Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Lucy: This podcast has conversations around different mental health experiences that may be distressing for some people. If that doesn't feel like something you want to explore today, you might want to visit another podcast and come back to us another time.
[00:00:13] Rachel: discovery college acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to lands, waters and community. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to the elders, past and present. They have never ceded sovereignty.
[00:00:32] Matt: If you hear someone's story without changing it, interrupting it, fixing it, adding anything, if I hold my loving spirit towards someone and they've got a big story in their thoughts that they can't organize and they say it out loud and they then hear it differently out loud. In response to a loving human, they got two stories and one is that they have an experience of another human being able to be present with them. Now they've got more choice.
[00:01:09] Lucy: I'm Lucy.
[00:01:09] Rachel: And I'm Rachel and we're the hosts of the Extremely Human podcast.
[00:01:13] Lucy: Sometimes we move through big human experiences that others might not understand, like psychosis, grief, addiction, euphoria, or moments that feel completely unreal.
[00:01:25] Rachel: On Extremely Human, we hear from people who've been there and share what they've learned along the way. Together, we ask, how can we meet the full range of human experience with kindness and compassion?
[00:01:38] Lucy: In this episode, Matt shares stories from his own life, including hearing voices, spiritual searching, grief and becoming a parent. He reflects on how these experiences aren't so different, but part of the full range of human experience. We think about why society labels some as acceptable and others not, inviting us to see them all as meaningful responses to life. We hear about just listening, an approach cantered on being present with someone without judgment or trying to fix. At its core, this conversation is about meeting different experiences with openness and compassion and the power of being heard just as you are.
[00:02:20] Rachel: Welcome, Matt.
[00:02:21] Matt: Hello.
[00:02:22] Rachel: Hello. Welcome to Extremely Human. Yeah, we're really thrilled to have you with us today. Can you start by saying who you are?
[00:02:28] Matt: Yep. My name's Matt Ball. I'm a nurse practitioner and psychotherapist. Professionally, I'm quite interested in humans and how they behave. I have a wife and three kids to three teenage girls. I am probably quite a complicated person. I mean, I think everyone's complicated. I think I'm aware of some of my complicated experience of being in the world and I quite like that. And I think in the past it's not helped me. Maybe in the future it won't, but at the moment it feels quite useful.
[00:02:56] Rachel: Oh, I'm so curious to follow through. Follow more on that, but maybe we'll get to it through the course of our conversation today. We do like to start the episodes with a question around.
Is there something ordinary recently that you've experienced that you thought was quite beautiful?
[00:03:12] Matt: Yeah. Yes. There was two things that I was gonna say. One was I was on the train this morning. There was a builder type guy and a guy in a suit. And the builder guy was sitting down and the guy in the suit got on the train. They obviously knew each other. And then they had this lovely little moment where they shook hands and then they kind of.
The builder guy stood up and it was this awkward little moment before they had a hug.
And then after that it was a bit awkward. So one of them went and did their ticket and then he stood by the ticket machine and then decided to come and sit next to the builder guy. And then they spent like 40 minutes having this really lovely conversation. And that just felt really beautiful. It just felt like, oh, yeah, that's what humans will do. If we can put aside all the stories of what's allowed and what's not allowed, then we can have that moment.
[00:03:53] Rachel: They're really nice moments.
[00:03:55] Lucy: I also love a good people watching.
[00:03:57] Matt: Yeah. And listening. Right.
[00:03:59] Lucy: Yeah, it's the listening into conversations.
[00:04:01] Matt: Yeah. And then we pretend we're not doing it. Right.
[00:04:03] Lucy: Yeah. I pretend I'm reading a book.
[00:04:05] Matt: Yeah. And then you can get really into it, can't you? Because there was a guy sitting over for me who was listening to a recording on his phone without headphones. It was really annoying because it was interrupting my listening.
Yeah.
[00:04:17] Lucy: We speak a lot about extreme states on this podcast. I've seen a lot of your keynotes or some of your bios pop up and extreme states is a term that I've seen you use before.
But I wondered what does it mean to you and what's been your experience of extreme states?
[00:04:35] Matt: Well, yeah, I think it's good to address the language. I think all the language is awkward. Right. Because my story of extreme states is different to yours or yours. And so I use extreme states as a kind of poor distraction from the nonsense that I think psychosis language is. So we can call it altered states, non-ordinary states, which is Grof and Grof's work. Or we can call it.
I mean, I wonder why we don't call it psychedelic, sort of non-drug induced psychedelic states. So one of my stories is that maybe we're having some similar experience of consciousness that you have when you introduce, say, Psilocybin or other traditional psychedelics. What we're learning, we think might be happening in the brain that allows us to have mind expanding experiences.
We could move towards thinking, okay, we're discovering that people can have manifestation of experiences expressed through psychedelic states. Ah, there's probably a good example of what's happening in psychosis, altered states, extreme states. So I only use extreme states because it seems probably one of the least offensive versions of it. I wouldn't even say a non ordinary state in my own head. I'd say just another human state of being, you know. And I think we're going to get into this a bit around anxiety and other things, but. But for me, I use extreme states because that's a language that takes it away from the sort of medical psychiatric jargon.
I don't think most of these states of being in themselves are extreme. I think society thinks the expressions are extreme.
