the most part. But my therapist at the time saw that I was struggling a lot, and she just called him just to let her know that she was working with me. And I feel like that did make a difference in how he treated me. Like, he treated me more respectfully.
As a therapist writing for people, CU, sometimes you call a psychiatrist, all you get is an answering machine. They never call back. So to give the person a letter saying they attend… I… it sounds horrible to say, it sounds very medical, but it’s just… I would speak the language of the psychiatrist. Say this person has been regularly attending their therapy, they’re doing really well, they’re doing all these different things for their life improvement. Put it on my letterhead. Say they come twice a week, they’ve been coming for this amount of time, they’re totally reliable, and they are interested in reducing medication.
And I would have my clients come back and tell me they’d be like, the psychiatrists read it, not know what to say. Sometimes they said it would just… like what you said, hi. The psychiatrist would often behave very differently after that, much more respectful.
Something I don’t know why… something about this isn’t sitting right with me. And I feel like maybe it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time recently talking about the idea of collaboration and shared decision making and all these things. But I think acknowledging that, to me at least, the idea of collaboration implies that there are two experts in the relationship. And to me, like, the only expert is the person.
That phrase of shared decision making points to how we still agree to be infeliz so often, and we just accept that, okay, it’s time for our shared decision making when the person in fact can lead that shared decision making. I don’t think other areas of medicine do they say, “Is your medical treatments are a shared decision?” No, it’s the patient’s decision, except with children. With children, I was first medicated as a minor. I had no choice. If I said no… and by the way, I used to chew up thorazine pills that looked like M&M’s. I thought they were M&M’s. They that light brown color, they still are. God, look like Reese’s Pieces. Yeah, and they were disgusting.
Um, but… and spit them back out, and then I would get the shots, which felt like molasses, by the way. Um, at any rate, um, I’m so sorry that you take that. But as a minor, you’re not deciding. I just want… I want to support Laura. I don’t like shared decision making. It’s like this new American practice and language and manipulative kind of practice. And in the international community, in many other cultures, they’re practicing what’s called supported decision making. And it is a different balance. It is supporting each other in decisions that we make that we choose or want to explore.
I want to challenge people to get rid of the shared decision making. I have a lot of comrades who use that language, and I just completely disagree. I will never share my decisions. Sorry.
Why is it… why is it that you would want to collaborate with your prescriber? Why would you want to collaborate to begin with? The big reason I can think of that you don’t want to, you know, go on your own sometimes is they will AAL you with non-compliance. I’ve been a product of that. The first couple times I tried to come off meds, my provider said, “You know, you go off your meds, we’re going to have a pickup order on you.” And I basically told them some not so nice words and went off my meds anyway.
Police are at my door. They might have some information that’s useful to you. They might not, but they might have some information that’s useful to you. Sometimes people have asked me, “Well, can I just cut my pill in quarters?” And I’m like, “I don’t know what that coating is. How the hell do I know? I don’t know how it’s been designed.” I don’t… I don’t know chemically. You cut it open, and the next thing you know, you’re getting four days’ dose in an hour.
They can change your prescription. Maybe you need smaller pills. Maybe do a liquid form. Maybe they can talk with you about switching the pills that you’re doing because, like, that’s somebody you pay for their advice. But you’re free to take it or leave it. And so it’s… I don’t have to collaborate with my consultant. I pay them for information. They give me information. I like it, I don’t like it, hire them, fire them, whatever. But it’s pretty free to use that.
The collaboration with the prescriber is to means to an end. So if they can help you get to certain things that you need in the coming off process, and if they can’t help you get to those means, then… but you don’t need to collaborate with them. You don’t need that. You can do it on your own or you can do it with a different person.
Since most people who want to come off their psychiatric drugs agree that their drugs are not helping them optimally, this brings up the subject of what we ourselves can do to improve and maintain our own mental health. And so we tackled the question in a group brainstorming effort.
So what we’re going to do now is brainstorm alternative wellness practices, and we’re going to get groups of three, try to come up with a list so you can report back to the rest. Brainstorming, okay?
Meditation, that’s great. You know, the thing that I do most is listening to understand, non-judgmental listening to whatever is happening inside of me. Kind of sort of like radical self-acceptance for me. Running, sure. I play golf, excellent. Um, broccoli, healthy diet. Does that work? If I don’t… yeah, if I don’t attend to that, actually, I don’t get anywhere. Getting a good night’s sleep, movies, animals, pets, reading my Bible, playing guitar, great. Yeah, favorite music is a good one. Facebook, yeah. Skype is another one. Hiking, nature, sitting by the water.
Fear support, one fear support, root beer with ice cream, reminding myself of my values, journaling, yeah, positive affirmation, reading detective BS, writing the no stretching, working in the garden. I do that too. Learning something new works for me. It’s really, really important. One great, sort of like meaningful work or something.
