The dissolving of schizophrenia

Journal entry. September 17, 2014

Location: Our Place Society, 919 Pandora Ave, Victoria, BC V8V 3N4, Canada

My role was as the Chief Operator of visual Connection Mapping / Developer / Helper to clients. The conversations, and most of the Visual Connection Mapping drawings that were conducted and created are private and confidential. Often I would do a self-reflection with the intention to bring tough topics to light. My motivation was to bear witness to the psychological pain of the clients and to reflect and try to help through any means I could, such as writing about my feelings and experiences myself in order to help other people.

Title: The dissolving of schizophrenia, the visual disappearance of schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is the result of a capitalism system. Are all the so called illnesses the result of our environment? The stress of trying to survive within a capitalist society? Schizophrenia, I used to understand as a mental illness but as I look around Our Place Society I see individuals as unique and I no longer see mental illness.

Each individual has their own narrative and their own logic. There are virtually zero signs of symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia and dissociations. There are virtually zero signs of treatment resistant psychosis. All individuals are human beings, who are intelligent and strong in their own beliefs. What makes this different than the lives of other people? The capitalist system in the drop in center at Our Place Society is alive amd well and the idea of being better than the next guy is what separates each individual. But is not that the way on all layers of society?

 

Essay on Treatment Resistant Psychosis

Above is a picture of me, the Chief Operator / Developer of Visual Connection Mapping and The Communication Model, current date Sept. 16, 2017

Title: Essay on Treatment Resistant Psychosis from Sept 02, 2014

Treatment Resistant Psychosis is a medical condition. It is the result of not receiving adequate care through the Canadian Medical System. Treatment Resistant Psychosis consists of the symptoms of schizophrenia but it is not schizophrenia as schizophrenia is a medical term that means that an individual has had their symptoms of schizophrenia treated in the Canadian Medical Hospital. The actual name schizophrenia refers to the diagnosis that a medical professional has given an individual with the intention to treat, rehabilitate and conquer all of the both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. In contrast treatment resistant psychosis is the outward and inward symptoms of untreated schizophrenia. Over the decades the non-treated symptoms of schizophrenia do not receive a medical containment and this results in the individuals with treatment resistant psychosis visiting the drop in center at Our Place Society on Pandora Avenue in Victoria, British Columbia where I help individuals with treatment resistant psychosis.

 

 

 

 

Visual Connection Mapping focuses on the human experience as the primary component.

Every Wednesday morning from 0900 to 11 am I walk through the black steel gates at Our Place Society where homeless people from Victoria City go to sit in the drop-in center and have some food and coffee. I bring my Visual Connection Mapping sign and place it on the table and I take out my clip board and pens and get ready for an individual to sit next to me. Within minutes of my arrival an individual sits down. If the individual wants more information about Visual Connection Mapping I will share that with him or her but most of the time the individuals have participated in Visual Connection Mapping and know what it is and how it operates. Most of the time an individual sits down and while he starts to talk I start to draw lines on a piece of paper.

Visual Connection Mapping started in October 23rd, 2014 and this meeting is to mark the one year anniversary. More than 200 Visual Connection Mapping sessions have been conducted at Our Place Society at the drop in Center. The secret of the Visual Connection Mapping is that it is pro-psychotic. Visual Connection Mapping welcomes psychotic symptoms like paranoia, hallucinations and dissociations. It also welcomes avolition, flat affect and a lack of insight. It actually welcomes psychotic behaviours, criminal histories and personality disorders combined with addictions and other acute health problems in fact it also welcomes sexual deviants and sex offenders to talk about their lives with me. Visual Connection Mapping does not judge another person, it accepts the other person in a whole and unconditional way. Visual Connection Mapping places the individual first and validates, listens and acknowledges their unique point of view without judgement.

