Darrell Herrmann
Appearances
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I think that's the biggest problem with our mental health system today is that no one teaches you this stuff. When you first become a psychiatrist, you sit down and talk about all this stuff, but no one does.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
If you get hospitalized for psychosis today, what happens is you get put on a medication, sometimes at your own free will, sometimes against your will, but you get put on an antipsychotic medication. In about three, four, five days, you're no longer psychotic, and they discharge you. And that's all they do. They put you on medication. As soon as you're no longer psychotic, they discharge you.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
During that time in the hospital, you most likely receive no other information at all, no therapy, nothing but medication. And that's why we have so many problems, in my opinion, because no one understands what's going on with themselves. I think we need to educate the people there about this stuff. I've been advocating for that for some time. I think that's what my groups are trying to do.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
You have to educate them or they can't come to this conclusion. Really, until I found the book, Surviving Schizophrenia by Dr. Eve Fulatori, that I really understood what I had. The psychiatry textbooks gave me the first insight, first glimmerings. When I got back to college after getting out of the Army, I was trying to research the college library, and I couldn't find anything of value.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Everything was based on psychoanalysis. They weren't even talking about medications in most of the stuff I read. And then I found in the state library, the book, Survivors Get Your Frame Doctor, E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., This was one of the first books ever written about schizophrenia as a physical medical illness for the layman. That told me what I need to know and got me on the track to recovery.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
If I hadn't found that book, I don't think I'd be talking to you today. Wow.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
comprehensive education program for everyone to become psychotic. That's what I've been advocating for for years. If you think about it, if you get diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, you get education as well as insulin. They tell you how to deal with it. They give you lots of information, how to cope, stuff like that.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
If you get diagnosed with schizophrenia, you get medication totally going your way. If you did that with type 1 diabetics, they wouldn't get anywhere. Most of them would die pretty quickly. And that's what's happening with schizophrenia. We're giving them nothing but medication and send them on their way. There's no education whatsoever.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
That's where our mental health system's biggest failure is in dealing with psychosis is no one teaches you how to live with it.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Why do we have to get the doctors and mental health professionals to start doing this stuff? That's what I'm advocating for. I have currently four articles that I've submitted to Schizophrenia Bulletin, which is a professional journal for psychotic illnesses that I'm advocating for this. They're under review. I'm trying to get this out in the public and say we need to be doing this stuff.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Right now, the biggest obstacle, the biggest source of stigma about mental illness, I believe, comes to the mental health profession itself. There are doctors who don't believe you can do what I did with schizophrenia. There are doctors who don't believe you can have a life with schizophrenia. We've got to educate the mental health profession itself before we can get anywhere.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
The mental health profession, in my opinion, is the biggest source of stigma against severe mental illness there is.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I agree totally. And that's why I wrote the article on peer guide to psychosis that NSSC is putting out. That's why I wrote that, because we have to educate the general public. We wrote that with specifically in mind legislatures and judges and district attorneys and prosecutors and judges. sheriffs and law professionals and just basically anyone that didn't know this information.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
What I did was I tried to explain in simple, clear, easily understandable terms the very basics of what they know about what psychosis is and what it does to a person.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I developed schizophrenia in 1984 when I was a captain of the United States Army. My specialties at the time were field artillery and nuclear weapons. And obviously, you can't have a military career with nuclear weapons when you have schizophrenia. So I had to do other things.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I agree totally. And I think the mental health professors are a big obstacle to that because a lot of them don't understand it either. Right now, if you're a psychiatrist, you get educated on psychosis and psychotic illness to some degree. Some psychiatrists know a lot about it. Some know very little. Some psychiatrists do not treat people with psychosis at all.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
They treat people with depression or anxiety or substance abuse. They don't treat the psychosis at all. So they don't understand that either. And we look at psychologists, for example. Most psychologists get absolutely no training whatsoever on psychosis or what goes with it or anything to deal with it. Social workers and licensed counselors, again, they don't get any training in this.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
