Tuesday, June 9, 2026

9:00AM PDT, 12:00PM EDT, 5:00PM GMT, 6:00PM CEST

Many people who experience psychosis have also lived through trauma, and some may develop post-traumatic stress (PTSD). Trauma can have a deep impact on mental health and may make experiences like hearing voices, feeling fearful, or struggling with distress even harder to manage. For a long time, some professionals worried that talking directly about trauma in therapy might be too overwhelming for people with psychosis or could make things worse. Because of this, trauma-focused therapy has sometimes been avoided. But growing research suggests these concerns may be overstated, and that trauma-focused psychological therapy can be both safe and helpful.

This webinar shares findings from the STAR Study (Study of Trauma and Recovery), the largest research trial of its kind, involving 305 participants across multiple sites in the UK. The study explored whether an integrated trauma-focused therapy called Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for psychosis (TF-CBTp) could help reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms in people living with current distressing psychosis. The webinar will introduce the therapy approach used in the study and explain how it supports recovery. This approach recognizes that trauma and psychosis can be interconnected, with the therapy guide targeting psychological mechanisms that play a role in both.

Register Here

They're asking for a donation (it's optional) in order to attend. These folks are a rare breed in my experience, generally gathering some of the world's leading experts on these topics. It's a staggeringly small community that actually looks at recovery trajectories and seeks to make methods that actually lead people to wellness or in any way correct the abuses of modern mental health systems. A powerful opportunity to learn and see where the culture is moving. This, for those looking to make a career in this space (very doable for anyone here), looking to find the manner of care that actually does lead to wellness, or for those looking to keep safe from the manner of state funded care that leads upwards of 95% of the patients it touches in a life long disability.

If you're interested in submitting a question to the panel to be used in the webinar email: zcunniffe@madinamerica.com 48 hrs ahead of time.

All the best!

This is the second song I've found focused on this subject material and posted here over the years. I have to be upfront, I hate this song... It's whiny... I'd file it under Grimes adjacent...

Musical tastes aside, I'll include the YouTube link and lyrics below:

Wicca Phase Springs Eternal - Targeted Individual

Baby there's a torment of pain to it
You can feel the aura of the hate around it
Black was the patch of a thread curving shapes around it
(That was a waste of time)
I'll never enter her mind
Scream to the fire online
Pact by malicious, saying I
Hate to see your eyes through her eyes

Guarded by decoded videos
That's what takes you right up to the edge
Then you take a ride up to the camp
Camera saw you 'bout a mile back
Now they see you through the camera of your phone
Then they overlay your internet
Better keep your eye out for these boys
It's scary how they're good with VFX

They're getting inside of your head
You can't be sure who's inside of your house
God what advancements you thrown in my way
Malevolence brought me to where I am now
I don't really know what to make of it
How am I to know what to say about it?
Misty is the mind with a maze of amazement on it
(Back to the sorrow)
Suffering from following the paths and the signs
Consequence of living in the margins of time
Tell me what you saw between the codes in the line
Why do I attack the undefeated?

Baby there's a torment of pain to it
You can feel the aura of the hate around it

Black was the patch of a thread curving shapes around it
(That was a waste of time)
I'll never enter her mind
Scream to the fire online
Pact by malicious, saying I
Hate to see your eyes through her eyes

In this confessional piece I can relate to just about all this artist writes about (in this song and the rest of their work) leading me to see this all as the same ailment I was once so inundated by. I put this in the "Green & Purple ⸸ Experiencing Hardcore" Spotify playlist (I'm still adding to) back when I first posted it, 2 or 3 months ago. This playlist has continued to grow to just under 1K songs. I'm not sure how this artist made it into the list, I'll have to start another one for hip-hop. I made this playlist and a few others to show everyone how common the direct language of this experience is in contemporary media. Hope you enjoy!

I am still trapped on the same SSRI I was prescribed at 7 years old because every attempt to come off has resulted in severe, debilitating withdrawal....

At 23 years old, I decided I wanted to come off antidepressants. Despite having been on them virtually my entire life — throughout my childhood and brain development — my doctor tapered me off in just 6 weeks, following the same outdated and dangerous guidance many doctors still use today.

What followed was a severe full-body neurological crisis: nonstop physical, cognitive and psychological suffering unlike anything I knew a human being could endure.

