Orlando Counseling : Harmony Counseling Group

          Prior to private practice while I was contracted by an Orlando mental health agency, I had the pleasure of working with many unique and beautiful individuals who came seeking help for very confounded and perplexing mental health issues. The events that I witnessed became routine after a while, and something as foreign as seeing individuals having an argument with the air was nothing but just a safety issue for any real person who happened to be in the line of fire.

        One of the most intriguing mental illnesses to me is Schizophrenia or Schizoaffective disorder. Those with Schizoaffective disorder have the psychotic episodes like that of a Schizophrenia, but also have mood swings like that of Bipolar disorder.  If anyone remembers the movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” Russell Crowe played John Nash, a brilliant professor who happened to have Schizophrenia- paranoid type.  That is but one depiction the movie industry has given us, and sometimes these outrageous stories are not far from the truth. 

     So in working with individuals with serious and persistent mental illness, I discovered the uniqueness and value to each human being, whether they are a functioning member of society or not. And the following stories show a glimpse of the roller-coaster ride that mental health issues can take us on. Working with severely mentally ill individuals is a balance between recognizing the seriousness of the situation, while also seeing the humor that sometimes comes with it.

• While doing an assessment on a psychotic woman in her thirties, she is enthralled in  conversations with several people at once as if I am not even there. She is arguing with them, rolling her eyes, slapping her thighs and laughing, and then points her finger at the air and shouts as if ready to fight, mentioning something about demons. All the sudden it seems she snaps out of it, looks right at me and her face changes. She says, “Damn, you look like hell!”
• After several concerning experiences, I began to become alarmed whenever a psychotic client started a sentence with, “I have half a mind to…”
• Upon doing an assessment on a twenty-year old man who appeared calm and rational, I asked him a routine question: “Do you see things that aren’t there?”  He replied, “No.” I asked, “Do you hear things that others don’t hear?” He again replied, “No.” I asked, “Do you think you have special powers?” This time he said, “No. Not any more…except that I still think I can fly. If I run really fast and flap my arms I can fly for a couple of seconds.” I asked, “Are you so sure that you are willing to test that by jumping off the top of a 20-story building?” He replied,  “Only if I had a banana in my hand.”
• Group therapy with clients in active psychotic phase is always interesting. One day, a client who is chronically delusional and disorganized, was participating in a game of “Three truths and a lie.”  The delusions were egregious and pronounced; I slipped and said to the group, “Now, tell us which ones are lies?  …I mean, which one is the lie?”
• During self-esteem group, I asked a client to name some people who care for him. He said very solemnly, “I got someone who cares about me,” and pointed up to the ceiling. I thought he was going to say something profound about God. I asked, “Who?” He was dead serious and stated , “My insurance company.”
• When a client says to me, “Don’t worry about this… but… when I was [mentally] sick, I had a fixation on my therapist and began to stalk her.” 
• An adolescent client once said to me, “Are your eyes two different colors?” I replied, “Yes, one eye has a birth mark in it.” [staring] “Wow, you must have an interesting life.”  “Why?”  “Because you have two different colored eyes.”
• During group, one elderly woman from Morocco stated, “I am humble, kind, I love God and Jesus, and I never have a bad word for anyone.” People become anxious and are moving about so we take a collective deep breath to relax. As everyone blow air out, she curses and yells, “Someone stink! Someone need to take a bath.”
• During group one day, a young male client who had been very manic and disruptive  blurts out, “When do we have break?”  “Not yet. In a little while.”  The client breaks up a bar of soap he had in his bag, sticks two pieces in his mouth like fangs and says, “I need to go spit this out.” In an attempt to ignore it, I went on about anxiety explaining the concept of fight-or-fight. But instead, I slipped and said  “fright or fight” as he stood there staring at me with soap fangs.
• An animated elderly woman I worked with was never without her little plastic dolls, Eddie and Dan. When we were having session, she stopped in the middle of her sentence and said to one of the dolls, “Now Eddie, what am I going to do with you?  Boy, Jean is going to beat you when we get home. I told you about this…” and she begins rooting around in her purse. She pulls out a deformed paper clip and sticks it in the doll’s hand. The doll is standing with his arm up with a paper clip in it. She scolded, “I told you not to bring the cell phone to therapy.” Later during session, the same thing happened except that this time she pulled out a piece of paper and stuck it in Joe’s fingers. It was a paper hamburger.
• Things one client did when he was psychotic: brought home a cardboard woman from Blockbuster and slept with it; heard the phone ring 24-hours a day and every time he went to pick it up, it stopped ringing; heard the radio from the closet but when he threw the radio out, he still heard voices from the closet, saw the devil in the mirror while he’s taking a bath, saw angels sitting at his dining room table.
  One day, a client came up missing. His mother told me that he was very disturbed about a tree she in the backyard. Then it came up missing. 
• During an assessment with a woman who grew up in the hippie culture, she was complaining passionately about a very “traumatic” experience she went through, which is why she was seeking therapy. She described an argument between her and her husband in which he got fed up and burned all her books because all she did was read.  She said, “I was so upset. It was torture. I heard the books screaming in the fire and there was nothing I could do to save them.”
• One day during group, it seemed that several people became psychotic at once. As I was talking, a woman began cursing at the air, “— you, you son of a b—!” A young and irritable client thought she was yelling at her and shouted back, “What’s your problem?!” Before a fight broke out, I had to explain that she was just yelling at demons again.

For help in mental health issues, counseling and therapy in the Winter Park and Orlando area, call 407.835.3673!