It's totally foreign to them. And if you look at our mental health profession right now, basically... The general population and most mental health professionals think if you are a mental health professional, you're qualified to speak with authority on any mental health problem or issue.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
That's like saying if you're a medical doctor, you can be a general practitioner one day, a heart surgeon the next day, do a lung transplant the day after, do a knee transplant the day after that. It's nonsense. We need specialists in mental health where they have the skills to deal with this stuff.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Dealing with psychosis requires a very special skill set that, frankly, most mental health professionals do not have.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I think we've got to start with the mental health professionals. I think that's where we need to start. The mental health professionals need to be taught what psychosis is, how to deal with it. But most of them just don't know. I find that most mental health professionals, other than psychiatrists, don't even understand what psychosis really is.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
A lot of them have no idea what to do other than give you a pill. And there's a whole lot more you need in recovery than just a pill, but most of them think that's what it takes. And we have a problem with the government, too. There's an agency called SAMHSA, which you probably know of, that has guidelines for recovery.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
So I went back to college, got a computer science degree, became a professional computer programmer, did that for 18 years. And then the stress of doing that and coping with my job and all with my illness just became more than I could manage. And I decided to go with disability because I found out this kind of stress was just endemic in the American workplace.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
If you look at their guidelines for recovery, they make no exceptions whatsoever for psychosis. They say everything should be free will, self-determination. Build your own path to recovery, self-actualization, self-determination, self-guided. That works fine if you deal with drug abuse or depression, but when you deal with psychosis where you don't know what reality is, how can you do that?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
You just can't do that. Furthermore, that guideline for psychosis doesn't put any requirement on the institutions like hospitals other than that they have to provide culturally competent care and they have to provide trauma-informed care. Well, cultural competence, most of them don't even understand what psychosis is. How can it be culturally competent to someone with psychosis?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
As far as trauma-informed care, that's become a buzzword that doesn't really mean a whole lot anymore. And I found my psychotic experiences to be very traumatic. And I think most people with psychosis do believe psychosis is traumatic. But I've never seen any allowances in a hospital anywhere for trauma as a result of psychosis. They don't even address it. They just pretend to ignore it.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
So they're not even doing that. They're not required to tell you anything else. Not even required to tell you what your diagnosis is or explain what it means.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I think the most important thing to understand is what psychosis is and what it does to a person. And beyond that, I think the next most important thing is to educate people as to how to live with their illness. Because right now, we're just basically giving a pill and send them on their way with nothing else. And that doesn't work. Okay, great.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
And when I went on disability, I made it my mission in life to do everything I could to help other people with serious mental illness live better lives. Ever since then, that's what I've been doing. I started doing hospital groups, talking to patients in the hospital about how to live better lives with a severe mental illness, and that grew over the years.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
In the 10 years before COVID, I spoke to more than 30,000 people of those hospital groups. With COVID, all my groups got shut down. And as of now, the hospitals were not reopened for me to come in and do groups. So I have no hospital groups today. But up until COVID, I was doing many groups a week. Like I said, I saw more than 30,000 people before COVID.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
As part of that, I learned what the people that were being hospitalized need to know based on my own experience, my own research, and talk to them and answer their questions and find out what they need to know. As a result of all that, I wrote a book. The book is called Straight Talk About Living with Subliminal Illness and is available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, or audiobook.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
It's the things that everybody needs to know, the basics they should know when they're dealing with subliminal illness. But sadly, most people don't know them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Most of them know they're not the only one. They're not alone. But what I find they don't know is that you can live a relatively normal life after having a cerebral illness. When I was doing those hospital groups, I was usually the first one to ever come in and tell them that you could live a normal life after mental illness. I'd give my own example of being a programmer for 18 years.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
To most of them, that was just unheard of. They thought their life was over when they got a diagnosis with a psychotic illness.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
There's a lot of things that they need more clarification on. That's why I wrote my book. And it's a short book. It's about 60 or 70 pages, but it's the basic stuff they need to know. Some of the big things they need to know are the fact that diagnosis often changes. You may have schizophrenia now. You may have bipolar. You may have schizophrenia some other time. It often changes.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