Visual Connection Mapping is not a therapy, nor is it any form of counseling it is meta-psychology. The process of Visual Connection Mapping includes tapping into the unconscious nature of the individual and allowing the conversation to roll in any direction what-so-ever. It can include free association, personal histories, observations about the outside world or important life situations encountered. The talker takes the reigns by verbalizing a conversation while the drawer moves her pen across the paper. The dynamic of the talker and the drawer is synchronized. While the person is talking, the listener is drawing and comprehending what is going on. The marks of lines on the paper represent the conversation resembles an in depth level of meta-psychology and psychic components. These psychic components can include emotion transferences, intonation elevations and hand and eye gestures made within the dialogue. The act of drawing lines on the paper represent the human connection between two human beings and it represents the unique dynamic between the two individuals in a way which cannot be replicated. This act of communication highlights humanity to its utmost heights because it illuminated the potential existentialism in the soul of the individual. This form of communicating empowers the individual’s unique character and this acceptance and validation of existence contributes both to the individual’s sense of self and to their own unique self-respect. Visual Connection Mapping focuses 100% on the individual. Each session is original. Sometimes an individual will sit down for a conversation every Wednesday morning and sometimes the individual will sit down, spill his heart out and then feel better and never return again. The drawings locks in the conversation which ensures the confidentiality of the dialogue.  At the same time all dialogues are down in the drop-in center versus in a little office room. The idea about being in the drop in center is to create an alliance with not just the individual sitting down to talk but also with others within earshot of the conversation. The act of sharing the communication and being visible to other’s creates a rapport and a trust within the Our Place Society community. Visual Connection Mapping is a communication Model – versus an art idea. Visual Connection Mapping is not art, it is a communication and the drawings are communication drawings. They reflect truth, honesty and the building of an alliance – one based on trust and safety. Visual Connection Mapping and the drawings are a representation of the homeless community in Victoria City and it is the communication device which listened to and encoded their unique experiences not in verbal concrete words but in abstract lines. Visual Connection Mapping represents the voices of the most vulnerable, most marginalized and the individuals with the most disparities. The drawings that represent this group of individuals may bring an audience in the general community to an absolute confusion and perhaps to a disgust at the seemingly unstructured movements of lines but to the trained art historian or medical practitioner these drawings turn into delicate museum artefacts and medical files illustrating the darkest secrets of each individual expressed with consciously or unconsciously and they map a unique soul like nothing that has ever been mapped before. The authentic journey into the soul conversation highlights the individual’s existence. More often then not the individual’s have their own philosophies to which they live by and create their own set of codes of ethics in which they determine for themselves what is right and what is wrong for their own lives. Hardly ever does finance come into the conversation, instead past memories and explanations for existence are components which come to the surface. Pain and anguish through verbalization seems to rarely be a topic of conversation. Instead the topics range from history to philosophy to economics to technology. Often topics seem to be reoccurring choice topics such as Vegan or Buddhism or Bible Studies. The individual that participate at Our Place Society in the Visual Connection Mapping always seem to take the helm and they whisk me off to their own descriptions of their own existentialisms. I get the impression that individuals enjoy asserting authoritative power over me by expressing their own unique points of views something that is a pride and a value to them and at the same time individuals seem to want to share their own ideologies with me with the hope and convictions that I, as the drawer and listener, will be over-turned and join them in their beliefs.

Whether the beliefs are something I would consider or not gets transferred into the lines and structures within the lines start to take shape. Balanced symmetry within the abstract lines equal the balancing of the dialogue, like a successful completion of walking on a tight-wire act at a circus. When practicing a non-judgemental stance often the talker lets his imagination race from many topics like the multiple wave directions on the ocean on a stormy day. The feelings of the experience can be experienced in a psychosomatic way for the drawer because of the profound intensity of absolute conviction which the talker expresses himself often feels like the words were contained for days only to be released onto my ears when I arrive on Wednesday morning. The lines capture the intensity and the psychosomatic feelings on to paper and the abstraction documents the propsychotic verbalization of symptom expression mixed with existentialism equaling the individualization of the talker. Documenting psychosis through the line frequency drawings often makes the talker feel at ease during the dialogue. I can tell because often aggressive words become soothing words and aggressive intonations become soothing intonations and aggressive body language gets replaced with a more gentler body language and the terror in the eyes gets replaced with a softness in the eyes. These qualities all together are so precious and are such a big part of communicating that they often get missed but each word, intonation, body language, eye contact and overall feeling means so much when communicating with each other and this is what the lines on the paper symbolize. This in depth human connection of reciprocated communication on a meta psychological level, something unique to each dialogue and something that cannot be scientifically measured through graphs, calculations and mathematic equations but something of equal or more value to human kind and I believe that it is in this essence that at least attempts to both bringing psychosis to light and at the same time accepting psychotic existence through validation which as a end result lessens the human psychological distress contained within a trapped soul.