So in my own life, I don't know how far we want to go, but as a teenage kid, I started hearing voices in a classroom when I was 13, I think. And there was an entity that was coming through the wall, translucent entity coming through the windows and was gonna, you know, I instantly knew it was gonna consume us and kill us. And it was like this omnipotent entity. No one else could see it, of course. And I hid under a desk and was screaming, or I thought I was. Apparently I wasn't in hindsight, but it felt like I was. And everyone caught on fire. We were in a science lab. So I don't think that's unrelated the science bit. You got your old Bunsen burners from when you're at school and things. So it was easy to imagine how the imagery, it was also an omnipotent experience. And I just left the church environment where I was abused as a kid. So, you know, hellfire, damnation in a science lab with Bunsen burners, omnipotent presence consuming us, taking us over. It's not, I don't think it's very hard to make up a really reasonable story as to why that particular set of events emerged. And that was my first experience that would be considered, I suppose, psychotic.
[00:07:16] Lucy: What was that like for you? How did you make sense of that?
[00:07:19] Matt: Well, I didn't. I mean, the story of that day was that I got taken to the sick room by the assistant principal and then at the end of the day, let me go home. No one said anything. It wasn't long after that that I started doing acid. We had some gypsy travellers would come and set up camp for a bit of time each year in near where I lived in England. Friend of ours said he could get some acid there and. And I think I quickly realized that I could have an altered state induced by me rather than something that randomly arrived.
It wasn't long before or after that, I don't know, that I also thought about killing myself. I was quite regularly beaten up after school in this alleyway. And I remember I had to walk over this enormous bridge to get home. And I wrote a suicide note and planned where I'd killed myself. And I think I was 12 or 13 and, you know, who knows what age exactly. But, you know, in hindsight, I would probably put suicide in the same bracket as psychosis, as in it's another state of being that's equally moral, morally unacceptable in our society, but is equally valid in terms of giving us, allowing us to notice what's happening in our being.
You know, I think having an altered state and think there's an omnipotent thing coming through the wall and thinking about ending my life. I'm not sure they're that different, but we've separated them off as we do in the industry of health is. Everything has to be distinct. And that presume comes from the medical model. And it's not a criticism, but medical model, we. We peel the layers till we find the problem. So I think we've done that philosophically with psychosis, this, suicides that. I don't think that's the case.
When I was 21, I became homeless in Perth. I was traveling Australia, became homeless in Perth and started. I was living in a park with some aboriginal mob that were looking after me, some homeless crew. And there was four cameras in the park. And it was in. This is in the 90s. It was a long time before we had cameras everywhere. I mean, there were cameras, but they weren't quite as obsessive as they are now. And I just knew the voice came, this voice, this man down by the side of my right legs with a big ginger head and beard. Don't know why. He would tell me that he was sitting in a room and could see all the screens for all the cameras in the world.
So these four cameras were just watching me repeatedly. And then of course, he'd say things like, I'd leave the park during the day and go and get some food from the Krishna Cafe or whatever for free because I was homeless. And he would be telling me, oh, this camera's here as well. You're not free of them. So then I became very frightened. I mean, what people would call paranoid, I suppose. Doesn't really fit for me, that language.
And so that was where I started hearing voices. Got put in a detention centre before I got deported. And it was in the detention centre I started hearing lots of other voices. Voices of people from my life who'd been bullies to me or who. Some of them were kind people, but they're all saying, look, this was always gonna be your life. It's pretty messy, you're pretty useless, you might as well kill yourself. Da da da da. Ended up slightly homeless in England, if you can be slightly homeless. And then ended up in a psychiatric hospital and ensued this kind of 18 months of hearing voices, seeing things, being frightened.
Not really. I would use the language. Disorganized. I was disorganized about being in the world.
So the voices and visions for me are kind of secondary.
It was the sense of just not existing or being in the world in a way that felt liveable or doable. And I think, you know, maybe we'll get more into this. But Laing, I think his book the Divided Self explains this really beautifully about people. Sort of end stage nihilism, you go psychotic, you become mad because you cease to exist anymore in relation. And Michael Jackson, not the singer, the author who talks about liminality, he talks about the existential imperative is to.
Of the human psyche is to tell people you exist, otherwise you face sort of existential oblivion, you don't exist anymore at all.
So the expression of psychosis, which is if I was said to be in an extreme state or psychotic, now you too would experience the expression I'd be communicating to you.
And so it's probably not an extreme state to me, coming back to that, but it might look like an extreme state to you.
And I think that's the sort of experiences I've had on and off. I then didn't hear voices for, I don't know, 17 years or something like that. Got into quite a lot of Buddhist philosophy, going away to monasteries, thought about ordaining as a monk.
[00:11:39] Lucy: Did you study with Buddhists or you.
[00:11:41] Matt: Yes, well, I started going over vipassana retreats.
Well, maybe it's important I tell you because this is an equally extreme state of an experience that no one would really think of as psychotic but was very powerful to me. And I've been thinking a lot about recently when I left the therapeutic community I lived in which was AIDS treatment resistant psychotic, schizophrenic people, so called.