That's one thing they need to know. So don't get worried about your diagnosis changing. It happens. Another thing to know is that medications are different for everyone. Medication does wonders for one person, maybe absolute poison to the next. And it takes a lot of time to find the right medication for most of us.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Some of us have to try three or four, half a dozen, before we find something that works really well for us. And it takes time to find the right medication, the right dose, and get on with your life. It's not an easy thing. The doctor doesn't know what's going to work and what side effects you're going to have until you try the medication. There's just no way to know.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Another thing to know is that there's no blame to this illness. It's a combination of genetic and environmental factors, and there's no single cause you can point at. You can't point at any one thing and say this caused the person's illness. It's a combination of things, and there's no blame to be had. It's just something happens like cancer or diabetes or whatever. There's no blame.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Well, the first thing you have to understand is what psychosis is. And right now, the medical system does not teach anyone what psychosis is or what it does to you. And psychosis, a lot goes into the diagnosis. But basically, for practical purposes, there's two things you need to look at. One is having hallucinations, and one is having delusions.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Hallucinations are sensory experiences you have that others around you don't. For instance, you may hear voices that aren't there, or you may see things that aren't there. It can affect either of the five senses, but while you're experiencing that, it's usually absolutely real to you. Delusions are fixed false beliefs you may have that others around you don't. They could be anything imaginable,
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Could be that you're President of the United States, or the Antichrist, or time traveler, or someone's applying a computer chip in your brain. There's no limit. And to the person experiencing psychosis, these are the reality. To them, it's absolutely real, even though it makes no sense to anyone else around them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
And that's why they're making decisions and acting in ways that make no sense to those around them, because to them, the hallucinations and delusions are the reality. And the other way to control those hallucinations and delusions is through medication. But even when you take the medication,
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Once you're longer psychotic, to be psychotic, you have to have hallucinations and delusions, but you also have to lose touch with reality. You have to not realize that it's not real. If you can realize it's real, you're not psychotic. Psychosis is when you can't tell it's not real. But anyway, the medications will get you out of psychosis, but you still remember what went on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
To you, it was still real. And unless someone tells you about hallucinations and delusions and tells you what psychosis is and what it does, you have no way of knowing. You should question things that may have happened to you. And I think that's a big piece of what anosognosia or lack of insight is.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
No one tells people what psychosis is, what hallucination delusions are, the fact that you can't trust your own mind. As a result, to them, it was all real. Another piece of it is they don't explain what, for example, schizophrenia is. If you're told you have schizophrenia, basically you think that's a villain, a horror movie, or a mass murderer, or some other dangerous, scary person.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
And you're sitting there saying, I'm not one of those people. So you just throw it all out the window, say it doesn't apply to me, it's total nonsense, and you go on. You don't accept it. I think that's a big piece of the notion that nobody tells people what these illnesses are and how psychosis affects the person. And that's something I've been campaigning to have corrected.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
But how do you expect a person to understand that they can't trust their own thoughts if you don't tell them that's a possibility to begin with?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Medication doesn't have anything to do with that at all. Okay. It's all up to you. You have to realize that you cannot trust your own mind. Okay. There's a lot of ways you can come to that conclusion, but you have to come to that conclusion.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
There are things that happened to me 40 years ago in my first psychosis that to this day, I don't know what was real, what was hallucinations, and I've just had to accept I never will. And that's part of dealing with this illness or other psychotic illnesses. You have to accept that you can never be sure of what reality is. There's another very troubling aspect to this as well.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Some people who experience psychosis develop persistent false memories of things that never actually happened. For example, they may think they were abused sexually or physically as a child, even though it never actually happened. But to them, it's real. They remember it happening, even though it never did. And some people have
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Major portions of their lives that are fiction, but to them it's real and factual because that's what their mind tells them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
