Accommodations

 Hello everyone, I do not post on this blog often but I thought of another interesting topic, which has to do with disability accommodations. I take train rides from New York to South Carolina twice a year, and the trip is 14 hours.  I like riding on trains, and it has been a blessing to travel. Usually I buy the cheapest refundable seats, but for one trip during the pandemic I splurged for a "roommette", for about 200 or 300 dollars.  That was a good deal, and if you buy the larger room or sleeper car, it costs 600 or 700 dollars. The roommette was really fun and a great luxury that I couldn't afford to keep doing just for fun. 

On my recent trips, I had a hard time enduring the whole trip and started thinking I might have to start taking a plane.  But there is a reason I don't take plane rides in the first place. I think it's my mental health plus the way sometimes mental illness is the wiser thing.  Like what are people thinking to fly in the sky like that.

So anyway what I am dealing with now is declining health and mental status from trauma and illness, and one option is for my sister to fly to New York and accompany me back on a plane to South Carolina.  But that is not that easy either.
 
So finally I cracked the code and realized that the solution is to get the roomette option for my next few trips if I am able to.  Well I never choose that because of the money, but my mom might be able to help me if the deal is in a certain range.
 
So finally we get to the mental health topic for this blog, which is the fact that the luxury option I could not indulge in for 40 trips is the appropriate "disability accomodation."  And I think this has some implications for our whole suffering society.  I think it has to do with the reasons some people have for not helping suffering people sometimes, or resenting it when other people charitabliy are given what they need to survive. It's just that there is a similar zone of how everyone would like to be taken care of, and hospitals and hotels have some things in common.  And where does the money come from, and when do you make the call when you can't hang on anymore and have to receive the comfort that you or others have turned down in whatever way before.  All I do is mention the example, because I think the richness of the topic is actually inclusive of almost all divisions between the servers and the served, the sick and well, working and not working, and every variety of needs and wants.

Actual People

Hi everyone, this topic is three-fold: letting autistic people be themselves, achievement vs sainthood, and…here it is… personality disorders and self actualization.  So my question is, if someone has a personality warp of any kind and for any reason, would they not be fully and unapologetically that way upon a successful complete effort to contribute all they can to their society?  In other words, are actualized sinners “actually” quirky but whole people in a good way?

I am writing about this because in my psychiatry notes from a hospitalization I just finished, it listed a differential diagnosis of what my schizophrenia condition isn’t, but still related to.  And there was a listing of personality features that made me think all day about it and feel mad sometimes, frankly.

It really makes me think of three blog post topics, which are:

1) playing to your strengths as someone with autism

2) a common difference between south and north which has to do with maximizing potential vs. avoiding sin

3) the possibility or even probability of some people exhibiting both self actualization and personality disorder features.

People might already be mad just reading that, but I think what I am about to say is freaking good material at a psychology level that a lot of people could learn from.

All my life, I have felt more comfortable being in front of people and speaking to an audience instead of small talk. But sadly, for reasons I still don’t understand, I am frequently and consistently oppressed into constantly being in scenarios based on my weaknesses. As I navigated a very social life with a million conversations and 400,000 customers in a busy bookstore, I developed a deliberate and effective communication pattern that matches that social preference of being the up front speaker. I chose to incessantly talk about myself and be the entertainer in terms of personality instead of the mutual connector. I did give people their turn too, so I wasn’t just a selfish jerk, but I do think that my way of life is viewed by some as narcissism. That does make me mad, and I do think people are wrong. But I think I am concluding now that if people want to see it that way, they can. It can seem selfish and attention seeking to make that choice to be yourself.  It can come across as proud, selfish, and just plain bad. But I actually would prescribe my strategy to other people who are shy in the ways I am, and say that in the bigger picture I was less selfish to offer my true talents to as many people as possible in my already oppressed state.

So now the mention of sin. This is also an interesting topic related to personalities, and some people for some reason see themselves as above having a discussion like that. However, many people do address their own foibles with a religious discipline and a micro strategy of fighting sinful tendencies.  I have complained before about churches caring too much about scrupulous self improvement that becomes its own form of self centeredness.  But it can also be a legitimate choice that does yield generous results as much as any other achievement.