I'd come through there at some point during that journey, I'd stopped having what people would think of was psychosis or altered states or extreme states. And I was sitting on an op shop bought fake Chesterfield couch in my new crappy housing trust apartment, which I was extremely pleased I was in, you know, like the, the different layers of gratitude or disgust of your lives, you know, but actually having my own place, having been homeless and been in the psychiatric system was this incredible, incredible gift. It was a tower block on a really rough, well, pretty rough estate. It was, but it was beautiful.
And I was sitting on this couch and I remember thinking to myself the first week I was there, if I'm not going to be psychotic and I'm not going to kill myself, then I'd really like to try and be conscious of as much as I can. And that was my first thought which I think led me to Buddhism. And it wasn't till a few years later that my friend Ali, who was a nurse, who inspired me in many ways to be a nurse, she and I surfed a lot together and she bought me an op shop $1 book on Buddhism.
And you know, I remember reading it and thinking, oh, I know this stuff. And I didn't know it, but it was like, oh yeah, okay. It just kind of felt something.
Suppose people talk about this in faith and religion and stuff. You just kind of feel something. And having grown up in the Christian church and rejected Christianity in my life, not in others, it's fine. But in my life as a legitimate construct, something I didn't experience really to be true, it was quite confronting to think about taking on other faith and spiritual beliefs. And that was quite challenging. But it was undeniable to me. I mean, the Four Noble Truths, people are interested in looking it up.
For me, it's hard to dispute the reality there is suffering in the world. People suffer. People suffer because they want things or don't want things. That seems pretty true.
There's probably a way out of suffering. And that's going to be to stop reacting to what you want and what you don't want. I mean, there's a lot more to Buddhism than that. But those are the, my kind of very basic interpretation of the Four Noble Truths. And it's like, so then there's the Eightfold Path. Live an ethical life.
Okay, well that's how you free yourself from suffering, right? So that kind of was like, yeah, that would make sense.
So to kind of get into that. And then I can go into loads of detail, but about surfing with this postie in England, it's freezing cold. And he's just come back from a 10 day surface silent retreat. And he said, oh, you should do this. Smells amazing. And then I went to work. Next time I'm running this therapeutic community for heroin users with some friends and my boss said to me, oh, I've just been to this 10 day retreat, it's two days, I've never heard of this thing. So I was like, right, I'm going.
[00:14:45] Lucy: I hear that a lot about vipassana. People get the signs and then they have a calling to go.
[00:14:50] Matt: Yeah. And I don't think it's a sign. I think saying there's signs of things is equally psychotic.
[00:14:55] Lucy: I agree, I agree.
[00:14:56] Matt: So it's funny, isn't it?
[00:14:57] Lucy: Because it's like what's acceptable.
[00:14:59] Matt: Yeah, yeah, that's normal to go on a retreat that's spiritual and lovely. It's. By the way, vipassana is not spiritual and lovely. Vipassana is bloody hard work.
And so you asked me earlier what was it like, you know, doing that? Well, I mean, I think you expose yourself to your madness. You know, you sit in silence with no interruptions, you don't speak, you get up at 4:30 in the morning and start meditating. You, you get taught, you don't eat after lunchtime. You know, you're putting your body into an unusual experience.
And so of course you would have unusual reactions. I remember thinking the guy next to me on my first retreat, I was so angry with him because he was so serene and so good at the meditation. And every time I opened my eyes, which was about a million times a day because I couldn't bear it any longer, he was sitting looking like the archetype of the, of the Buddha, you know, and on the 11th day you can speak. And I said to him, I've had such ill feeling towards you. You know, we're trying to do this ethical thing. I've hated you all week. How did you do this? It's your first. Is my first retreat. How did you. He said, well, every time I open my eyes you look so serene.
[00:16:04] Lucy: Yeah.
[00:16:05] Matt: So you know, you're like, okay, right there's. There it is.
[00:16:09] Lucy: That's funny.
[00:16:10] Matt: The stories in our mind dictate our experience of being in the world. Right?
And the environment around us creates those stories to some degree. And our history and our ancestors, our culture, our spirit, whatever it is, are the events in our life create how those two things interact and then we have experiences. Now were my experiences in Vipassana any more or less psychotic than my experiences in the classroom that day. No.
Extreme experiences of the human spirit, the human being. And then I started going to a monastery. Oh, I got cool stories about this. I went to a monastery that was close by a Thai forest hermitage monastery in the UK. A little girl at the time, me and my wife were living in a caravan. So then you start to attach experiences to experiences which if you're psychotic and you think that the psychiatrist is a figure of God because they're powerful, that's psychotic.
If you have a Buddha stupa in your caravan and your daughter gives the Buddha her leftover toast every morning, then maybe that's a sign of reincarnation. And that would be okay in some forms of Buddhism. Other forms of Buddhism would say no.
So I started. I was listening to this Buddhist podcast, and I'm telling myself, oh, my daughter, she must have been here before. How does she know at one year old to toddle over and give her food to the Buddha? You know, like, this is amazing that I've. My wife's birthed this reincarnate because I was listening to a lot of Tibetan Buddhism. And so I went to Suvaco and I said, I've got a question for you. And he said, okay, let's go for a walk in the woods tomorrow. So I went for a walk. I said, I got this. And as we're getting back to the monastery, he said, oh, you had a question for me. We've been talking. He said, you got a question? I said, yeah, my daughter's doing this. Do you think she's reincarnated?
And he stopped and he paused. He says, I don't know.