Meaningful work, yeah, totally! Woohoo!
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
Beautiful eating, foods that specifically nourish our bodies, bicycling, aromatherapy, breathing practices. We were very cohesive morning practices and, you know, our daily rituals and such. And physical sensations of touch, like for, um, children’s or animals, was one of the ones that came up. Being in nature, reflexology, reading, the hot bath, hot bath, lavender, and [Applause] bubbles. We have walking, fishing, fin fishing, that’s really good. Our all-time favorite: sleeping! Sleeping!
And then for the younger generations, the internet, cooking, spending time with your children, going to museums, that just popped into my head. I like to do that. Movies is missing. I don’t think I heard movies. Ringing, crying, nice crying, hobbies and crafts, creativity, gray alone time, swimming, talking to people. Hang on, I think I missed swimming. Sorry, we’re going a little fast.
The bastard alone time, star or moon gazing. I know I like to stare at the moon. I like to stare at the moon for three, four hours. Meditation, exercise, pets, music, journaling, meaningful work, radical self-acceptance, not self-acceptance, radical, radical self-acceptance. That’s what it takes! Yes, really!
The point of this is there’s just like an unlimited amount of wellness practices that we have available to us. But when you go to the hospital, you’re not told, “Hey, this can actually [Music] work.” As we got into the heart of the training, we began to examine in more depth what actually has worked for people. We used Will Hall’s harm reduction guide to coming off psychiatric drugs as a framework for our study, but we used our own experience to bring it to life.
Cultivating support, I found this so important in my own journey of coming off, um, to get support of my family and to help educate them about the research involved. It could be friends, it could be peers, could be a doctor if you have a supportive doctor. But people have done this without support. People have done this completely on their own, with no support, and not even telling anybody they were doing what I did. Just happened to work. I wouldn’t recommend to anybody what I did.
If you look at this last paragraph, the leading UK charity Mind, in their study on coming off psychiatric drugs, found that people who came off their drugs against their doctor’s advice were as likely to succeed as those whose doctors agreed they should come off. I ran out of prescription of my lithium one day. I knew for two weeks it was going to happen, but I dug in my heels, and I was on a therapeutic dose one day, and the next I wasn’t. So this myth that you need to have a, do you have to have a doctor’s support is really a myth. You can do it without a doctor.
And when I had a rough spot that I thought I was going rudderless again, I said, “I think I really need some, maybe not a full therapeutic dose, but I need access to lithium.” And I didn’t have access to a provider at that time. My center manager, she said, “You know, you can do that, but keep going with these other things.” The results that they collected with interviewing a lot of people are showing that you’re just as likely to come off successfully without a psychiatrist as with one. And that’s like, that’s so contrary to like medical advice. It’s like saying medical advice is just as good as no medical advice, right?
Well, I think it’s more like, no, no medical advice is better than bad medical advice, right? Yeah, because it seems like the doctors a lot of times don’t really have much medical advice to give about coming off. Yeah, their training gets people on meds, but not get off. They put obstacles up for me when I was coming off psych drugs, and even when I was on them, I felt that, um, a lot of times I actually needed to be alone, and I really needed a lot of privacy. And I got pathologized a lot for being introverted and wanting to spend a lot of time by myself.
So I know that peer support is really helpful for many people, and it was for me too. But I think it’s important to respect people who want to be alone sometimes when they’re going off of drugs. Um, it’s, it’s kind of, I felt that having a lot of time to myself actually was really healing for me. Usually, it’s better to go slow and taper gradually. And again, this isn’t cutting fast. Some people have cold turkey and done that successfully. We don’t recommend that, but some people do it.
Recommend, um, starting with one drug. Maybe choose the one that has the worst negative effects, the drug you feel is least necessary. So we’ll do one at a time. Make a plan. The 10% method is pretty common, which is, uh, reducing by 10% every two or three weeks. It could be longer if you’ve been on the drug longer. And also just about that, that frequently people find that at the end of their withdrawal process, they need to slow way down, that they can’t, they just de see to really slow. That’s the hardest.
Sometimes you don’t always know what’s going to happen when you do something. And if you do know what’s going to happen, then we probably wouldn’t be sitting here. And, um, I think that’s both scary as hell and exciting as hell.
I just want to add one thing, and this really comes back to the harm reduction approach, is that you have to be flexible with your goal. You have to be flexible with your goal. You may say, “I’m going to be off my lithium by the end of the year,” and you hit an incredibly difficult period of your life with withdrawal symptoms, and you’re sick, and you just, and you realize, “Wait a second, I need to change my goal.” I think it’s important for people to know that, um, if you try and it doesn’t work for you the first time, that you didn’t fail.
I worked with a lot of people who are just very dead set and committed to coming completely off medications. And maybe their brain has been injured by the medications that they’re on. Maybe they have chemical changes in their body. Maybe they don’t have the supports that they need, and they may need to reevaluate that goal in the process as you discover what’s going to work best for you.