And then to zoom out of that discussion a little bit, or maybe zoom in, I think about the differences in America between north and south, liberal and evangelical, democrat or republican, and I just think there are multiple approaches that people emphasized while living their lives, and each can result in a good harvest and already have.  I would say some people have chosen to do well in the big picture, to focus on gifts and achievement, and be oneself as an imperfect person, and to max out everything, including their worst side. And others have taken the time to turn inward and wage a battle against their sinful nature, disciplining the private thoughts and life, refusing to brag and gossip or criticize, be negative, or whatever else people try hard at.  I found the former thing to be more mentally healthy, and had to do so while church people looked on with unhidden disapproval sometimes.

That is all I will say about that, it is very interesting, lots of people have lots of friends, facebook was a cool phenomenon and display of all kinds of work, plus smartphones for billions of people, and our country and world has done well in many ways.

So okay, that was the second topic, and now finally, here is the Phd material, a worthy discussion for any psychologist at any level: Are personality disorders possible or even inevitable for fully “self actualized” people? Is our only choice on earth to be productive sinners? So might as well go with it?  Also, how different is sainthood and righteousness from self actualization? Does a person literally have to give up the self for that in a way that prevents full development?  Maybe it is different for different people.  What if your actualized self would be a murderer?  Everyone has to manage their behavior, even if it is just to get stuff they want.  Would a self actualized person have all the personality disorders instead of none?

I have a lot of friends, I am mostly secure with my socializing and had a nice life.  Now I have dementia and can’t read books any more or pay attention to whole conversations.  But here was another blog post, and I know it is good material.  My score on the global assessment of functioning is a 40 out of 100 right now, but this blog post is true and part of my life’s calling.

Righteousness Privilege

 link to blog post about "righteousness privilege"

Expect betrayal from the social work schools.

 A lot of insurance dollars come from DSM classifications for mental disorders but many social work schools are well into a transition from their once life-saving medical support to a new stance of tearing up thousands of people’s mental health as their altered mission of so called racial justice. Some of it is kind of obvious but when you are actually in social work school it can be slow to dawn on you.  You just think that everyone would be there to help people but there is a “white fragility” narrative that includes unexpected rejoicing at the one in four mental health crisis and even better than that, increasing rates of autism behind a lot of the new white poverty.  But white poverty is actually not discussed that much as the people barking at you to not touch their hair literally are petted like animals by the liberal curriculum and then sicced like dogs onto conservatives. I wouldn’t go for it myself, but promoting anti-white racism is actually one of the main recruitment strategies to attract the diverse student population they are so proud of, so some perspectives are already established beforehand and then reinforced with the tuition money of people who don’t get scholarships for assuming everyone else is biased. How much detail would be good to share in a post like this? In a way, despite all the obscure reference citations and dense articles in an out-of-reach curriculum, it’s not that complicated.  It is middle school level harassment.  But when you are there, you can’t help but believe some of what they teach, and it is normal to suspect yourself of being racist as you risk your life every day to go to internships in dangerous neighborhoods full of the now government funded drug dealers and child abusers.  However, the lies eventually wear off and you figure out that it’s not so much that you are racist, per se, but that you are white… and they are racist. “Ha ha,” all the people who aren’t reading this blog say.  “This is exactly what we were trying to tell you.”  But unfortunately, resentment like this is exactly what I paid for when I earned the 80-thousand-dollar dirty buddhism license that I can’t ever use because my social work school taught my whole city to discriminate against me on the basis of… everything about me.

"No Can't Do, Mr. McFeely"

 Spectrums have become popular in academia during recent times to explain complicated things, especially mental disorders involving a 3D wrinkled blob of jello. I actually think it's not that useful of a construct, even for autism and especially for bipolar disorder, which already had a good name of "manic depression."  Kay Redfield Jameson was by far the leading scholar and published a huge encyclopedia by that name, but almost exactly after she did, rich white child abusing doctors who had not yet discovered opioid drug dealing opportunities started peddling a new  name of "bipolar disorder." Of course it seemed like genius, since happy is simply the exact opposite of sad, isn't it?  I mean, some people don't learn that until they are four years old.  But anyway, I just want to add another spectrum to the mix, which I think sometimes really is measurable by degrees, and that is the "I don't care" / "I can't care" spectrum.  It has to do with people only being able to take so much, and how some people's "don't seem to care" is really a matter of having cared so much that they maxed out.  And there is simply nothing left.  I'm not suggesting that everyone start saying "I can't care," when they can't come through on whatever the next demand is for their attention, because I think that can still hurt the people needing help.  But when people are assessing how much to blame themselves for certain limits of strength and heart, then it might be useful for them to know themselves that their feeling of not caring enough actually might have a mix of "can't" in it, and they might be the ones in need.