That was kind of it, you know, that was kind of it, right? And you're like, ah, I just done all this gymnastics in my head about something I couldn't know. Now, is that not psychotic?
In the vernacular of medical psychiatry, that is psychotic to taken actions.
Turned your child into this child reincarnate. Your wife is now venerated because she's given birth to the. I mean, that's madness, right? Fixed beliefs. Yeah.
And then they weren't fixed because when Suvaco said that, it was like, oh, yeah, right.
Anyway, so then I went off to see if I wanted to be a monk in Indonesia. Decided not to.
Gave that up. Got back to England. The day I got back to England, I'd met my wife nine months earlier once I was living in this communal house. I'd met my wife once at a comedy night through a friend.
Never spoke to her again. And the day I got Back from deciding not to do anything with Buddhism, got a text from her saying, I don't know if you remember me joining me out for a drink. It's the first time I'd ever been asked out, I think, on a drink. And then we're married 20 years later. So which bit was destiny?
Signs, who knows? And I think this is the point, right, about extreme states. I could make up a story about my wife texting me that day and what it meant, and the destiny of going to Indonesia and meeting some mystical people on the way. And they gave me signs. And then the energy moved across the earth and I surfed this spot called Devil's Rock off western Bali, which no one surfs because it's possessed. And then.
Which did happen, right? According to the locals, it's possessed and they had to pay a lot of money to take me there to surf it. And so I could make up any aspect of that story, could turn into my wife texting me and us getting married, having three kids. And if it's not in a psychiatric hospital, it's probably all right. Some people probably think you're weird, but if you're in a psychiatric hospital and you start going down that path, and then the thing for me is, if people start denying that, but you think that might be true, you're going to become more energetic in it being true, right? And there's a thing called the negation reflex, which has been written about. And so, you know, if we negate people's realities, they have react stance in psychodynamic language, where you'll see more of it, it becomes more present. And then we say, oh, that person can't manage the testing of reality or stress tests or whatever. Well, this is all what you're. I mean, if we play that, you're the professionals, you're doing that to me.
You don't need to dispute my reality, right?
But I'm stuck in a hospital and I've got to talk to you. Well, I'll tell you what's happening. I don't need you to tell me it's not true.
But that's the whole setup, right? So then I think extreme states, altered states, works better. And that's probably been the experience in my life. So when I start off saying I've I'm complicated, I actually don't think I'm complicated. I think. I think a lot about the complications of what one human thinks in a world where there's kind of generally, in different cultures and groups, generally a sense of what's Acceptable and what's not and how we organize that.
[00:21:01] Lucy: We have a course for discovery college on psychosis and we reframe psychosis with the idea that it could just be another unshared reality.
That seems mind blowing to some people. But it's like a lot of the lived experience in the co production say this is just a reality that we experience.
[00:21:23] Matt: Yeah. And I think that one of the things I think has happened and I think we've probably come onto this, it's someone else deciding, isn't it, what's a reasonable explanation and what's allowed. I remember working on ED when I first got to Australia and I worked with the. This doctor who was a Muslim man and we got talking in late at night, three o' clock in the morning. It was probably quite mad because, you know, it's doing these 12 hour shifts. And he said, oh, you know, you should, you know, Allah is there for you, you know, you can give you a lot. And I said, oh, well, you know, I think Buddha taught us a lot and we had these lovely conversations. He would teach me about Islam and I would try and follow those practices. And then another day I would teach him about Buddhism. He tried to follow. And what we discovered is that we weren't going to convert one another, you know, and that was okay. So he had this beautiful journey with Allah, you know, and I had this beautiful journey with Buddha.
Oh, okay. There was no psychosis in this, but they were pretty different views. I mean, I don't believe there's a God. He does. They're pretty extremely different views.
But what we didn't need to do with each other was try and change one another's story. We offered to understand and hear one another and I think both of us would admit we'd quite like the other ones who have come over to our side, you know.
[00:22:35] Rachel: Validates you in some way, doesn't it?
[00:22:37] Matt: Because what does it mean if someone knows more though? Something different to me. Scary, right?
So, yeah, so. And then. And then in 2017, my friend died. And this is important to me. I nursed him through his death that night, palliated him. Then the next day I started hearing. I was walking past the cafe and I heard someone call my name. And I'd been awake for 40 hours. It'd been a long, long trip. Beautiful experience, actually, but a long trip. And I went into the cafe and said, oh, did someone just call my name? And they said no. And I was like, oh, okay.
And so then I started hearing a voice and my ear would get Warm. My right ear would get warm and I get pain in it. Start hearing this voice just telling me I'd done all I could and it wasn't my fault. And I associated that my lovely friend Paul and who died. And that was quite comforting.
Sometimes it was a bit annoying.
And I think that voice, I don't hear it anymore. But I think that voice was quite useful to me over time, telling me, you know, maybe you're all right who you are, you don't need to do other things.
So, you know, is that an extreme state? Or is that a thought? Or is that really useful? Or is that a kind of respect, my dead friend? Or is that going through a profoundness of palliating someone, you know, who knows what it is? We don't need to know. Maybe. But it was beautiful. And I was actually. I remember when I first started hearing his voice, I went straight to work and told my colleagues. And that was one of the fundamental differences was when I was homeless and, you know, derro and. And went to a doctor to get some valium because I couldn't afford any more drugs and I had too much tick medulla and he put me in a psych ward.