I think that’s important to know that, uh, in my experience, it took me quite a few times, uh, quite a few attempts. The real goal here is to feel more empowered and more healthy and more confident around your medication decisions. If you can do that, then you’re successful. So let’s not measure the success ultimately about whether I completely came off or not, because then that potentially can set yourself up to not being flexible when you need to be flexible.
And, uh, there were times when it didn’t work, when I had to go back on, and I felt I was a failure, that I failed at this. And, uh, that that’s not [Music] true.
One thing that maybe we should touch on at least is when you come off, that feeling strong feelings can come up. And how do we, how do we deal with these, some of these strong feelings? The issue of strong feelings is that I also didn’t know what would come up when I came off of M. So it’s, it’s, it’s here. So even with all that therapy, which was really helpful, there were a lot of things I didn’t look at, which are now saying hello. You not bad, you didn’t look at it, but here it [Music] is.
I see here the 10% plan that seems sort of arbitrary. I understand it as being the way to organize tapering off. I’m thinking about when I go back to the clubhouse, I’m going to want to explain what the reasoning behind some of these methods. There have been studies on slow tapering being supported scientifically, but mostly that 10% rule of thumb comes from thousands and thousands of people doing it over the years since the 70s. But at the same time, everybody who promotes it says this is not for everybody, right? Trust your own experience, because I mean, there are doctors that’ll take people off 50% two weeks, and then you’re off in four weeks. And sometimes that works for people. You’re also in a hospital when it’s happening, and so if there’s a problem, they’re right there.
Remember sitting next to David Con one time, and he said, “We’re finding that it really should be much slower than anybody’s doing it.” That was his thing. He said in his experience, it’s looking like a year for every year you were on the drug.
Yeah, but that’s so different than some people’s experience. I think about it in terms of just the basic idea of what withdrawal is. Withdrawal is your brain slowly readjusting to not having a drug. So, for example, if you are a regular drinker of strong coffee and you cold turkey off of the coffee, what’s going to happen? You’re going to have a strong headache. If you slowly taper your dosage of caffeine down, maybe the headaches won’t be as bad. So it’s a similar kind of adjustment of your brain and body to not having as much of a daily input of a drug.
Although we all came for the formal training, it was inevitable that a big part of the value in our three days together would take place in our unstructured time. As a sample of that, let us jump into an average dinner conversation, which invariably strayed quite a bit off the beaten track of average.
I feel very protective of people feeling judged because they continue to take medications, because I see that happen a lot. I see people who come off medications and who say, “We’re very pro-choice, respect people,” but there’s a judgment in the back. And I’m just not going to someone and say, “Well, I know for you than you do,” because the person that I’m with may be suffering and dealing with things around medications that I’ve never experienced.
If a person chooses to stay on medications, like, I completely respect that. But if a person wants to come off medications but is convinced and believes for whatever reason that they can’t, I want to do whatever I can to help that person give it a shot.
I think a good way to frame it is, I believe it’s possible that you can get off your medication. I believe it’s possible. And it’s not about can or can’t; it’s let’s see what happens. Let’s try it. We were all told that it was impossible to live without medications. Now all of us are living without medications.
So the reality is that people don’t know. People are a huge mystery. I think there’s a difference between someone not wanting to come off of meds and someone wanting to come off of meds but not thinking they can. If someone says, “I want to come off, but I can’t,” then I would say, “Yeah, what did you try? You probably didn’t try. You didn’t try X, Y, and Z. You probably didn’t do it. Let me help you. Let me support you.” I don’t believe that that’s true; you’re predicting your own future.
Exactly. I think it’s possible, and it’s so completely based in fear because deciding to come off of psych meds was the scariest thing I ever decided to do. Because I didn’t know who I was off of meds. I’d been on meds for ten years. I had no idea what feelings were mine, what thoughts were mine. I had no idea what my personality was like. And so all of those games I played in my head about, “You can’t do this. You’re not going to,” it was all based in fear.
Once I acknowledged that fear and owned it and started talking about it for what it was—fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of myself, of my authentic self—once I acknowledged the fear, I could coexist with it and do it. Right? On every day I woke up over the last year, I didn’t think I was going to wake up. I’m still being driven by fear, by the way. I’m still afraid, and I’m working on it. Afraid of a lot of things.
Well, I say I’m getting stronger every day. I know that. But there is some fear that I have, and I’m working on it. And I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but poetry and other things are kind of leading me in a direction of greater understanding. And I’m going to continue to journal, even though I was actually afraid to write anything down. Wow, I started. I have started, but I stopped, and it’s been fits and starts. And now I actually typed in my computer while I was here kind of a beginning of a story.
