Gordon McManus & Jerome Carson: From Communism to Schizophrenia and Beyond:

One Man’s Long March to Recovery

Peter Chadwick.Chapter 8: From teddy boy to teddy bear, from barbells to bar-belle: On growth via psychosis, sin and love. (Peter Chadwick).

Peter was brought up in the North of England in a tough family environment. This association with mind-wrecking people continued until his breakdown at age 33. Two things: he ‘wrote himself well’ and also he challenges the notion of being ‘proud to be mad.’ He is uncomfortable with a society where everything is a dimension of competition. Peter is prepared to make an example of himself as a member of a marginalised and stigmatised group. He feels his illness may have been ‘all politics.’ The politics of a weightlifting boxer being a transvestite. He is now, age 65, happily married. However his first 20 years were like a training for the army, and he learned that nothing was lower than a poof. The conflict was between the army-style upbringing and the feminine. His psychotic episode was in 1979 at age 33. He suffered persecutory delusions from 1974 to 1979 after being outed as a trans. He had learned from the Nazi-style bullies in the 6th form that they really would go out of their way to attack pansies. He had become a ‘bar-belle’ going out with men. Sex and gender fascists meant: If you’re not like us we will destroy you. His overactive imagination led him to think they were out to get him: We didn’t beat Hitler with poofs like him. His psychotic episode was a single event, with no relapses. His wife thinks transvestism is ‘just a laugh’. He was able to indulge his femininity through his academia. He says you have to reconstruct a personal narrative. ‘Man as flower and shaman’ was acceptable in

the academic world. After the psychotic episode, he advocates for JAM (Job, Accommodation and Money) (cf Rachel Perkins?). He met his wife and medication did not turn him into something he wasn’t, it removed the barriers to him becoming himself. He can talk about anything with his wife and close friends. In short story writing he gets back at the Gestapo-like teddy boys at 6th form, portraying them as shady characters. He has a good relationship with his medics. He uses a variable drug dose (haloperidol) and takes only infrequent drug holidays. He is wary of confirmation bias, where research is done mainly to confirm thoughts and beliefs. Also there is JTC bias – jumping to conclusions. He wants to get away from research on deficits and dysfunctions. However in the early stages of recovery he needed to relearn social skills. This was in a psychiatric aftercare hostel. He was lucky to have the chance to get back into work gradually, from a few hours on to full time. He eventually worked many hours and this may have a long lasting effect on his health. He avoided like the plague, street drugs, hard drugs, and binging on alcohol. He avoided competitiveness and sought self realisation and he wrote himself well. It’s good to have a handle on creativity, spirituality etc, and if you are proud to be mad you will never get out of it. If you have friends and family, you need to think what your ‘marvellous manic madness’ is really doing. He finds that most of the psychologists he has read are materialist atheists and concentrate on brain, disavowing mind. This is like ‘intellectual machismo’ like the teddy boys bullying at school. No soft thinking for us! His growth has been facilitated by his hatred for them, and he finds places where bullies do not stay. This elaborates his own identity. He listens to the voice within and says ‘It’s your recovery, not anyone else’s, it’s your action, not anyone else’s.’ This threatens the men on the building site, football terraces, and in the forces. Recovery is something to work at. Peter lists R D Laign’s

comment that psychiatry is a ‘vocabulary of denigration’ and Gergen’s ‘discourse of deficit.’ Peter says it’s necessary to avoid coarse, boorish, blunt people. Artists can bring alive what crass people may have scorned and suppressed. It took Peter two years from breakdown to get to part-time work and five years to get to full time. He had to refind himself in the mundane everyday world of work. Not everyone is suited to cognitive procedures, some therapists now include person-centred approaches in this. Fluctuations in fortune are with us everywhere on this Earth, this we need to be prepared for. Peter describes his journey as decadent and that breakdown might be expected. Peter has now a heart condition that may shorten his life...If Peter goes to an afterlife, he is looking forward to speaking with his father.

Chapter 9: Does a psychotic episode ever do anybody any good? (Peter K Chadwick).Peter looks at the economic costs of schizophrenia and asks about any gains from a psychotic episode. We need helpful discourses, not to demoralise people. Mad Pride – what about the effects on those close to sufferers? Medication plays a part for Peter personally. Stats: There are at least 24 million people worldwide with schizophrenia, WHO says it’s #2 in the burden of global disease, treatment cost in USA in 2001 was $34 billion or 1/3 of healthcare spending, life expectancy is reduced by 10 years, many attempt suicide at least once in their lifetime, 10-12 % die from suicide. Unemployment is rife for sufferers as it is for carers. 2004 drug expenditure in US was $20 billion. Parents give much support to schizophrenic children, twice as much financially as to other children. Crises can give self-knowledge to sufferers, some mention a profound creative and spiritual experience. Strengthening and positive discourses are appearing in service user narratives. The

focus on positive aspects of psychosis can be empowering and hope-giving. Some sufferers are demeaned by psychosis and cannot let go of the experience. Shingler writes of the ‘1 in 100’ and says episodes may enhance creativity, and that sufferers are receptive to paranormal. This involves the amplification of the uncanny and the meaningfulness of synchronicity. This can be dismissed by professionals as ‘hippy 1960’s talk.’ Shingler writes of the growth experience of his 13 episodes and that psychiatry is damaging to enlightenment. He is extra sensitive to coincidences and sees universal or cosmic meaning in Milky Way bars and Wisdom toothbrushes. He turns these perceptions into art. Art out of psychosis. Scientific psychiatry puts a realist view on the world as ‘truth’ but Peter mentions **social constructionist scenarios which point to many other possible interpretations of reality, including Shingler’s. Other ways of influencing policy and practice are possible from a social construct point of view, rather than saying everything is ‘objective’ and to be measured. Mad Pride sees positivity in psychosis. So feelings of wonder and terror (cf Anthony Scally) can even outstrip the alienation of daily life – and should not be dismissed as delusion by a psychiatrist. Alienation comes about in a success-striving society. There is a claim that madness has to be reclaimed from scientists as the new rock and roll. As a civil liberties movement, Mad Pride needs to recognise responsibilities. Being high can lead to supreme creativity but also to outbursts. Also the high can be followed by a deep low which can be made worse by medication. One patient says she was elated by psychosis and yet knew she was kidding herself. Can psychosis have a long lasting adventure quality? Certainly after psychosis there can be creativity such as poetry and art-making. These can be conduits from patient to the public. Laing claimed that a completed psychotic journey can mean being better than before. In non-Western societies

schizophrenic people are looked on as healers and shamen. Some patients get well and then get weller. Peter mentions the benefits of medication to him. Psychosis can lead to the making of a discourse to fit people’s situations.

schizophrenic people are looked on as healers and shamen. Some patients get well and then get weller. Peter mentions the benefits of medication to him. Psychosis can lead to the making of a discourse to fit people’s situations.