The. There's two fundamental differences there. One is that was. That person took it away from me and decided what it meant. At work…Okay, your voice is so what I mean, or not so what. But I wonder what that's about. What does that mean? How does that feel for you? What is it like?
And so that. That was really important to me. That's been my experience. And again, I would say it's not extreme states. It's kind of another way of a human being in the context of something that's happening, which is really unsatisfactory to a mental health industry. Right. Because it's very unneat. We can't organize it.
And the other thing I'd say then is being a parent. Not everyone gets to be a parent or wants to be a parent. But my experience of being a parent, I remember the day I first saw the physical body of my daughter being delivered from my wife. And that felt.
I can only say that it was like, oh, my world has just changed now. She'd had that experience ongoing for nine months. So she'd had this different experience. I'm not equating it to her experience at all. Quite different.
But I just. I'll never forget the crowning of her head and just going, oh, this is it. Something's happened.
And so is that an extreme state? Because actually nothing had Happened, the baby was still inside my wife at that moment, you know, because few times it's gonna happen before the baby's delivered.
[00:25:39] Matt: But yeah, I can, you know, I can equally go back to that hospital in that moment and see that as I can. The omnipotent thing coming through the wall can still see it in my mind, feel it in my body, stories in my head. And you go, oh, okay, well which one of those is extreme? Just experiences. Right.
[00:25:59] Lucy: Kind of like what the monk said, like who knows, you know, about everything, right? We don't really know.
[00:26:06] Matt: No.
[00:26:06] Lucy: People just making things up, aren't we?
[00:26:08] Matt: No. And one of the stories is when people get into that they're psychotic. Yeah, yeah, but actually it's true, isn't it? None of us know anything like. Well, no, we know lots, but none of it. What's absolutely.
[00:26:21] Rachel: And what is knowledge as well.
[00:26:24] Matt: Yeah.
And I think, I mean, I know this isn't a podcast about the mental health system as such, but I do think this is one of the kind of follies of the industry of mental health. And we've gone further down, we haven't come back from it. You know, we started with hypothesis in the early 20th century and in the early to mid 21st century, now we're actually going further down the folly of thinking we've got knowledge. You know, at least back then there was experimental stuff. I mean, there's psychedelics. I was thinking about psychedelics on the way here. That's slightly experimental, but of course it's been taken over by drug companies and it's about the treatment. Well, taking acid, mushrooms, DMT, whatever you want, ayahuasca, it's all very good and you probably have new experiences, but if the context of your world is the same, presumably those experiences just actually become something you yearn after and don't really exist.
So we're still trying to fix the brain, right. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the human brain. The whole notion of mental health is silly because the body doesn't stop at the neck and not even getting into where serotonin is produced, all that, of course, but there is a sealed up human body. And I think if the first thing we could do is to stop using the language of mental health, because mental health comes from the language of mental hygiene and mental illness.
And so we were washing and cleaning those that were morally deficient and that is the euphemism of mental health. We pretend it's not. But what we're talking about, what I'm rambling about, is that these states of being are just simply states of being.
And importantly, not withholding that people get very distressed. But why do we think they're distressed in the moment? It might be the extreme state, but it's the world, it's the life, it's the context, it's the experience.
It's distressing and they're expressing it to us.
[00:28:20] Lucy: If we didn't use the word mental health, what would you suggest would be a good alternative?
[00:28:26] Matt: Being human. But of course that doesn't work. And this isn't really a sort of anti system, but it's a commentary from my perspective that we have built an industry complex. It's a neoliberal construct where you're either ill forever, so people serve you, or you get better and go and work in that field. Either way, it maintains an industry.
I think that we've created another profession to come into the complex, which is the lived experience profession. And we're losing the value of people who've got lived experience by creating a space for them in the industry complex.
And I think I don't want to say too much about this because it's not my profession. I don't want to take up all the airwaves, but I am really sad about the co-option of the experiences of being that we could learn so much from.
And now we're looking at shaman from other cultures so we can take psychedelics. What about looking at the person who I walked past today, who's shouting at their voices on King William Road? I wonder what that person has to tell us.
He's never going to be a peer worker. He's never going to see a peer worker. He's never going to be seen to be okay enough for that. Well, that's madness.
That guy's telling us he's in the nice posh little Adelaide area with all the cathedrals. There's the world tennis thing going on, there's all this going on and he's telling us something. He's our shaman and that's what we've lost.
[00:30:00] Rachel: What came to my mind as you were talking was Sheila McNamee's article on radical presence where she talks about the psi complex. And perhaps we could put that in the notes because it really just kind of is very similar to what you're talking about. I think.
What is Just listening Approach? How did it come about and what makes it different from more traditional mental health services?
[00:30:25] Matt: Just Listening is about offering justice through listening and connection. In this moment, most of our systems don't do that because we need to layer on our professional skills, our interpretations.
We need to be valued. They're all the things we need in the presence of a person who's talking about their life and their being. And so in just listening, we've really just tried to come back and say, okay, you know, if the listener takes responsibility not to interrupt the story, we might be able to begin to offer justice in this moment. We're not trying to address past traumas. We're not trying to pretend you can heal from everything that's ever happened. We're not trying to stop you being how you are being in this moment. What we're saying is you be how you are, and we could be here and witness that. Just listening was a thing that. We got inspired by sidewalk talk from the states. We developed our own model. We'd sit at the beach, we'd offer free listening. People would tell us beautiful stories and often say, I've never said that in my whole life.