Owning that fear is so important because figuring out what it is is going to take me some time. And it was so humbling to hear that people need a couple of years. People said, “It’s been a couple of years.” It’s been, I’ve also been, “Need a couple of years to come off and feel okay again.” Yeah, but you know, I may never know what’s behind everything. But I do know that every day that I’m living is a day that’s for the future.
Every day is, I mean, it’s just been amazing. I’ve been getting involved in Buddhism and reading, and I’ve just been reading a whole lot of other things besides mental health. And I’ve read that some of the more well-known Zen masters, including Sartha, that it was six or seven or eight or nine years before they became awakened or enlightened or before they had an opening to have greater understanding about themselves.
So, and I see that number six to ten or so, and it’s kind of like, it’s like three months for me, you know? And I’m going, “Oh, that’s good. It takes longer.” I think that analogy is really great because I see my experience coming off meds as an enlightenment, as an awakening of sorts. An awakening. And the more I felt feelings, especially fear, but anger, grief, all—I mean all of these feelings—the more I allowed myself to feel them, the more human I felt. And the more, you know, grateful I was that I got to feel real feelings that were mine. They weren’t coming from the meds. They weren’t side effects. They were my feelings. And even if they were painful feelings, I got to own them and be with them and get through them and build up resiliency and confidence in myself that, like, I can feel these feelings.
I’m not going to—one thing that I wanted to ask you, by the way, ’cause you’ve been going through this longer than I have, is that sometimes I feel like I can break a wall that I want to. I want to, and I know I will break my hand if I do. I want to just hit it once, or I want to scream in an airport terminal. I don’t—so what I’m wondering, and I have a lot of anger that I need to let out, but I know not to inappropriately. But when did you learn? When did you figure out? When did you do that? Did you do it at night? Did you do it in a field? When did you know? ‘Cause like I’m doing mine, like I cried out here earlier. And it’s a deep—I’ve wiggled in my gut. I feel it.
I mean, I think it’s different for everyone, so I don’t think there’s one right answer to it. I mean, I know I think most of my feeling process I’ve gone through these last almost two years off of meds has been with people. Because I was alone for so many years, isolated in my head, feeling misunderstood, whatever it was for me. My recovery process from psych meds has been about connecting to people, even people who haven’t been through it themselves but who unconditionally love me. Also, too, just because I was so—it was so ingrained in me to pathologize myself and to pathologize what I was feeling that it took me a while to realize that if I wail in public and if people are going to judge me and call me mentally ill and call me crazy, like, that’s their problem.
Of course, there are situations where your rights can be taken away and you can be locked up if you are in a setting, and that happens. But you know, I’ve definitely behaved in ways that are outbursts of some. And you know what? Like, I own it because I’m a human, and like that happens.
[Music] As the conversation progressed, I…
Found myself wondering how Ed, the psychologist from New York City, was fitting into the training. I know that it can often be difficult, or even more than difficult, for clinicians to integrate themselves into groups of psychiatric survivors. I looked for an opportunity to ask him how his integration process was unfolding.
Somebody really wise said this to me while I was coming off psychiatric drugs. They, um, because I was really impatient. I mean, how can you not be? Um, and they said, um, brought my life back. I want it now! Yeah, and I mean, it took only took me less than a year. Like, some people, as we’re saying, it takes like so much longer than that. But somebody told me this Zen story of somebody asking their Zen master to teach them something. And the master says, okay, it’s going to take about three years. And the person says, well, what if I try really, really hard? And then the master says, well, then it’ll take about 20 years. And like, I have to say that that story actually comforted me while I was coming off of psychiatric drugs. It took away some of that sense of like, okay, if I just work really hard at this, then I can do it.
So I got a question for you, Ed. I thought you might—what’s that? What’s that? Go, ah, go! Yeah, love it! Have a question. So I’m curious, how—what’s your experience of hearing all this?
I mean, it’s interesting being a clinician and coming here because, I mean, there are parallels to my experience being working in the mental health system and trying to help people. Because in so many ways, I don’t have a voice where I feel like I can express my ideas and they can be heard without being shut down, without being criticized, without being told I’m naive, I’m stupid, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If I express dangerous—I’m dangerous. If I express what I really think in a true sense, I mean, I do feel like I’m going to—I would be—I’d be rejected. I’d be outcast, you know?
But at the same time, you know, I mean, I have to say, like at a recent treatment team meeting, someone—a psychiatrist—there was just saying like, he’s 18. Like, this kid already had two breaks. You know, he wants to get off his meds. He’s going to have to get sick again, you know? It’s the only way. And he’ll come back, maybe he’ll get some insight into his illness. And I was just like fuming. Some of the other social workers saw, and she’s like, what’s going on, Ed? And I was just like, listen, like this kid’s 18. There’s plenty of people who get out of the mental health system and do fine, who do well, you know, in the long term. A lot of people do better without medications, you know? And I’m just sick of all this pessimism around this. And you know, we’re here to help this kid. Like, you know, this kid can have a life. He’s 18. We don’t even know the context of why he even ended up in the hospital. Maybe his family’s abusing him.