The medication has nothing to do with that. The medication just stops the psychosis. It stops further problems. All right. Having to realize that it's not real is insight that you have to develop on your own, and there's no good way to do that. Our mental health professionals right now don't have any idea how to go about that.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
What I have found the best way to do is just explain what hallucinations are, what psychosis is, what it does. Let them know they could be subject to that. And then let them start thinking about it on their own and say, you know, maybe this thing I experienced doesn't make sense after all.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
And then they can start questioning and come to realize that they themselves may have some experiences that weren't real. And that's the only way I know to deal with this. You have to come to it on your own realization. There's no way to force that on someone. If you try to force it, they will not accept it. They'll fight you.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Groups typically lasted 45 to 50 minutes. We talked about some of the things I've just talked about, yes, but I also spent a lot of time talking about other things. And that's probably just as important that, again, the mental health system doesn't do anything to teach you about. And that is how to live and cope with the mental illness. Things like what causes relapses.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
One of the most common causes of relapses. No one tells you that. How do you cope with recognizing you're going downhill so you can ask for help before you end up back in the hospital? Nobody tells you that. How do you cope with hallucination delusions even though you're not psychotic? Some of us still have hallucinations when we're not psychotic and properly medicated and have to carry on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
When I was working as a computer programmer, I occasionally hallucinated things I had to sort out. Is this real? Is this hallucination? And that's another thing I talk about in those groups is hallucinations. helping figure out how to sort out what's real or what's not real, what you're experiencing.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Because when you have a psychotic illness, you are subject to not experiencing, to experiencing things that are not real at any time.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
There's no real surefire solution here. I think the best way is to make sure they understand it can happen first. That's the key, understand it can happen, and then you start talking about whether or not this is real. Now, the method I use to determine what's real for me, this is my own method, I developed it on my own. I divide the things I experience up into three big buckets.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
First bucket is those things I'm pretty sure are real, factual, actually happening, real-world stuff. And the second bucket is those things I'm pretty sure are not real, not happening, not real-world stuff, hallucinations, delusions. And I have a third bucket of things I'm just not sure about. And I put things into those three buckets based on my past experience with my own illness.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
If someone is talking to me directly face-to-face, I very seldom hallucinate that. So that's probably going to go in the bucket of real. If I hear something whispered down the corner, down the hallway, those are things that often hallucinate. And then look at what I've just heard and ask myself, does this make sense? Would the person really know that? Would they really be saying that?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Does it make sense or is it nonsense? If it does make sense that I put it in the bucket of things that are not real, just dismiss it and move on with my life. But otherwise, I put things in that third bucket until I get some information that will allow me to put it in one of the other two buckets. Sometimes that information never does come. It kind of festers and frustrates you.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
You want to know what's real. But I've learned that acting on things that are not real can get me in big trouble real quick. So I just leave it in that third bucket until I get some information that will allow me to put it in one of the other two buckets. And sometimes that information never does come. And that's the only way I know to cope with this. That's my strategy.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I tell everyone I do with Sky Coast, they need a strategy somewhat similar to that. They can have their own strategy, but that's the one I use, and that works well for me. They may want to try it. But you need some kind of strategy to help sort out what's real and what's not real in your world as you go through life.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
It took time. It took time. Because no one teaches you this stuff. No one tells you this stuff. When I became ill, they wouldn't even tell me what my diagnosis was. I was in a military psychiatric ward. I knew I had the right to read my medical records, so I asked for my medical records, asked to read them. Well, they had to give them to me, so I read them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I found out my diagnosis was schizophrenia form disorder, but they wouldn't tell me anything about what that meant. I knew nothing about it. It was total... nonsense to me. And when I got out of the hospital, I tried to find that in a psychology book because I realized it was a mental illness diagnosis.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I never found that in any psychology book, but I did find descriptions of schizophrenia with hallucinations and delusions. I was looking at that and saying, you know, some of the things I experienced don't make sense to me. I don't think they could have been real. So I went on from that and learned how to start doing that stuff. But it was not easy and there was no clear pattern.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
I just had to develop it on my own because no one near told me how to do it.