I have a book "To Heal the Broken-Hearted" that chronicles my 18 year journey through "mental illness" to healing and wholeness.

I'm enclosing a short synopsis of my book.

To Heal the Broken-Hearted - SYNOPSIS

When the third person in my immediate family of four was diagnosed schizophrenic in 1976, I knew somebody had to do something to save my four children and grandchildren. Since I've never been one to wait around for someone else to do everything, or to give me "permission," I followed in my father's footsteps and volunteered. Besides, I was that kid in second grade who wanted to find out if the teachers knew what they were talking about during a partial solar eclipse when they said, "Don't look without the smoked glass, it'll make you blind." I looked, I saw, it didn't make me blind. So prompted by the extremely inadequate, dehumanizing and at times life threatening experiences with most of the mental health system, the consistent failure of psychiatry to deal with, or even acknowledge the spiritual aspects of my psyche, and what was becoming an outbreak of schizophrenia in my family, I dared to confront the core of my "mental illness" ALONE and dared to challenge orthodox psychiatry. I now have the story on an 18 year period of my life, from 1971 to 1989, 13 years of which were spent in my personal version of research of my mind. Purely an independent research, it was conducted in the ultimate natural setting, without benefit of funding, facilities or camaraderie.

UNKNOWINGLY, WITH ONLY INSTINCT AS GUIDE, I DESCRIBE THE PROCESS BY WHICH I WAS BROUGHT OUT OF A "SCHIZOID" EXISTENCE.

There were to be some books, articles and movies I purposely avoided in an effort to limit contamination with the result that my work is a quite pure relation of experience making it valuable anecdotal material. I would remain totally ignorant of the newer developing theories about psychosis as transformative experience until I reached the end of my journey into inner space.

STUDENTS OF C.G. JUNG AND JOSEPH CAMPBELL WILL RECOGNIZE MYTHOLOGICAL AND ARCHETYPICAL ELEMENTS THROUGHOUT MY EXPERIENCE.

Though I'd never heard of either Jung or Campbell and knew nothing of mythology, didn't even know the word archetypes, I was able to make sense out of what seemed nonsense, i.e. delusions. This was a critical factor in enabling me to move on, not getting stuck in literal interpretations. My knowledge of the conceptual element in sign language for the deaf opened this door for me.

I detail some of the dehumanizing and dangerous experiences in mental hospitals, the traumatic reaction of my biological system to the dehumanizing and potentially lethal life-controlling, life-negating medications, the chemical straitjackets that eradicate FEELINGS (the very thing that was trying to come back to life in me!) And keep one's mind on the straight and narrow of divided, segmented, compartmentalized, linear, logical, socially approved experience. Although I had been subjected to extensive and consistent emotional trauma from the age of five when my father was killed in WWII.

I NEVER EXPERIENCED MY PAIN UNTIL I WAS THROWN INTO AN ALTERED STATE.,/p>

As the years and "psychotic" episodes went by, I plowed through layers and layers of pain - alone. I resolved at least one major trauma during each episode - along. (Including the trauma of having had a child as a result of rape.) I came to recognize there were gradually lengthening periods during the "episodes,"

THE ONLY TIME OF MY EXISTENCE, THAT I WAS FREE FROM WHAT I WOULD COME TO CALL AN "UNDERCURRENT OF PAIN."

It would not be till it was lifted permanently, sometime during 1985, that I would be able to name it. I came to see that during these altered states was the ONLY TIME I experienced differentiation of feelings. It would be early 1987 before I began to recognize this as part of my "normal" experience. Because of my recording of events, thoughts, feelings, delusions, dreams, hypnosis visions, etc. I learned that some "delusions" turned out to be actual future events, I had pre-cognitive dreams, sometimes knew about events happening in other places through some unknown means and went through periods of quite intense synchronistic with the environment. I gradually became able to ACCEPT personal "psychic" phenomena without coming unhinged, a crucial step in not being locked into the myth of "mental illness."

I SHOW THE STEP-BY-STEP DEVELOPMENT OF MY ABILITY TO FANTASIZE

Starting at the intellectual level in 1976 during minimal fantasy work with my therapist to the culmination on August 20, 1985, with the dramatic, and for the first time, conscious realization of the FEELINGS of fantasy. I had somehow managed to make a critical leap to discover a facet of my psychic life that had continued to exist only at a subterranean level since the loss of my father. I had always known the WORD "fantasy" but I had to learn the MEANING I realized a state of my development had been interrupted in childhood and it needed to be completed before I would be able to move on, that the childhood fantasy state could appear as "psychosis" in an adult. Through the altered states I gradually recovered deeply repressed feelings of the relationship I'd have with my father. Not until I lost control of my conscious mind were the good feelings able to surface. After reclaiming those feelings, I was able to emotionally bury him at last - in August, 1985. Though my writing may appear orderly and purposeful, let me emphasize that living through it all those years, it seemed anything but orderly or purposeful. To my rational ego in a "quick fix" society, it was pure chaos. It has only been since 1984 that it begins to "make sense," like the pieces of the puzzle falling into place at last. Like so much of nature, the leaf skeleton of a poplar, the honeycomb of a bee and the Colorado River Delta show connections, a pattern, the "purpose" TOWARD WHICH it was being formed over some period of time. Even though we have egotistic "dominion over the earth" we can only sit back and watch it BECOMING. If we've never seen one before and see it in PROCESS or we see it at only one point in time in process, it appears total "nonsense," we see "no reason," it doesn't "make sense."

IT IS ONLY AFTER IT IS FINISHED THAT THE PATTERN IS APPARENT AND SUDDENLY IT MAKES THE MOST PERFECTLY BEAUTIFUL AWE-INSPIRING KIND OF SENSE.

SO IT IS WITH THIS 18 YEAR PERIOD OF MY LIFE.