I just went off for like five minutes, and then everyone was quiet. Break when the meeting ended. And then the next day, the psychiatrist I work with was with the assistant director of the training clinic, and we were talking. And he walked up and he said, you know what? I really love this guy, pointing to you. Yeah, he pointed to me. He’s like, I really love this guy, but you know what? Because he’s not pessimistic, he actually believes people can change. Like, it’s great! He’s like, we need more of that around here. And I was just like, holy [ __ ]! That happened like a month ago.
That’s so interesting, though, is that your concerns are the same as mine. I sense your hesitancy and concern about where you are with this and maybe professional issues. I’m still coming out. I’m in the coming out, and same with me. I have the same—not exact concerns, but I’m worried. I’m concerned. Are people going to think differently? Am I going to be accepted? Um, only I’m going through the experience and you’re on the other side as a provider. And so it’s like there’s strands of common, definitely, of worry. I see it in your eyes that I have too, and it’s like there—you know what I mean? It’s very interesting. It’s a scary world.
I don’t know. Um, little kid. All right, I’m going to go get with you.
So, so Ed, yeah, how was that? How was what? Talking, seeing what you said? It was great! I love it. Well, I think what you said was very valued, valued by all others. Yeah, I mean, I don’t even know what I—I mean, I don’t know. You’re saying what everyone else said, just in your own—from your own perspective.
Yeah, yeah, exactly! That’s what I feel like. Yeah, like I have everything being said here I can resonate with, but it’s from the perspective of a clinician and of someone who works in the system and is going through similar—not a severe, but similar oppressive practices and losing their voice, not being able to express themselves because they’re being shut down. I—I, you know, I could not work in a hospital like you. I think it would just eat me alive. Yeah, I’m able to tolerate. I’ve always been a mediator. I mean, that’s my—that was my role in my family. And part of me wants to be there. I have to be there. Part of me feels like I need to be there. If I’m not there, who’s going to be there? You know? And I—if I’m not there, who’s there? What’s going on? If I’m not there? When I worked on an inpatient, like, my presence—I helped people save people from being put in restraints ’cause I was there to, like, mediate, you know? I was there to stop the order from the med coming in from inside the glass and be like, no, this person is just crying. Let me sit with them for a half hour, you know? I was there helping someone who heard someone came in the first episode of voices and got them to calm down and help them walking with them up and down the unit, you know? And is coming up to me like, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m helping them get through their first voice hearing, and they want to talk to me. I talk to them about it. You know, I have all these positive experiences of helping make change happen in these environments—all difficult environments—all those things that happen to. But you know, do I do things every day at times I feel bad about and feel like I’m a sellout and I should get the [ __ ] out? And what’s wrong with me? And I can’t believe I’m doing this. All those thoughts go through my head when I came up here. Hell yeah! I mean, you know, it’s both sides.
[Music]
As we return to the training, we address the subject of sleep, which is so commonly a front and center issue for people coming off psychiatric drugs. Will and Orex pointed out how good sleep, and sometimes a lot of it, can be vital for helping naturally restore a sense of balance. Yet they also noted how lack of sleep can uncenter people like almost nothing else, to the point of inducing psychosis.
When people go into the hospital and they come down out of their extreme states, what really is helping them? Well, they’re helping them to sleep. I mean, they’re knocking them out with heavy medications. But the big thing is that they’re really interrupting their crisis with sleep. So this is a really important skill to have. When someone can’t sleep, what are you going to do to help them?
So speaking from my own experience, ’cause I do have trouble sleeping, yeah, and knowing that I was coming here, I packed a little fan because I need two things. I need air moving in the room, and I need a little white noise. I turn the fan on in my room, and I have it pointed at the wall just for the white noise, or else I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
That’s great! So a fan, a white noise, yeah, melatonin, and those ever so precious hot lavender bubble bath!
[Applause]
That I’m thinking of are avoiding caffeine. I would say also avoiding stressful conversations, stressful interactions, especially in the afternoon and evening. So by the time evening comes around, I’m down. And I do that, I schedule like my difficult calls. Like I know it’s going to be a difficult conversation, I’m w have it too close to bedtime.
Getting good exercise also I think can help me sleep a lot better. Gentle, good, healthy exercise, but um, not too close to going to sleep. Ear, I was taking clopin for a while for sleep, and I slowly weaned off of it very slowly. And then for a while, I would just have it on my bedside. It would just be there, was kind of like some type of placebo or something, just realizing it was there if I needed it. And if I had it there, I never took it. I would sleep just with the comfort that it was there. And then eventually, I didn’t need it at all. I haven’t done that in wow, years and years. I was on medications for sleep for 10 years, and when I came off of all of my medications, sleep was one of my biggest concerns.
