Gregorio Overcomes A Fraudulent Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

<cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>0:05</time> <p>Welcome to 90834. It&#39;s the weekly podcast where guests share the biggest lessons they&#39;ve learned in therapy. In each episode, I&#39;ll pose two questions what were you looking to resolve by going to therapy, and what did you really end up getting out of therapy? I&#39;m Shannon Miller, a licensed clinical social worker and private practice who has the privilege of spending every day watching the therapeutic process lead to unexpected and beautiful places. In this episode, we have the pleasure of welcoming a 49 year old man living in Mexico whose parents gave him the name Craig at birth, but he now goes by Gregorio. His therapeutic process lasted from around 2006 to 2013. Let&#39;s start off with just asking why did you go to therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>0:52</time> <p>In 2006, I hit rock bottom for I&#39;d like to say the last time, but it was just one of many times. I was living in a part of Boston called Alston it&#39;s like a borough of Boston. I really looked at my life. I&#39;ll correct you, it was more like 2005, but there&#39;s the context around the beginning to therapy. I had just looked at my life and I realized that I didn&#39;t want to be alive anymore, I didn&#39;t want to die. It&#39;s not like I wanted to end my life, it&#39;s just that I didn&#39;t want to have my life be the way it was. It&#39;s kind of a funny thing to say, I suppose, but I just got to this breaking point where I had this huge public meltdown one of many, but this one was like extra bad. On my scale of what&#39;s a bad public meltdown, this is pretty much up there at the King, the King of the public meltdowns, right, I just looked at my life and I said I can&#39;t continue to be like this and I took myself out of the situation and I moved to a different part of Boston called Jamaica Plain, like really way across the city. I looked in the phone book and I started calling therapists and kind of find somebody, because I didn&#39;t want to live like that was anymore. I said to myself I&#39;m going to try one last time to fix me not really fix me, but to get better or I was going to like walk away from life, and you know exactly what that means. That&#39;s what led me to therapy, I guess a desire to not suffer in a way that it was to suffer in a better way, I guess. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>2:24</time> <p>The way in which you were suffering. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>2:26</time> <p>Yeah, thank you for asking. My mother is what you would, what could be described as somebody who has like I don&#39;t like these terms either, but like a personality disorder. I don&#39;t ever want to use these diagnostic terms, but she&#39;s not a healthy person. Let&#39;s just say that she&#39;s way off the charts. Part of like why the therapist I&#39;m happy to speak with you about, like my experiences, so powerful, is because my woman, this therapist I had, was able to identify the depth of depravity that my mother, how my mother was, and she was able to help protect me from her. And so, basically, I grew up in a household of what, how do you describe it? Okay, so on the outside, everything looked great and I was like the terribly sick, you know mental health, in need of services child and my parents were like the most ideal and like best people in society could stop standing people lots of money, lots of involvement in the Jewish community and the legal system, mental health advocates, but behind closed doors they were vicious abusers. In their attempts to somehow Make sense of why their son was acting weird, whatever that means, they put me through a series of seven years of trying to find a therapist or a psychiatrist that would Agree with them that there was something wrong with me, and what they found out was no amount of money was enough to pay a doctor or a therapist to Diagnose me with some sort of mental health condition. Each and every time that, tell a therapist or psychiatrist Look at our son. We brought him into your office. Look how sick he is. They would sit in there, was it my mother and father? Mr Mr Lewis, you actually are not mentally healthy. You are dysfunctional. You need help. Your son is reacting to you, and then my mother would immediately take me out of that person&#39;s care and then go look for another provider. Ultimately, they found a I don&#39;t know what their role was, but a mental health professional who they could both get to believe them. Right, they locked me up. But the point of all this is that the reason why I know this is because I ended up reconnecting with a former therapist that I had in nineteen, ninety, nine, eighteen, eighty six, nineteen eighty six, and I went to meet him in person For a free a session and he told me in that session that my parents were doctor shopping. And if you know what the word doctor shopping is connected to, it&#39;s like munch houses syndrome, but proxy, which is now known as fictitious disorder, imposed upon another, which, for those who don&#39;t know, is when a family member Creates a situation or scenario where the child of a person is sick, they actually become sick. And I actually became sick because of my parents like delusional, you know, obsession with me being mentally ill and they had me psychiatrist and I was drugged and it&#39;s all because of, like, my correct, healthy Response I guess we&#39;ll call it or trauma response to the sickness that they were like surrounding me with day in, day out for my entire life, behind closed doors, and the reality that, like when we were not in that closed door environment, that I was the bad guy or the Bad kid in need of help and everyone thought I was crazy and sick. But the truth is very, very different. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>5:48</time> <p>I&#39;m just sort of stunned into silence. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>5:51</time> <p>Oh well, you wouldn&#39;t be the first one, and I Hope someday you&#39;ll be the last. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>5:56</time> <p>Were you given a diagnosis of any sort? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>5:59</time> <p>false diagnosis of schizophrenia. When I was 15 years old, yeah, I know what my parents did. I know what they did to me and In part I&#39;ve saved my life by talking about it. I risked everything and I lost everything by talking about it. So I don&#39;t live in the United States anymore, but I also, like gained everything and so life sort of like a it&#39;s not like walking a Balance beam, like you&#39;re at the Olympics and like the only way you&#39;re gonna win the gold is if you do it perfectly. But who knows how to walk a balance beam perfectly to that level once, unless you&#39;ve been forced to learn how? So that&#39;s sort of like me and I just hope it works out. I believe it will. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>6:40</time> <p>In 2006, you started working with a therapist and you still have an ongoing relationship with this person. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>6:47</time> <p>That is correct. I&#39;m not spoken with her for a while because of different reasons, but I&#39;ve been thinking about it every day, so I&#39;m gonna come. I&#39;m gonna yeah, she&#39;s cool, I&#39;m gonna contact her, yeah how did the therapeutic process start for you? Okay. So this woman and like this is why I responded to this. This, this, this opportunity is so amazing. I was disappointed and let&#39;s let down and given a run around and treated like a sick person my entire life. The way I connected with this amazing therapist is it&#39;s a beautiful story actually. I moved to this new part of Boston College and make a plan and I looked in the phone book. I started calling local therapists and I left a voicemail. The person I left it for like, however, the process happened had a colleague in the same building and he said to her you should listen to this guy&#39;s message. I think he&#39;s a good person for you to talk to you. And so then she called me and she said hey, I listened to your message. I looked like I just said you might be a good person to come speak with me. I said okay. So I went in and I sat down and she said she said tell me about your life. And I looked at her and I said I don&#39;t want to talk about it. I don&#39;t want to talk about it. And she said there&#39;s no brilliant thing that a therapist has ever said to me. She said well, if you don&#39;t want to talk about it, you shouldn&#39;t be here. And she challenged me in that moment. She&#39;s like, ah, don&#39;t waste my time, kid. I said okay, I told her my story and at the end of the session she said to me she said I understand you, or I can I understand what you&#39;re telling me. If you Want to work with me, I&#39;ll do everything I can to help, to help you. The limit better life. I said well, that&#39;s like the, the best pitch that I&#39;ve ever heard from a mental health provider. I was like heck, yeah, yeah, okay. And and then I went to see her and I saw her like once or twice a week for years and years and years, like the second Session. She said something like I don&#39;t know when she said it to me. She said you know, when you came to see me for that, for that&#39;s for that first meeting, just to meet you, I actually didn&#39;t have space and my in my calendar To see you. I had. It was fully booked, as she said. So that&#39;s why, that&#39;s why we meet at Tuesday. At Tuesday, I said five o&#39;clock because I had to make an extra appointment with you at the end of the day, because I wanted to. I was like I decided because I&#39;m a smart person who just had been prevented from living and learning and all these things that I was going to find some sort of way to allow all the information she was trying to give to me become like in few years within me and and she knows this about me to this day like I took what she taught me as Like an uneducated street kid, like living in squalor amongst violence and all those terrible stuff. I&#39;m still that. I&#39;m an educated street kid, but I mean everyone knows I&#39;m like high level, brilliant. It&#39;s just the world&#39;s treated me the way I did. So things happened and I took all of that in and I took all the information she taught me and I became like like a radical mental health Provider, worker, like peer support or whatever, and I took her lessons. I Traveled the world, even though my whole life was in chaos. I took all that that she taught me. I just disseminated against or I sheared that knowledge of that with that became wisdom with everyone I met. And so I got myself into a fighting situation where, like, even though I come from where I come from, I get to talk with people like you. And not only that, I took all that she taught me and I turned it into a life of value, not only for myself, but I can share that information with others. All because I got this like radical therapeutic experience with somebody who chose to Help me when she didn&#39;t have to, but because she wanted to, and I thought that was just the best gift that anyone who worked in mental health could ever Give somebody and I decided, if I was gonna have that gift given to me, I was gonna Give that to everyone else. That&#39;s what I&#39;ve done with my life. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>10:44</time> <p>So every Tuesday at five you were spending an hour with her at least One Tuesday at five. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>10:50</time> <p>Well, I guess every Tuesday at five, and sometimes on Thursdays, if she had extra space. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>10:55</time> <p>Okay, what were some of the first lessons that she taught you that you can still remember? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>11:01</time> <p>On my tattoo. I know we&#39;re just doing a audio recording here, but it says the words you don&#39;t unlearn progress. And I used to ask her. I said You&#39;re telling me that we, when we humans, when we learn a skill or we learn some sort of like Method of dealing with the things that we feel and we think and we&#39;ve experienced that affect us. Now, once you have proven that you can do it, that you can always do it, meaning like you could be a person who struggled like with everything and always felt like they could never get beyond those challenges, right? But if you just find a way to do it once, even if it&#39;s by a fluke, because of some like inexplicable reason, that you were able in one moment out of a hundred and one attempt out of a hundred to successfully self manage yourself, that you could do it one time, then you could do it another time, meaning like you had the power within you and no matter what happened, if you could find a way that you can do it again. So her words you don&#39;t unlearn progress. Well, that&#39;s the truth. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>12:05</time> <p>It was through your relationship with her that you began to undo years and years and years of trauma, and trauma with a big T. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>12:15</time> <p>Oh, yeah, no, all capital letters. Yeah, it was really interesting, You&#39;ll appreciate. This Is that that process was one process. And then there was the second process, which is trying to live in the world after you&#39;ve like come out and dealt with and talked about and exposed and like try to accept that stuff that happened to you, to then learn how to get through all of it and then live the life that you deserve to live. I guess that means like therapy is a lifelong process, whether you&#39;re meeting with somebody in person or you&#39;re just taking the lessons and you&#39;re trying to apply them each and every day to better yourself self therapy, I suppose. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>12:56</time> <p>Talk a little bit about how life outside of the therapy room you know the outside world, how things began to change as you were going through the therapeutic process. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>13:05</time> <p>So during the early days of my therapeutic journey I guess we&#39;ll call it I was dung-ho about doing anything and everything that I possibly could to benefit myself accessing resources, finding ways to, like, benefit my life, take control over all parts of my life. And part of that process was that I found out that I could be trained to be something called the certified peer specialists, and so I was able to take the work that I was doing on myself to learn how to cope and learn how to manage and how to make sense of like where I came from and what my parents did to me, and then, you know, be educated. And I was never educated. So it take all those lessons that I was learning in school and also in my personal healing journey with my therapist, and then, at some point, be able to work with others and help other people as a professional mental health provider of some sort. And so I had this rear and radically cool opportunity that, while I was going through therapy and, as I&#39;ve already shared my story was a little bit horrendous. Yeah, I was self-identified as a person who had mental ILL and ESS I don&#39;t say that word, but in fact I could then tell people also that, in spite of, or in addition to, or however you wanna say it, of having this issue with my life and all those weird behavior that also, I was respected so much, or I was included into a process where I could learn how to be a mental health worker to help others. So this was like my reality working on myself, kinda learned the lessons that I was being taught by my therapist learning how to cope, learning how to manage, learning how to self-advocate, learning how to try to navigate relationships and how to do stuff and at the same time well, a couple years into therapy help others do the same. So I was able to, in like one fell swoop state to the world, because this is so important for me to be understood. All these things happened to me. I&#39;ve had all these issues. This is what I&#39;d go through and at the same time, I&#39;m also helping other people learn how to cope with their similar issues. That right, there was a life transformative thing, because no longer did I just have to be the sick person, but I was the person who was actively publicly processing it and helping others via my journey, simply by living and doing it. You flipped the power dynamic completely oh yeah, and you know what Shannon, like my story, really is, that I wasn&#39;t supposed to do that. You&#39;re not supposed to get better, You&#39;re not supposed to stop following the psychiatric model. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>15:36</time> <p>So you are working as a peer mentor while simultaneously going through your own therapeutic process. Tell me what that&#39;s like for you. What comes next? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>15:48</time> <p>That changed my life forever. I mean in great ways, in bad ways but at the same time, when you look at life and you have to look at your experiences, you realize that good and bad are great and all for logistic values, that everything is what it is. If you can accept the lesson I had, the most amazing things happen to me. I was working, I had different jobs, I was involved with lots of public mental health recovery organizations and advocacy groups and I was making a difference in my life and in the lives of others. I finally got a really good professional job and as I was working as a professional case management team and in the inner city in Boston and that was wonderful for me because I look how I look Well, parents just can be deceiving so I really treasured the fact that I was who I was and how I came up and what I knew, and I could help people who were just like me but had it even worse because of the way society is. Throughout this whole journey of healing, I was able to do something unexpected as well, which is I created a curriculum for self-help or like support group mental health recovery, trauma recovery, addiction recovery curriculum as part of my practicum to become a mental health work, so I was able to publish this book called Better Days a mental health recovery workbook, in 2013. I sold like 10,000 copies and eight different languages. That&#39;s what I did throughout this whole process and I was able to make a permanent mark on the mental health recovery world. By the time, it was 2015, and I had just announced to the world because it was my right to speak my truth and be understood by human right, my birthright that I was no longer with the documented diagnosis of any mental ILL, nas, that my mental health files had the word debunked next to all the diagnoses, and that the psychiatric team that was working with me told me that if I didn&#39;t stop taking psychiatric drugs, that I&#39;d never get better. And as of April 30th 2015, I swelled the last of 80,000 pills over the course of 28 years. If you could appreciate that very month while working as a new role at a different job, after I just moved in with a girlfriend, a partner, for the first time in my entire life. While working, as you can imagine, I was a mandated reporter and I reported something that I saw and it turns out that I was correct I had to report to the same institution, which is the Department of Mental Health, and that was the end of me. My career, my life, my everything was taken by the same organization that oversaw me, having my life taken 28 years prior. From that point on, which is the fall of 2015, I haven&#39;t had a job since. My entire life collapsed. Everything was taken. I lost my home. I lost all my belongings. My friends, my family gave me an ultimatum and they said if you don&#39;t stop talking about what we did to you, you&#39;ll never have a family again. Obviously, I&#39;m talking with you right now, shannon, so that means I don&#39;t have a family at all. I ended up just falling on pieces. Everyone thought I was sick. They all said I needed to take my medication, but that was false. I became blacklisted, I got in trouble with everybody, I lost everything and ultimately, by January 2018, I just said well, since I&#39;m gonna be homeless at the end of the month, I&#39;m just gonna leave. I jumped ship, I left everything I had behind and I bought a one-way ticket to France. I spent the next year and a half or so homeless, but I figured, if I was gonna be homeless, I might as well be homeless in Europe. So I just took that whole my whole story of what happened to me and what I was going through and I decided if I was gonna be in Europe, I was just gonna have a good time. So I traveled to almost all the countries in the European continent. I turned my life into something of value, in defiance of everything that was done to me. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>19:45</time> <p>I know that you&#39;re living in Mexico. Tell me what the way forward is for you. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>19:50</time> <p>Life&#39;s very hard. I&#39;m trying to find ways to radically change things. It&#39;s very hard, but you don&#39;t have a family, you don&#39;t have education, you don&#39;t have assets. Nevertheless, I&#39;m trying to put my books into the hands of the people because I can make a good living doing that if I&#39;m successful at that. I&#39;m trying to take care of myself on a daily basis, because life&#39;s very hard without basic needs met, but I&#39;m getting better. I just started a new online I guess we&#39;ll call it peer counseling business and we&#39;re debuting as we speak. So I&#39;m hoping that I can continue to find good people who want to connect with somebody who knows what they&#39;re talking about, or real radical trauma recovery, finding ways through the darkest. And honestly, I&#39;m just trying to keep my head above water. Try to be a good person, try to be a good friend. You know, love myself, love other people unconditionally, be good to animals. The truth is, I think I&#39;m going to die every day, but that&#39;s okay, because each morning that my eyes open, I&#39;m going to go with it. That&#39;s one of the blessings that I was given by having a therapist who taught me that there was always a way to move forward. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:58</time> <p>On that note, I think we&#39;re at a good place to wrap up for today. Thank you, gregorio, for taking the time and effort to connect with us. I know you&#39;re in a remote location in Mexico and it&#39;s not always easy, so we will really appreciate the effort that you put in to come and share your story with us. We wish you the best of luck as your healing journey continues. If you are looking to rediscover and redefine your relationship with spirituality, the therapists at Epricity X-PAT therapy can help. We use various therapeutic techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, trauma focused approaches, mindfulness and inner child work, to help you strive to heal and reclaim your personal power. We can help you develop healthy coping strategies, challenge negative beliefs and rebuild, or build for the first time, your sense of self-esteem and autonomy. If you are ready to begin this process, please schedule an initial consultation at wwwepricityxpattherapycom. </p>