Icings

     Well everyone, it's almost Halloween, and a nice time to let everyone know something I believe about myself which is that I believe I am a person who could have turned out to be a serial killer or some kind of monster predator. It's not really about mental illness, though that does add another dimension to it, but it's really just that I have always known I have a mean streak, and a sick streak, and a humor streak that could have been combined to make me a really bad person who could have ended up being an infamous criminal who hurt people in "creative" ways.  
      I have a lot of really cool friends who watch horror movies with no problem, and make jokes like "I am going to kill you," and stuff like that, which may sound sick on paper but are actually things people say when they are securely in their own mind and heart not a threat to anyone and know it.  But I have not usually made jokes like that.  I laugh at some sick jokes sometimes, and am probably posting a funny cartoon with this post from that category, but I have been all too careful not to say threats, or to indulge too much in certain kinds of writing, like true crime and horror movies. It is often the more innocent people who can enjoy learning about that stuff, or who can read it without feeding an actual appetite for destruction. And a lot of people are scared to watch scary movies because then they can't go to sleep without worrying about every creak in their house.  But I can't watch scary movies for a different reason, which is that I am scared I will turn out like one of the bad guys. I just know that in my soul there has always been a risk of that, and that my sense of humor and slight anger, and even innocent curiosity about what would happen if I did turn to the dark side, just cant be trusted to the point that I am careful not to feed that wolf, as that proverb goes. Because I think I might not just have a wolf to feed, but some kind of gremlin.  Anyway, I read joke books like the Onion and feed friendly imaginary animals and have turned out to be a children's book writer.  It is because I decided to follow Jesus Christ starting in middle school, and I looked for ways to be a good person.   Honestly I went overboard sometimes, which is not recommended, and I have annoyed a lot of people and been an active part in my family's terrible social problems.  But I also haven't viciously torn people apart, either in their hearts or literally by eating their flesh on video and chopping up people with a witty pattern of mysterious letters and a blood treasure hunt linked to terrorism.
    It is something to think about, and a related topic has to do with what is actually horror.  A lot of time the real horrors in life have to do with people feeling left out, marriages falling apart, failing at something because people were too hard on you, and thousands of other heartbreaks that would never be the topics of blood and gore movies. So even the most innocent people who know that the local news crime pages are not about them, should do everything they can to guard other people's hearts from normal daily crushings.   Because those of us who read that same news and wonder if the police are about to knock on our door, don't need any more problems either, even if it is just a fast food worker leaving off the sauce from our lunch break order, or a facebook post that didn't get liked enough, or if you are going to make cupcakes but a grocery store sells steak knives in the bakery section.

Assessment Scales for the New Millenium

I have found that a good way to assess your mental health status as compared to some kind of idea of normalcy is to think about what most people would have to go through to feel as bad as you feel.  And for mentally ill people, it is often something like, they would have to run over their own dog in the drive way and then give a speech naked in front of their church and forced to eat the dog guts before then being attacked on video. And people might say, Gosh, that is sick, but really it is sick when people feel that bad every moment for years at a time and yet are treated worse in life every day and punished for it. So some of those same people show up at church or work and get told that they should stop complaining until they have real problems like cancer or grief. That right there is something for everyone to grieve about because it is a historical loss for the country and church that many people had to put up with that.  But anyway on a personal note I am going to the hospital soon and am going to tell them that Nancy Pelosi authorized my euthanization.

podcast links

 Hi everyone, here is a link to a podcast I was on about spirituality and mental health: 

Also here are links to my e-books at smashwords and barnes and noble online

Podcast: 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2sOKLuUaLWyjQ63nUFl29T?si=WZSpcuubQiKm8orHX5DI8Q

here is the podcast on apple:

Listen to Refried Bean from Open Hands on Apple Podcasts 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-hands/id1514293593#episodeGuid=https%3A%2F%2Fopenhands.podomatic.com%2Fentry%2F2020-08-10T13_37_10-07_00

Racism CBT pie chart

 

Racism Pie Chart

 

bad slices: systemic, privilege from history, appropriation and betrayal, personal discrimination and ignorance

good slices: education and appreciation, service and giving, friendship and justice, mutual suffering

 

other: OCD

Well everyone, this post is a little out of the ordinary, but I want to share something that really helped me have a more reasonable picture of my own guilt and innocence in regards to racism and the accusations that are mixed in our culture.  I am very affected by it and have had to face the issue a lot while navigating life in New York City during social work school, volunteering, and living in my neighborhood where I am a minority but still part of a powerful majority in the surrounding culture of United States, at least so far. Racism can be as simple as not discriminating, or it can be as complicated as a whole economy and history.  