Bringing the Visual Connection Mapping idea to the community tonight is an attempt to share both the intrinsic values of the most marginalized in Victoria City and to share with you the uniqueness of dialoguing with the individuals face to face. Visual Connection Mapping is one tool amoungst an array of treatments, therapies, supports and help that a marginalized individual can choose to use. Visual Connection Mapping is not a cure for human suffering but it is a device which encodes the human suffering and transmits the decoding of the human experience onto paper through line frequency drawings – hence bringing the psychosis to light and providing a loop back in the dialogue for observational reflection and feedback by the drawer and the talker both at the same time. Visual Connection Mapping drawings are of an anonymous nature but at the same time they are personalized to past direct interactions so the purpose of the drawings is twofold. One to be an expression of captured human experience and one which is the personal medical file record which the drawings take on. Exposing the method, technique and act of Visual Connection Mapping with the general population is intended to inspire, motivate and bring awareness about the lives of Victoria City’s most marginalized. It is an expression of hope that more improvements in quality of life can be attained through this method and through perhaps other methods in the future. This talk about Visual Connection Mapping is intended to spark an interest in learning how to communicate with an individual who attends the drop-in center at Our Place Society on a metapsychological level through mapping human experiences abstractly. This is the creation of a brandnew language transmission which needs time to cultivate and expand in the future. It is the hope that components of Visual Connection Mapping will inspire others to view the complexity of this humanity model through a brandnew set of logic, a logic based on Existentialism versus stigma and hope versus despair.

 

What is Visual Connection Mapping?

Part 1:  Introduction – What is Visual Connection Mapping?

Since April 2014 I have been going to the University of Victoria’s MacPherson Library to find answers as to how to best solve homelessness in Victoria City. My journey took me through many different avenues, from Philosophy to Medical books and from the Jewish Holocaust to Modern Germany today and then right back to Victoria City, at the Our Place Society where individuals whom are marginalized seemed to find themselves. What I found in my search is that in the past in the times of around 1890 there was a growing dystopia towards the marginalized. This seemed to be escalating and it hit its height in World War II. After World War II it was written that good triumphed over evil but on deeper analysis of the facts, I wonder if that was really the case at all, as political systems seemed to be ambivalent. Ambivalence is a symptom of schizophrenia according to the 4 A’s of Bleuer. Affect, Autism, Associations and Ambivalence.

What I realized was the effects of the ambivalent factor trickle down into almost all Western civilized countries such as West Europe and the Americas. This symptom of schizophrenia has somehow ended up in Victoria City and I believe it is what is pervasive amoungst the individuals who visit the Our Place Society drop-in center on Wednesday mornings when Visual Connection Mapping is conducted. The symptom of ambivalence is a medical term used in the context of being part of a Medical Model, serious mental illness sickness, and it is the most serious of illnesses, namely schizophrenia. Could it be possible that the whole of Western Society has contracted the dominant symptom of schizophrenia, namely ambivalence? What would the outcome of Western civilization be if that was the case? Would it mean a re-evaluation of all citizens lives? Would it mean that every citizen would need to be treated for the schizophrenic symptom of ambivalence? Or would it mean business-as-usual and denying that this observation ever came to light and hence burying this fact for ever and ever?

The next question that I was encountered with was who are the saints and who are the devils? Are the homeless people the saints because they are really victims and really part of Victoria’s Mental Health Medical System, and patients of the Medical Model. Or are the doctors and counselors the devils as they practiced an unauthentic one-way reciprocated communication asserting their authoritarian power over the patients – within the context of the Involuntary Treatment clause regarding schizophrenia in the Mental Health Act.