When I went back to my doctor and told him I was in withdrawal, I was told antidepressant withdrawal “doesn’t exist,” that symptoms of “discontinuation syndrome” are “mild and only last two weeks,” and that what I was experiencing was proof I needed the drugs

After months of torturous suffering and countless emergency room visits, I had no choice but to reinstate the antidepressant. But even after reinstating, the neurological damage from the rapid, doctor-directed taper did not go away.

That is why the term “withdrawal” is often deeply misleading. For many people, coming off antidepressants can trigger a devastating neurological injury that persists for years.

I still do not feel normal. I am intermittently bedridden, and even as I type this, my brain feels like it is on fire.

I genuinely do not remember what happiness, love, or emotional connection are supposed to feel like anymore. So much of my cognition, personality, creativity, and ability to access my mind the way I once could feels altered or gone. Some days the suffering becomes so overwhelming that I genuinely do not know how much longer I can continue living in this condition.

Today, at 30 years old, I am still on the same medication I was prescribed as a child. I desperately want to come off, but every attempt has caused severe, debilitating withdrawal that has made it physically impossible.

#MentalHealthMonth #NobodyToldMe #medicationinjury #HHS #HealingJourney #overmedicalization #SSRI

Bragolin - I don't Like What It Does To Me (YouTube) (Spotify) (Full Lyrics Here)

As I am amid beings
Beings standing in their lines
My mood is getting heavier
My mood at dawn was fine

Ever so curious
And ever wanting more
But change is never changing
Oh, Change, why don’t you change?

I’m drawing this creature
This creature like a charm
But in times of need it feeds on larvae
And I’ve got larvae crawling up my arms

This view is getting dire
This view is closing in
But change is never changing
Oh, Change, why don’t you change?
I’m drowning this creature
This creature like a charm
But in times of need it feeds on larvae
And I’vе got larvae crawling up my arms
In times of need it feeds on larvae
And I’vе got larvae crawling up my arms

In this entire album by Bragolin I see a confessional work by an experiencing artist, clearly writing about the same experience all report here. I love the expression captured in their album artwork, images of singular feminine fugues. I presume emblematic of a spirit guide of the lyricist. Every week I come across experiencing artists who similarly seem to devote their craft to a guiding yet disembodied feminine personality. Here's a Spotify playlist of such artists, I've only just started to put it together... calling it "Her."

If you like the initial New-Wave/Dark-Wave mood of the Bragolin song, here's another "Green & Purple" Spotify playlist of similar works speaking in the same direct language seen here in the HVN. I've put these (just green and purple colors for album art) together to show how common these pieces of art are. To show you all you are not alone, that there are expansive subcultures in all human societies reporting the same lived experience you all seem to. Again this is just a VERY narrow selection of such subject material, just to underscore how much of this stuff is out there. Currently the Green & Purple New-Wave playlist is at 228 songs and just over 16 hours of this material.

These artists speak of the importance of belief, in a knowledge of how sacred life is, and to how real this phenomenon is. I am increasingly certain it is both an ideological and spiritual bout that determines if or how one survives this. Most all of our cultural heroes seem to have gone through what is seen here.

All the best ⸸

Here's his Barne & Nobel link

Hartford, Connecticut's Institute of Living - formerly the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane - is the oldest mental hospital in the capitol of the wealthiest state of Earth's most powerful country, and the setting for PSYCHIATRIC INCARCERATION: a firsthand account of 22-year-old Jim Flannery's 2008 involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.

The memoir begins with Flannery's experience of being locked inside a psychiatric unit, forcibly restrained, and drugged against his will - all under the guise of care - and unfolds into a desperate struggle between one person's desire to walk free and a hospital's mission to define them as mentally ill.

What starts as confusion and disbelief soon becomes a powerful critique of a modern mental health system that often harms the very people it claims to help.

Not sure if she ever really gives a health update for Jordan Peterson, and this is fairly tedious, but watching the entire video is enlightening about some permanent and severe effects from prescription ssris and benzodiazepines. Do I agree with the “ lion diet?” Maybe not, and maybe not even their politics but I have always found J Peterson to be talkative and interesting, and no one really deserves to suffer like this.

As I was watching all I could hope for is that her message reaches a wider audience. Something needs to be done about these dangerous drugs.