The guy that comes to mind was the vet.
He'd been kicked out of the army when he was 61 years earlier. We'd seen this guy sit and look at us for 45 minutes and then drive away. And he came back and he said, I want to talk to you, but I want to say thank you before I start, because I'm going to cry. I'm going to tell you something that I've been holding onto for 62 years. He was 81. And he said, so here's a chocolate for you both for listening.
And then when I leave, you don't need to worry about me. It'll be emotional. So this beautiful gift to us of setting us up, really, like, how beautiful is that he'd done something by saving someone's life, but he'd crossed this line that he followed. Not followed orders, but he had saved his friend from dying. And he got kicked out of the army. He was so ashamed. He'd never told anyone. He had been in the church for all of his life. He'd never told the priest. He'd never confessed his sins.
He never told his wife, and she died three months earlier.
And so now he needed to say it.
And so he came and told us this story, and he wept. And, you know, it feels emotional thinking about it, but he wept. And he just said, look, thanks so much, guys, and got up and walked off.
And, you know, that.
[00:32:32] Matt: That sums up just this thing for me. We couldn't solve his being kicked out of the army, not telling the priest, not telling his wife, none of that stuff.
But he'd never had a space to share his version of events, of what was inside, his experience of being. So then we decided we'd open an ED alternative. And this was before there was a plethora of ED alternatives where they're not alternative anymore. They're all within the system now.
So we're not saying we've got it right, but we made some very basic principles. We wanted the community to be able to deliver justice in the moment to another. And we would refuse to use risk assessments, predictive risk assessments, because successive governments tell us they're not fit for purpose, they're inaccurate, they're erroneous. Australian government tells us that, Nice guidelines in England tell us that. And yet our models are based on risk assessment. And then some people say, oh, we don't use the paperwork risk assessments. No, but you still decide when someone, oh, might do that. Well, that's a predictive risk assessment. That's actually clairvoyance. And I'm not against clairvoyance, but clairvoyance might be considered altered state or extreme state, which is fun because that's what we're talking about. Right. So if you said we're going to do clairvoyance to decide whether someone's going to end their life, you wouldn't last long in the mental health industry. And yet risk assessment prediction is clairvoyance. So we decided not to use risk prediction or clairvoyance, and we decided not to ring services, but to offer people relationship. So come back as often as you want. Give people really, really clear boundaries. Every time someone comes in, tell them what you offer, tell them what's available, how long, what's going to happen. Tell them you won't call services and then they can walk out whenever they want. They can come three times a day, they can come five times a day, they can come once a year, they can come once, whatever.
What won't happen is we won't take away your freedoms and your freedom to think and believe what you believe. Instead, we'll offer you human connection.
Now, that sounds like a lot of people say, yeah, we do that, we do that. I'm not saying we're brilliant, we're perfect, it's certainly not a model for everyone. But what we do try and do is take responsibility for our behaviour rather than asking the other person to change and take responsibility for their behaviour. That's a really key component here. Because if I come along and say I'm a nurse and apply some nursing models, then I'm ultimately deciding that you need that. If you come along as a peer worker and share your lived experience story, I'm deciding in the benefit of you that you hear my experience.
Now. It doesn't matter whether it's peer work, nursing, medical, social work, OT. I'm not against any of them. I'm just saying that when we apply that to someone, we're telling them that we know something that will be useful to them. And in their story, I couldn't know that they are the wise person. They are the only person that's had that experience ever.
I have all my stories, so I have my lived experience of psychiatric settings, abominable and beautiful occasionally.
I have my experience of being abused as a child in the church. I have my experience of being a white Christian, conservative privileged male growing up. I have my experience of homelessness. I have my experience of Christianity or Buddhism, all of those things, they're all really relevant. But anytime I apply something to someone else, it's those stories that I'm applying.
It's those, it's me interpreting that that is more knowledgeable about you than your knowledge of you.
So just listening is about offering a just process and being available to take responsibility for my stories. Really important. I hear them. I don't want to do an injustice to me. But after I've listened to you, I go and share with someone what was happening for me while I was listening with someone else. With someone else who does the same thing to me. They offer me the same process. So perhaps I come and listen to you and then I turn to you and you listen to me, all right?
And then you might get listened to. And what we do is we create a sense that all of us can take responsibility not to do things to other people.
And that's, I think, a fundamental difference of just listening is that we're not telling people that we have something that we could know would be helpful to them.
They can come and see if just listening is useful. What I think happens is if you hear someone's story without changing it, interrupting it, fixing it, adding anything, and you just hold the intention of being a loving human and trusting that person, people will experience that. And this is where it gets into, you know, it's non science, it's maybe the same as clairvoyance, who knows? But if I hold my loving spirit towards someone and they've got a big story in their thoughts that they can't organize and they say it out loud and they then hear it differently out loud in response to a loving human, they got two stories now. They've got more choice.
And suddenly they came in with one heavy story. They got two versions. And one is that they have an experience of another human being able to be present with them if we take a story.