As a sophisticated society, how far have we actually come? Are we not stuck in the 1940’s mode of conduct? Where fear tactics and assertions of perceived justice over-ride the human rights of marginalized individuals. The ambivalent factor is something that did not just appear in the 1890’s onwards but has been around since the beginning of time. Within the Old Testament within the text of Jeremiah, there is a constant cry of mercy and a feeling of pain caused by the punishment Jeremiah is experiencing. Is not God good? Should not God help Jeremiah instead of punish? What kind of a God is Jeremiah’s God anyway? Within the context of being at Our Place Society and seeing the disparities with my own eyes I have often felt that God was punishing these individuals and condemning. What I was witnessing was so far from any kind of logic that I could not get my head around it. I started reading the Bible in order to understand. I came to two conclusions, one the God was man and second that the Old Testament was joint to the New Testament and could not be interpreted as separate and that from confusion in the Old Testament came light and clarity in the New Testament. I then remembered my

Roman Catholic ancestry and my Roman Catholic University education and then many components seemed to line up for me again. I started to view homelessness in the stage of the Old Testament where psychological development needed to further evolve itself in order to break free from the torment and psychological distress. In order to try to help individuals in this predicament I reached for a communication device that could capture and at the same time transcend psychological distress and that was the birth of the Visual Connection Mapping technique.

Visual Connection Mapping was all about the individual, their own unique existence and it was about mapping their existence into a diagram so that they could physically see the concrete design of their verbal creation. Visual Connection Mapping is so much more than lines on a paper, it is the soul of the other person, their words mapped out like geographical lines defining a new country. Visual Connection Mapping goes very deep into the abyss of a human being and draws out something that has not been brought to light before. It is a human phenomenon and it is not a calculated perceived idea, it is the opposite of that. It is the free-flow of line frequencies and dimensions of feelings and experiences that often get missed in a regular conversation. It is the capturing and the noting down of intricate psychological details that go beyond the 20/20 vision of a regular eye-sighted individual. Visual Connection Mapping taps into the unconscious nature of an individual in a very non-coercive way. It does not provoke, investigate and analyze instead its nature is all-encompassing compassion and empathy. Visual Connection Mapping is psychosis friendly. It is pro-psychotic and it is intended to work as a paradox. The more acceptance of symptoms one is, the more the symptomologies start to fade into the background and the more and more the unique personality comes to light. The Visual Connection Mapping is not some kind of quick fix to end all human pain and suffering instead it is an element to help cope with pain and suffering temporarily. It is a human composition. Often it is two human beings trying to help each other versus one individual being the helper and the other the client. The intention of Visual Connection Mapping is to dissolve stigma and replace it with understanding which is intended to lead to self-empowerment and the finding of oneself through understanding ones true nature and through ones own Existentialism.

Unintended consequence of peer run organizations

In the summer of 2016 I stopped working as a trained mental health and addictions practitioner as a volunteer in the organizations, Pandora Arts Collective Society, Our Place Society and the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society Victoria in Victoria city, Vancouver Island, British Columbia Canada.  At the Pandora Arts Collective Society I was a studio liaison bridging the gap between studio participants and community members on the board of directors. At Our Place Society I analyzed symptoms of schizophrenia by working one on one with individuals in the drop-in center and at the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society Victoria I engaged with a group while observing the group process of people with schizophrenia.  To me, each of the three organizations had one common theme and that was schizophrenia. Out of experience I noticed that each individual that I engaged with was unique, and on a macro-level – each organization I was inside was unique as well. On reflection of my four years of hands-on experience and working shoulder to shoulder with individuals with a diagnosed DSM psychiatric label of schizophrenia in Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia Canada I would like to mention two main components. First, it is in my humble opinion that psychotherapy needs to be re-introduced into the Victoria City Medical system and second, it is in my semi-professional expert opinion that, it is not the clients with schizophrenia who are resistant to changing, but rather the management of the organizations which take care of the clients with schizophrenia who are resistant to change. This phenomenon hinders positive personal development in clients and can lead to an increase of symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia. I believe this to be an  unintended consequence of a community run, peer run and non-medically run organization.

(If you request any information regarding my findings, please contact me by e-mail and I will be happy to communicate in more depth on this topic).

Note: Visual Connection Mapping will continue in the private sector.

 

Ring true to New World Order

In an ideal situation all human beings in a capitalist system should be able to benefit from the amount of financial wealth, but this is not the case.