 

 Anyway, it has driven me crazy as I constantly either mentally defend myself, change allegiances in my mind, manage mental illness symptoms, and try to avoid hurting people.  

 

So I just wanted to share a tool that helped me not keep blaming myself for all the world’s problems in an irrational way. 

 

This is adapted from CBT pie chart ideas that help people avoid “all or nothing” logical mistakes and “black and white thinking.”  I think some people have had to think literally about black and white for all their lives and they want for other people to also have to deal with the racial suffering.  So in a way I will gladly take my share of it, but in another way, I think I have to literally draw the line and say okay, I am not going to throw my life away because of guilt and I am going to try to find some sanity in my life and social participation.

 

So I made a racism pie chart for myself, to see where I am bad or good, and to try to get at least a snapshot of a view that is more complex than just thinking I am bad or good, which usually makes me feel pretty bad.  

 

The yellow dots are just on the sections where it is positive things that can help people.  For this chart, you can see that I am probably just over the majority line in terms of being better at helping than hurting, though the OCD slice could sometimes be a problem instead of a good sign of caring about how my thoughts affect other people. 

 

I don’t think this chart is exactly representative of me but it is a sample of how people could assess themselves and see that really, racism probably is a major problem that needs to be personally fought against as much as possible every day, but also is part of a complex life where goodness is bound to prevail.

 

I just want to say, too, that is chart is not exactly accurate for me and just an idea that I am sharing for other people who might have some more extreme slices in either direction as the ones I have mentioned in this chart.

 

One other thing to notice about it is to think about which things are the things I have control over. I have a lot of control over thoughts and judgment but not total control. I have a lot of control over what I read and media but not total control. I do not have much control over history but I have some say in what I do with my benefits from it. I have some control of system participation but some is kind of forced compared to how some of the good slices would shrink if I refused to participate by going to jail or killing myself.

 

I think the slice I did for resentments and ignorance is actually a bigger percentage than what I have in real life but I think this ends up being kind of the defining slice where people really need to try to overcome that side of themselves while working hard to expand some of the other positive slices.

A funny way to make OCD problems worse

Well hi everyone, today I was going to post an e-book on my e-book site but decided to wait.  And for a while I did not know what to do, and I started eating some fortune cookies that I ordered from Wal-Mart during the quarantine, and found that it was kind of a funny thing to do during a spell of OCD.  The first fortune I read said “bide your time and success will be soon” or something like that.  Which, if I applied it to my decision process about posting the book or not, it really could be interpreted either way. It also adds another mental health challenge that would have to do with religion problems, where I would have to figure out the sane way to think about how fortune cookies probably aren’t necessarily a message from God, and probably not automatically the opposite of a message from God either.  And thankfully my OCD was not that bad so I didn’t really have trouble deciding whether it was okay to eat fortune cookies in the first place like is that linked to a wrong kind of magical thinking.  Anyway that is kind of funny.  And I texted two different friends to ask their opinion of the book cover and then had to think about well what if I had not texted them.  But now I feel total peace about waiting to publish the book later. I think I waited past the original planned day for the other two in this set, too, so that makes me feel more certain. Well have a nice day everyone.

Distorted Realities

Well everyone, here is another topic that I could just start rambling about when there really could be a nice article about it.  But I will still just say the simple thing which is about CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The idea is that people have “cognitive distortions” where negative things in their mind have become exaggerated and there are illogical thoughts that cause bad emotions.  And if people are restored to the more reasonable truth about things, then some of their pain would go away. It is a famous therapy from being so effective and it is interesting to read about during times of relative sanity. But I just want to say that I think sometimes the distortions in question are actually created in reality, and people’s catastrophic overgeneralizations, such as “nothing I do is good enough,” or things like jumping to a conclusion where you think that things can’t possibly go right, have actually been established for real in peoples’ lives.  So when they make those complaints, there might be some truth to it because of other people’s bad treatment.  And because of one of the actual bad cognitive habits of self-blame, the interpretation of people’s thoughts as automatically being wrong becomes another layer of fallacy where the patient is taking the blame for things that other people have had more to do with than anyone realizes.  I think that CBT can still help for people with trauma or stress, because basically these distortions have become learned, so the beliefs themselves can be untangled to bring relief.  However, if this component where the truth of the problems does not get understood, then to me the CBT itself becomes both another set of distortions, and another unreasonable aspect of reality that pressures people’s mental strength into cracking. Do you guys see what I mean? I am saying that every single one of those illogical habits from the CBT lists are absurdities that can take place in real life. And to assume that a mentally ill person has simply misperceived their reality to the point of insanity might actually be a misperception that itself would be seen as the most damaging distortion, other than the truly outrageously preposterously warped and twisted circumstances that cause people to break in permanent ways.