So I was abused as a kid. Didn't talk about it for 37 years. I remember the night I talked about it, and the person allowed me to just talk about it for the first time for about four hours.
I would have repeated myself over and over and over.
We walked around Sydney, we were on the trains, we went out for dinner. This poor person, in hindsight, I mean, she didn't feel that, but, you know, it was extraordinary to be allowed to say stuff that I'd been holding in for 37 years and not at any point for them to pretend they could make that better. Because you can't make child rape better.
It happened. I think about it every day. I. I have images of it every day. And I have a good life, so that's okay. I can manage that. And whatever anyone else who's had those experiences in childhood has, it wasn't the same as mine. I'm not special. I'm just saying, only I know what that experience was like. And again, going back to Lang, one of the things he said is, if someone's telling us their experience, you're having your experience of them telling you their experience, not their experience.
So then what is my lived experience worth to them? What is my nursing experience worth to them? What is my prescribing knowledge worth to them? It might be of use at some point, but just listening is before all of that. There's no reason why everyone can't offer just listening. And, you know, there's practical tasks. We've got to do things. I get that. But first and foremost, when you. When you bump into someone, when you meet with someone, whether it's in the office, whether it's here, whether it's wherever, perhaps we just pause and offer justice to someone that we've arrived in this moment, here.
In my mind that just listening is one. One of the vast array of alternatives that different humans might find useful.
So I used to think Just Listening was the answer for everyone, and I don't anymore.
I think it's something that can be useful to a lot of people, and that's probably in workplaces, probably in families, probably as a mental health intervention, if you want to call it that. But I know that sitting down with a fellow on the bridge, if that's what he was interested in, and just hanging out with him, having a smoke with him might be quite nice.
I think of Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. Really beautiful book. When I think about lost Connections and a lot of what we talk about in the modern era, the disconnect from knowing that what we're doing is not working to knowing what to do is a chasm.
I think dialogical practice is a start, but I think most dialogical practice happens within the context that if you happen to ring the wrong person on the phone in crisis, you don't get a dialogical practice and it undermines dialogical practice. Again, not critical, just naming the reality. So just listening is not immune to that. If you come to just listening and then you go to the hospital, you're going to have two different experiences. We need to be careful to tell people that, to give them choice, to trust their wisdom, to honour their judgment. So people in extreme states. One of the fantasies is that we need to use clairvoyance to guess what's going to happen so we can stop it.
Stop guessing and using clairvoyance.
Spend time in connection and love and being. And that's complicated. Far more complicated than the pharmacology of drugs, really Clearly, I'm not anti psychiatry, I'm not anti medication.
I'm really, really pro doing everything we can to make sure that people make really great choices, given the wisdom that we can all bring so that people can make choices. So if you want to know about antipsychotics, find out everything. If you decide to take antipsychotics and you feel that your world is better because you're doing that, that's great outcome.
That's a great outcome. But know that if you're on olanzapine, you have a risk of getting diabetes.
Know that you can't read the novels that you read because you'll stop forgetting at the end of a paragraph and that'll be seen as a symptom of your psychosis. Know that you'll eat more. Know all of these things, and also know that some people find it really, really powerful and useful. Right? Know it all and then have good people around you that you can go and explore this ongoing with. And then have a prescriber that knows how to take you off it in a compassionate, kind, beautiful way, or increases in a kind, compassionate, beautiful way.
One of my fantasies is that we might start to accept that if you prescribe people drugs, I'm a prescriber. If you prescribe people drugs, it's not a new skill to take them off it. If you don't know how to support someone to safely come off a drug, then you shouldn't be prescribing the drug.
And the modern era is, oh yeah, well, we're just learning. Well, we're too bloody late. If you're going to put people on drugs that alter their body shape, their identity, change their ability to reproduce, you know, like these are extreme things. Right. If you're going to put people on a drug, make sure you are skilled to take them off it and do it compassionately, with kindness, with justice, with honour, as a mutual human.
[00:42:29] Lucy: So, Matt, we did have a catch up before recording this podcast and you spoke about the idea of people with psychosis being the most marginalized people in our society. I wanted to hear a little bit more about why you think that.
[00:42:43] Matt: Well, I think that because to me it's true.
But why? Where I'm coming from in our conversation about that, and one of my passions recently has been that the mental health industry has become so siloed, it's become more siloed, not less silent. Everyone says we've got to be less silent because become more siloed. So every group seems to think that it has the priority need for services and funding. And I'm absolutely not saying those individuals within that group don't have an absolute need.
What strikes me is that if you're from the LGBTQ+ community, thank goodness we've got to the point where people from that community are leading that community. Women's rights, men's rights, different racial, cultural groups. Hopefully we've got to the point where it's inconceivable that people wouldn't be leading those communities if they weren't from those communities. Lived experience, community. You know, hopefully we're moving further and further away from having the peer and lived experience consumer survivor community being represented by other professionals. Right. So that's really great. Generally you would not have the needs of people in altered states, psychosis led by people in altered states and psychosis, or at times even people that have had those extreme states. We would categorize what was enough. So if you had a transient psychosis, you might be right. But if you've had a 25 year journey of being labelled schizophrenia, you're unlikely to get to the top of the tree and lead a movement.
It has occasionally happened in spaces, but in terms of in Australia, I don't see that we still need to lead the psychotic people because we know more about psychosis than them. And my point about people from different groups leading their own groups is we accept that they know what it's like to be to identify within that group.
