Recovery Origins Blog 2018

Blogger would not allow this to be pasted in a comment/reply...so I had to create a new blog post. This is the kind of chair that Natasha was restrained in on February 3.  Here is a spit hood. It has a mesh front to allow airflow, but when you are agitated, and overheating, I suspect it would feel "close" and make breathing more difficult.

Though in some circles I am Dr. / Professor Barrett, with a Ph.D., there are other contexts where I hold highly stigmatized statuses. In a medical context, I am a person with psychiatric disability, and even more stigmatized, I am a person who has lyme disease...also known as a "lyme loonie." Because of my life experience, I feel deeply about our history, the lives of people with MI, and the origins of recovery movement within psychiatric rehabilitation. I teach because I think it is important to expose providers to a different way of thinking, or a perspective they may not have considered. No approach or theoretical orientation will apply in every situation (e.g., therapeutic use of hallucinations), but as a person who has skin in this psychiatric game, I also feel strongly that some approaches are more consistent with recovery than others. When I am symptomatic, I want someone to listen and validate my experience. I want to feel emotionally safe.

(READ THE KARON ARTICLE ON Bb -- FOUND IN MODULE 9 -- THEN READ THIS AND POST) Historically, people with schizophrenia have been told that their symptoms (i.e., hallucinations) need to be medicated away. "Once you are stable, then we can address your other needs..." This week, as we consider deinstitutionalization and people's rights in the community, often it is hallucinations that mark people as "other" or "crazy." Hallucinations can be very stigmatizing. The recovery movement offers a different narrative. One does not have to be "stable" and "symptom-free" before recovery can begin, quite the opposite in fact. The community is a place one can recover and learn to advocate for rights. One can have symptoms and live well in the community. What if hallucinations were recast as unconscious needs? What if people in the community, family, and support professionals viewed hallucinations not as an aberration, but as communication?

Pineland Center New Gloucester, Maine When was this "asylum" opened, and what did it look like? Did it follow Kirkbride's design?  The Pineland Center opened in 1908 under the name: “Maine School for the Feebleminded” and closed in 1996. It did have many features of Kirkbride’s design, particularly that it was established in a very rural part of the state where patients were very removed from the general population. The Pineland Center was designed to be self-sufficient in many ways. What was this institution's original intent?  The intent was to house and care for society’s disabled population, although this incorporated a wide variety of people with disabilities including intellectual disabilities and mental illness. The intent was to provide care to this group of people while providing purpose and education as everyone lived and worked there, including farming which was a big part of the Pineland Center.  This working farm was designed to be profitable w

I have so many intense feelings after listening to Howard Dully's account of what happened to him. At 12 years old, he received a transorbital lobotomy, because his step-mother convinced an eager doctor that the boy was unmanageable. Truth was, he had just lost his mom, and the adults had told him she had just "gone away." A loving Mom was replaced by this stepmother who was, at best, unkind to Howard.  Of course the cause of the problems was "Howard was a difficult child." That was the story the stepmother and Freeman told themselves.  It seems Howard's Dad was too disengaged to question his new wife's motives and/or judgment. The child, in this case, was labelled and treated yet was NOT the source of the problem, in my opinion. Grief. Loss. Emotional abuse. No one in his "corner." - these are the things that I believed were causing Howard's issues (if he even had any!). Do you think that this happens today? If so, give an example -- but

When was this Asylum opened and what did it look like? Butler Hospital was founded in 1844 as Rhode Island's first exclusively mental health hospital. Industrialist Cyrus Butler donated heavily to the hospital, and it was named in his honor. Hospital was constructed in 1870, and that November 118 mental patients were admitted - 65 charity cases from Butler Asylum, 25 from town poor houses and 28 from asylums in Vermont and Massachusetts where the state had sent them. Hospital was constructed in 1870, and that November 118 mental patients were admitted - 65 charity cases from Butler Asylum, 25 from town poor houses and 28 from asylums in Vermont and Massachusetts where the state had sent them.  In 1888, the General Assembly appropriated funds for a new almshouse to replace the frame building that had been originally built for the insane. Known now as the Center Building, the Almshouse was also designed by Stone, Carpenter and Wilson. Its name acknow