The Irony of Lacking Accommodations

Something I have experienced that is very common and defining for a lot of people with mental illness is the phenomenon of mostly doing what I am supposed to while a lot of sane people near me don’t do what they are supposed to and rely on everyone assuming that I am the one being bad because I have mental illness. Many of my friends are heroically and conspicuously not guilty of that offense, but that common problem should not be underestimated as an extreme source of additional damage to already suffering people. The fact is that when people’s brains have various problems, ranging from slight quirks and imbalances to severe damage, it creates a challenge to keep previous standards, and especially to match the ways other people are used to living and expect everyone to conform to. So, we appear to be habitually in error but are often spending a hundred times the effort of most people to do our responsibilities and help others. Meanwhile, people with a fraction of our challenges flail around without even an inkling that there might be a worthy mission or even basic decency to dedicate their own rich life to. These kinds of mistakes can be grown out of and unlearned, and people with disabilities themselves are often the most likely people to see through external trappings of social norms and superficial tickets to acceptance. However, the true blindness to right and wrong remains a problem that will eventually be reckoned with on a scale of eternal exposure and significance. 

It simply is the definition of injustice to spend years accommodating other people’s ignorance and selfishness while they refuse to accommodate my disability that is already reduced 80 percent by my own symptom management. And then that I would show up to church as a depressed person and be viewed automatically as morally inferior while already putting up with an irony that cruel in my daily life is an embarrassment too unspeakable and shameful to represent a whole culture. And yet it may never be lived down.

Think about that for a second in terms of accommodation that supposedly is required by law.  In a way, it is probably measurable, whether people know it or not.  And if the reality is that people who have it pretty easy can’t adjust their lives and treatment of others to offer a mere 5-10 percent of patience, but people like me are literally adapting to life with severe constant impairment that requires an 80 percent change in how we would prefer to behave, or even more than a hundred percent and exponential if you consider accumulative effects of things like attendance, staying alive while suicidal, and working at all when the pay is a third of what we should be making, then the question falls back to the healthy people who might be not only refusing a minimal amount of effort to include all people, but might actually be doing worse than that and spending close to a hundred percent of their whole life not caring at all about their impact on any part of the whole world.  That can be seen as a spiritual problem to be pitied above and injury or illness, but I think in the long run, it is more likely to show itself as a moral problem that goes tolerated far too much and with a cost that exceeds any basic consideration that the whole sum of disabled people have ever begged for in a state of rejection and torture.

Three Trees

Well everyone, I am posting this post on my mental health blog, because I think the thing I want to talk about has to do with a mental illness symptom that I have decided to give in to on purpose.  It is kind of an OCD symptom, and the resulting effect puts me in a certain category that I usually try to avoid, which is “eccentricity.”  Basically, as I feel sad to take down my awesome Christmas tree and another smaller Christmas tree, I have decided to replace those decorations with three fake Christmas trees from K-mart.  One of them is already up and decorated, and tomorrow I am hoping to pick up another one that I ordered a few days ago.  I will just move all the lights and ornaments from my other tree, and it will be in my room year round.  I love my apartment, but it is kind of small, and I do think that having three Christmas trees as the main light sources is something unusual in the way that would cause many normal people to have their sanity questioned.  Well my mental illness is usually very much over all the lines into mental hospital territory, and I personally try not to be in a zone that seems more like a “just a plain old weirdo” category.  I’ve just never wanted to be a “crazy cat lady,” or one of those people who might be kind of gifted, or might just put too much stock in New Age crystals and the occult.  Well of course a few Christmas trees here and there is not the same as that, but I have to say that to me, this allowance for OCD to have its way does in fact knock me either down a few notches or up a few notches to be a classic, undeniable oddball, much like certain Christmas ornaments that can be purchased at the 99 cent store in my neighborhood if anyone else wants to celebrate Christmas in a possibly excessive way.