And what I did when I couldn’t sleep was pay, like sit down and understand why. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t tired, it really was that my head was going a million miles a minute. I think in large part due to the withdrawal, but other things too. And so what I did, and I did this for several months, was I just would put my laptop in bed with me and watch like South Park or Law and Order. And just, and I needed, it’s kind of similar to the white noise, but I needed something to get me out of the dialogue in my head. And it took me many, many, many months to like wean myself off of that. But I think like I wasn’t, it wasn’t that I wasn’t tired, it really was just that my head was going.
Not eating too late for me, 8:00’s about to cut off. And then not eating too much. I wish we had cestas here. I can’t nap. Napping, I have no self-control. 2:00 in the afternoon, I wake up at 7, so I’ll put nap in or not napping. Yeah, meditation is actually, I’m really struggling with that right now. But I hear, and was doing, I was meditating three or four times a day. I hear it’s very good before bed. I think also do you have something to look forward to the next day? Acupuncture too. Yeah, there are a bunch of herbs, C skull, C still choose, uh, little benzo and definitely benadryl every night for sleep because I still, uh, I’ve gone on and off with that. But I’ve been a period on journaling or talking to someone if there’s something bothering me. Sometimes can’t go to sleep.
Yeah, the other thing is that’s really good if someone can’t get to sleep, and this ties in with what was talked about at the beginning about reducing the fear that surrounds it. Like I’ve got to get to sleep, I’ve got to get to sleep. It’s just to tell people it’s okay just to rest. Just sit quietly, sit in a chair, listen to some music, just be still and rest. You don’t have to go to sleep.
I didn’t want to leave the training without getting a chance to interview the Ladner brothers who had flown all the way to Upstate New York from Anchorage, Alaska. Spencer, age 24, had been provisionally diagnosed with schizophrenia at 19 and put on a variety of antipsychotics and then lithium, and his family were crucial to his success at coming off them.
When I went off with a doctor the first time off cypra, it took like 6 months. But I don’t really remember any like strongly debilitating side effects from coming off of it, other than like I remember every time my dose was lowered, things would become a little bit clearer. And I could have remember like more of my experience and process like new information better. But I don’t really remember any strong side effects from coming off as much as I remember the strong side effects of being on it. And just like feeling really empty and complacent. And like you can feel all the nerves and capillaries on the outside of your face, then you can’t. And you can feel your brain, but you don’t feel like everything else is connected.
Yeah, there’d be times of sitting at the dinner table with Spencer when he was on meds, and you’d ask him a question, and he would just sit there and stare at you, you know, and just look at you for like 10 seconds and then finally respond. SP, like there was just really slowed down. Spencer, you know, really so he was really seemed drugged.
Oh yeah, big. So the first time I tried lithium, I felt amazing. You know, I said it was like baby ecstasy. And you know, you just feel like, “whoa, I’m going to have to immediately sit down and relax and fall asleep.” And so it helped me to start stabilizing my sleep. But I noticed that every morning I’d wake up really, really groggy and really, really pissed off and sort of like some sort of lithium hangover. But I was doing well, and I was confident that I was working with my, or my, I was working with my doctors as well. And I felt like I had a lot more strategies.
CU, me and my dad were active in maintaining the, I would ride my bicycle all the time, and we would try and stay busy, stay busy and stay active. And like my dad’s like, “no, we’re going to the grocery store. Like you’re not going to do anything here. You’re going to sit in the backyard, you know, you’re going to smoke a cigarette and read a book, but you can’t do that the rest of your life.” So we’d go to the grocery store, we’d go on bike rides.
Was it like watching him come back to his normal self? It was awesome. I mean, there was a lot of times where he would be not wanting to do stuff and staying home, you know, being afraid of, you know, whatever he was afraid of. And we had both sides where, you know, our mom was kind of like, you know, that I felt like she was more willing to allow you to just kind of stay and do what you wanted to do and not be busy, where our dad was, you know, very like, “you got to get out there and do stuff.” So me and my dad would ride my bike, we ride our bicycles all day and try and eat healthier and be productive and get out in the sun.
But after that, I was living with a bunch of buddies. I was actually one of three people in a living room, so a three-bedroom house with six people in it, sleeping in a little like closet that just had a blanket for a wall. Yeah, and so that was kind of counterintuitive because I had realized by this point that I definitely had to get my sleep every day. But this lithium though was giving me a lot of issues, dietary issues. So I would drink like a gallon of water a day, and I would still end up puking every morning this giant salty foam every day. And I was like, “well, if I’m going to wake up with a hangover and I’m in a puke every morning, then what’s the point?” Because my number one issue is sleep, and I have to get my sleep. And so if my pill is going to [ __ ] with my sleep, I’m done with it.
