2 articles I like on Breakdowns and Upbringing and Psychosis

Understanding Madness as Life Management Breakdown by Brian Davey

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Breakdowns.htm

I like this so much I'd like to cut and paste the whole (short) article here. It's one of about interpretations of breakdowns.

The second one is from the Lecture to World Congress of Social Psychiatry, Hamburg, June 1994 by the same author.

Upbringing and Psychosis

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Psychosis.htm

Here's one snip I like. The author puts his personal experience in brackets. I like the rest of both of these articles and I think many people who are going through a hard time might have something to learn from either of these pieces.

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(One of my greatest frustrations eventually lay in trying to communicate my developing theory of madness - since this was mostly ignored by local medical psychiatrists. One of them said 'We don't have to listen to him, he's only a patient'. Others listened but it has made little difference to their practice. I knew I was on to something important and was desperate for the breakthrough when I hoped they would realise the value of what I was saying. The fact that they ignored what I had to say aroused powerful feelings that became too frustrating. The anger spilled over into all my relationships and periods in which I would withdraw from everyone. In isolation nearly all thinking is fantasy as there is no feedback to reality-check in conditions of intense aroused emotion. Later I saw I was rather 'father/teacher fixated' as I was appealing to local psychiatrists to support my attack on their work. I wanted them to accept me even as I attacked them - acting out repressed feelings as rebellious son/pupil. This was a reproduction of, and a failure to go beyond, chronically unsatisfactory childhood relationships. It was Professor Romme, who did see the value of my work, who advised me, very wisely, to address my ideas to those who would listen, not to those who would not).

"

Sadly I disagree with Prof Romme about presenting work to those who won't listen but then I'm a miserable loser who's pretty unhappy because of his own misadventures and Prof Romme...well...he's a professor. His work has been instrumental in getting other people to listen to the voices of patients, people who otherwise wouldn't bother to even look a severely mentally ill person in the eye nor consider their experiences to have any meaning.