Tent city Canada: Sedated in a cocoon sleeping state

Tent city in Victoria seems to be a poverty stricken situation when in actual fact the city of Victoria has been trying for decades to help these people. The Canadian government funds the hospital settings, where there are lots of mental health and addictions services provided to people with and without income for free. We live in a democratic system where the majority of the tax-payers often over-ride the minorities. This is the kind of political system the majority of Canadians want. Democracy is freedom. Some theorists believe that the homeless want to be homeless. Others believe it is a medical condition, perhaps schizophrenia, or perhaps addictions or a combination of both. There are laws in British Columbia which place people with schizophrenia and addictions into both a law system and a medical system. These two systems lead to a government Canadian financial / disability system as well. The individual becomes taken care of by the state. Tent city is the birth of all of these elements combined together. The physical appearance of tent city looks like a cocoon, it is like all the inhabitants are sedated and in a sleeping state, wanting to arise again.

Glass Window Effect: Tent City Victoria BC. April 2016.

 

On April 27, 2016 I visited Super inTent city in Victoria for the second time in two weeks. This structure in this photograph is one of the most iconic structures around because it captures the secrecy of tent city. The glass wood frame placed inside the tent and tarp is an actual structure on display at the corner of tent city. How someone would be able to get something that heavy to Quadra ST in Victoria city is beyond me. People live behind the glass structure and this one tent construction is probably one of the most sophisticated out of all of the 120 tents. It was mentioned that an organization, from Vancouver – PHS would come in and supervise tent city – but when I walked into the core of the rummaged city, I did not see anyone except inhabitants sitting around a fire, an inhabitant pouring water and two people sweeping twigs off of the dirt (a pointless action if you would ask me). For years now I have tried to help people who have fallen through the cracks by using visual connection mapping and the more I used visual connection mapping at Our Place Society, a homeless shelter in Victoria, the more and more compassion I had for individuals who were classified as marginalized. I started to notice more and more complexities to each individual who visited Our Place Society. Some individuals had serious mental illness and were untreated; some individuals had serious mental illness and were in the care of case workers, doctors, ACT teams, hospital workers, subsidized housing units and were attending psycho-social activities in the community;  others were sex workers; drug addicts; people with cancer (with and without treatment); others had physical disabilities – to name but a few of the individuals that I witnessed. Most of the individuals that I spoke to through visual connection mapping were seriously mentally ill and the majority had schizophrenia. The more and more I tried to help, the deeper and deeper I empathized with their symptoms. To describe my experience clearly, I would have to say that I experienced there being a glass window between me and the individual who was partaking in visual connection mapping. I often thought that I would be able to break the glass window dividing me and the other individual and this act would then cause clarity in the individual with schizophrenia and once the act of breaking the glass window was broken then the individual would be able to look at life through new perspectives and then be able to both cope and succeed within the boundaries and constraints – as well as opportunities and blessings – within a Western society – however this has not occurred after multiple years. The glass window between helper and person with schizophrenia stays up. What this could mean is that there is possibly a medical symptom which could best describe this glass window effect. And this glass window effect which could correspond to a medical symptom could possibly be a factor in how and why homelessness in Victoria city occurs. When it comes to schizophrenia in Victoria BC there are numerous laws found in the Mental Health Act which date back to the 1900’s. Even though conditions for patients in hospitals who have schizophrenia have improved over the years, the actual laws have stayed the same. This means that from a legal stand point, schizophrenia is locked in a water-tight glass box and no hammer is strong enough to break it open with one side of the coin – the side of helper and patient (with schizophrenia) as on the other side of the coin – patient (with schizophrenia) and society.  [Photograph taken by me on April 27, 2016 at Quadra St, Super inTent city, Victoria BC Canada at around noon time].

Art Exhibition April 2015 in Victoria City – expressing psychotraumatic feelings

This video clip is about an art exhibition which has every painting meaning an emotion. The exhibition was built around the Flight MH 17 flying above the Ukraine which went down unexpectedly. This is an ode to the passengers and their families. This is a very tragic event and it is the hope that family-members and friends of those who perished will be okay in the world.

Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on the Term Schizophrenia First Person Account

Click on links to read the article published in the Oxford Journal Press, the Schizophrenia Bulletin, Feb. 2015

Schizophr Bull-2015-van der Pol-schbul-sbv008

http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/02/09/schbul.sbv008.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=8tRzrC4LdoG2AqZ

Published this article, February 2015 in the Schizophrenia Bulletin. Hearing a voice. Pretty deep article. Please enjoy. Provide feedback if you would like. The reason for writing this article is to help others and to bring deep personal subject-matter to light versus using revisionism to suppress and repress it. First Person Account.