I had already read the harm reduction guide, and I started rereading the harm reduction guide, and I started really thinking about what I could do. And so I started slowly kind of tapering myself off. During all of this time, I wasn’t really knowledgeable of meds and what they really did or nothing like that. My whole role was to pretty much just be there with Spencer and, you know, to assure him that everything’s okay and, you know, no one’s out to get him. So I didn’t really understand at that time what was going on and that he had, you know, this whole process of getting off his medications. I mean, that was obviously something I knew, but it’s nothing to the knowledge I.
Have now, it’s nothing that clicked. Back then, I was aware of him getting better and, you know, maybe some fallbacks every now and then. But I did not associate that with the medication necessarily at the time. It’s like getting off any other drug, you know? It’s just you kind of feel groggy, and you kind of have to get over that. That’s really what it came down to.
At this point, I found myself curious to know what Spencer found most helpful to him during his coming off process, considering he’s been entirely off-site drugs for more than two years with no returns to the hospital. For me, it’s like I have to get my sleep—at least eight hours. I’m very adamant on getting sleep.
What’s he like? Can you tell me? When he doesn’t get sleep, he’s a jerk. He’s very grumpy. One of the biggest things I would say is that we, as a family, learned that the hospital was more difficult than anything, including the meds. Just the sheer fact of being surrounded by a bunch of people who I don’t know and I don’t identify with. And so, for me, it was really important because my family decided collectively that I can’t go to the hospital. Because if I go to the hospital, they’re always going to have to deal with three more months of me getting over the hospital experience versus the one or two months of me getting over my difficult feelings.
I think what helps a lot in the work that I do now is having that experience, you know, of a family member going through that. It changed our whole family dynamic because I was, you know, like I was in that place, and they were all there for me. And so, I could definitely wait on both of my brothers for me to be in a mental hospital. And you guys seemed like you were concerned for your own well-being. And what does your future present to you, right? Which I got caught up in the whole system of feeling that, you know, something’s wrong with me pretty much because of what happened to him. You know, just re-evaluating myself and thinking something’s wrong with me, that I need meds. So, I got into this whole, you know, just hoopla of being on meds.
And you got on them too, then? Yeah, I’ve been on my wide variety of meds. And you got off the stuff too? I was kind of stupid and cold turkey off of everything. And I was on lithium myself after seeing what it did for him, thinking that that was helpful. I was on anti-depressants, amphetamine salts, and I cold turkeyed off of everything, which is stupid, I think. Because even, you know, it’s been a year, and I feel like my brain is still fried. Like, I’m unable to be the person that I was before I got on meds. You know, I feel lack of emotions.
The other thing was like finding cathartic releases, you know, and like things to, like, you know, ’cause I feel angry and deal with the sadness of, you know, it’s like I felt like four years of my life was just cloudy, and I don’t remember many bits and pieces of it other than, you know, a lot of like people looking the other way or me being this weird big bearded mental patient to standard society. So, I started playing music with my friend, and so really loud angry music and being able to scream and express how I feel and know how I feel and be able to be in contact with how angry I really am about some things and the melancholy I feel over, like, losing portions of my life.
Do you see yourself as a mental patient now? Hell no. Do you see him that way? I don’t see him as a mental patient, no. How do you see him? I see him as someone who went through struggles of, you know, altered perceptions and someone who really took the effort to gain the knowledge about what was going on and to move through it without just regoing through the system and regoing through that cycle. I just see him as my brother. I don’t see him as no mental patient.
As we jumped back into the end of the training, we found the group discussing one final subject: withdrawal, which plays a powerful role in many people’s coming off process. Although some people, especially those only on the drugs a short time, experience little or no withdrawal when coming off, others can experience reactions including super sensitivity, psychoses that are more extreme than anything they lived through before they first took psychiatric drugs.
I think people should be aware that some things can happen, some difficult things. And I might also want to say that, or this won’t happen, this won’t happen—it could happen, but it could not happen. So, to have an openness about it. Luckily, I went slow enough, and I hadn’t been on long enough. I don’t think that I never had any really any withdrawal effects, but I’m sure lots of people in this room have had some pretty severe withdrawal.
I’ve done really well getting off the Zoff, but when I was taking my tramadol to negate some of that physical effect of coming off it, I ran out of my tramadol. I was ticks and everything. I was doing this, and many times I think people jump back on their medications ’cause they can’t cross that bridge. I just wanted to add to that how we deal with the physical effects over time of having the damage that the meds have done to us. So, if anyone has ideas about, ’cause even ten years later, I still feel physical damage.
The most important thing for me to move through, especially the acute withdrawal in the beginning, was finding meaning in what I was feeling. And I like would visualize, like, the acute withdrawal I had. I mean, I had that horrible fuzziness and electricity through my body. I had migraines. I had weird smells coming out of my body. I mean, I just was sitting. I wrote down a list of some of the things, and it was scary. It was confusing. It was scary. It was agonizing. But when I started to visualize it as representing my body healing itself, like this agony that I’m in is action—my body is taking action to heal itself. And it’s like that gave me this determination to just keep going through it.
Anything that we do for our wellness in general to deal with anxiety or restlessness or sleep, all those wellness tools that we have are also useful in the withdrawal process. And being patient, having somebody who’s there to say, “Look, time is on your side here. Let’s see if the withdrawal doesn’t subside if you wait.” And then sometimes that’s what people find is that they are going a little bit too fast, that maybe they need to start back up on their dosage and go a little more slowly if the withdrawal symptoms aren’t tolerable.
Like everything else we’ve been talking about, it’s very individual. So, some people will be able to handle the physical pain. I don’t—I want to say better, but it won’t affect them as much, or they’ll be able to move through it. And other people, it just be excruciating. And I still today, almost like almost two years off, I still have withdrawal effects, but I’m at peace with them, and I have faith that they’ll get better in time.
This is really where we can help each other because different people have found things about different kinds of supplements: GABA or fish oil or Vitamin B or amino acids. And a lot of that, well, it’s hard to say, is it placebo? Is it actually effective? But that’s where we need each other because the research isn’t being done.
I remember feeling thumping pains in my abdomen, and I knew it was toxicity, and it was painful. It was annoying as well. And I remember I came off drugs, psych drugs, inside a prison, so there’s not very many holistic opportunities there. And so, a friend of mine, who Junebug was his nickname, and we’d walk around the yard, which was exercise for us to move that toxicity, that poisoning. But I went to—I’d have my family send packages of herbal teas. I remember trying to flush my system. I remember the pain lessening over time and the thumpy.
Lessening over time, you can get few vitamins. And I just decided I had to do this. Another thing I did was I began to run around the yard. You just run and keep running in circles. The sweat—I just, this is just stuff I felt in my soul that the toxicity was moving out of my body as I wean myself off the Zyprexa and depote.
[Music]
It was now time to say our goodbyes. And because we had opened up a taboo subject and revealed ourselves deeply, we had bonded. So we found that a few closing words were in order.
I’m grateful for all the love I received from the people in this room. The training made me feel comfortable enough to really do some deep sharing. I’m grateful for all of your stories because it’s the evidence that it’s possible to come off psych drugs. But I’m grateful for everybody who was here because I’ve only known not even a handful of people who have gone off their meds. I’m in the process of doing it, and I know it can be done. I have been more encouraged about it and more reinforced about it by hearing everybody’s story here.
I’m grateful for the information that’s been provided because many people come to me and ask me questions about how to reduce or come off their medications. It’s been difficult for me to find information to give them. It’s really wonderful to be able to say, “Gosh, I’m doing this thing, and it’s really, really hard. It’s really, really difficult. It’s really, really challenging.” But it’s also moving in the direction of my truth. So even though it’s hard and difficult and painful, I still want to do it.
I’m grateful for the dark times in my life just as well as I’m grateful for the good times in my life. Because what I have found somewhere along the line, the horrible things that I’ve experienced, someone crosses my life who needs that experience that I’ve gone through to help them to get through. And that helps carry me through.
There were times in my life when I didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t think I could be in this world. And I really have a lot of gratitude for all of you for being part of that vision—that those of us who’ve been told that we’re sick or we’re crazy or there’s something wrong with us, that we’re not. We’re human beings too.
I’m thankful for all the testimonies, and I’ll remember you when I’m going through my experience trying to get off the Abilify. Just being here feels like my past and my future are kind of like coming together into this integration. I’m just grateful that we’ve got the right people here. We have it all going on, and just that I have that confidence that wherever we try to take this, the answers will come.
There’s people like this all over the place, and we can come together and start to build this. How I view this right now is we have a bunch of bricks on the ground, and we’re just starting to cement and build our foundation. It’s going to continue. We’re just going to build it. We’re going to build it in our communities, and we’re going to build it throughout the country and elsewhere.
Thank you, all of you. And if anyone has—yeah, if anyone has anything you’d like to say or share, I’m going to start.
[Music]
Trying definitely learned a lot from each and every single person here. It’s been awesome. Where was everybody when I was being upped on the Prozac? Where were you?
[Music]
Guys, it’s definitely been a pleasure. I learned a lot, and it’s nice to know that our state’s not the only state that’s [ __ ] up in the system. You may want to edit.
[Music]
I was just remembering when I was locked up in the hospital, all there was was just a brochure that talked about human rights. This is so much better. I just can’t help but think of the people out there right now who are fighting this fight and the millions and millions and millions of people who don’t even realize what’s happening.
I say a lot of words like liberty, justice, freedom, and human rights, but this is the most peaceful I’ve—I haven’t felt peace and peacefulness in a long time. So it’s because of you.
[Music]
[Music]