We haven't got to the point where we have a situation where psychotic people lead. How we respond to extreme states based on the experience of being someone that experiences extreme states. But what if a bunch of psychotic people come out and say, open dollar's no good for us.
Do we have the courage to take a U turn on that? What if people come to just listening and say, just listening's not enough? It didn't really hold me.
Have we got the courage at just listening to say, yeah, no. Fair point.
What do you actually think would be better here?
What could we do differently? And do you want to lead that?
I don't think we're there with psychotic people.
And so then I think if you go into the public and talk about schizophrenia, it is still the archetype of the thing that you don't want, perhaps second to cancer, perhaps not, because we can treat cancer now, but you don't want a lifetime of schizophrenia. And if you have schizophrenia, if you think about the power threat, meaning framework and that if you have schizophrenia, you lose cultural capital, you lose financial capital, you lose relational capital, you lose legal capital.
It all acts against you. All of them, the ideologies of power, epistemic injustice, it's all there.
And so for me, the other thing is that if you're person of colour, you're more likely to get diagnosed with schizophrenia. So then you start going, oh, it's not only the psychosis. We use the other groups to marginalize even further the psychotic person. And how well do those groups cope with it? How often do you see psychotic people in one of the very prevalent groups that's around at the moment being put up there as a really valuable person? You're just not going to see that. You're not going to see in the women's movement lots of schizophrenic women?
That's not pretty. It doesn't work. And I'm talking about the ideologies of pretty women looking powerful. I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying that's what we still do. You see, you don't want psychotic people on there because that doesn't work. Right.
How would we go with a politician that was psychotic and schizophrenic? When was the last schizophrenic politician in Australia open about that?
Thank goodness. We're trying to get to the point where we celebrate, or not even celebrate, we acknowledge the importance of a person who identifies as gay being able to talk openly about that in professional sport. We're not there, but thank goodness we're at least beginning to think about it. We're not there with schizophrenia.
Could we have a schizophrenic playing for openly schizophrenic voice here playing for the 36ers? No, we couldn't.
I mean, people can argue. We could, but we couldn't. Now you can say, oh, it's because of the dysfunction. It's because they're not coping. It's because of. Yeah, yeah, all right. How much of that is the antipsychotics? How much of that is the hospitalization? How much of that is the marginalization by society that schizophrenia is a bizarre thing?
Am I still. Is it schizophrenic of me to say that psychotic people are marginalized and treated more unfairly than any other group because even within their own groups they're treated unfairly?
That might be psychotic of me, or it might just be what I think we all know.
So all I'm saying about this is not that psychotic people should have more than anyone else. I'm saying that in all the kind of polished, modern, politically correct movements, there's another group of people that go in every group. There's not a group of people where there isn't people who have extreme states and altered states.
They get marginalized and then they face oppression of the Mental Health Act. And I know we can't go too far, we've recorded for too long, but let's name the Mental Health Act. It is bizarre. If you stand back from Mental Health acts in every state, forget the reforms, forget the tweaks, forget the language. It is just an opinion that you can remove someone's freedom.
Show me another law in the country that is as loose as the Mental Health act in removing a person's right to walk down the street or express themselves. There isn't one.
It would not meet the standard for any Human Rights act, in my opinion. Others will disagree.
You know, if you speak to someone, you probably both do, but speak to someone who's got a Mental Health act tribunal coming up where you've got a psychiatrist, maybe another professional, members of the board of whoever's reviewing your tribunal.
I don't know if any three of us would like to go to that hearing today as the subject of someone else's opinion about our sanity. I don't want to go there because there's no way out.
So then I've got to convince a person that they think I'm psychotic and need to be forced to have chemicals which are harmful to me at various levels. I've got to convince them that their whole training, their career, their income, their status in society, there might be a glitch in it in this moment, not completely, but just in their opinion of me, that's an unwinnable situation. And then I start hiding from the tribunal, which is kind of one of the negative symptoms. Right. Start getting a bit sad about it, maybe start hearing voices telling me I'm shit and I can't cope and maybe I should kill myself.
What are the criteria by which we detain people? If they're a risk to themselves. Okay, so I can't mention that in the tribunal, you know, and off you go. And off you go. And off you go. I know the last in a long line to be saying this, I'm not new, but it starts there and then it leaks into our society. So actually my kids know about my history, but I'm confident that if I wasn't their dad, I was their friend's dad and they heard I had a diagnosis of schizophrenia in the past, they would have anxiety about who I was.
And we've done this since the beginning of time.
And that's what most of the other freedom movements are about, is about stopping thinking that because that person's got a different way of being in the world. To me, they're inherently a risk, they're scary, they're dangerous. I've got to change it.
I remember my daughter and I were at the. This is another beautiful thing I saw one day which is just normal. I remember I was at the botanic gardens here and I was at an art exhibition, my 12 year old daughter. And we happened to arrive at the same time as two guys who were reminded me of my dad. They were about my dad's age, my dad passed away, but they were about 75, I reckon. And they were just walking and holding hands in front of us and we kind of kept being at the exhibits, one after the other behind them and it was all outdoors and then they turned to each other and kissed each other and had a hug and nothing massive, just normal displays of affection in life.
And my daughter and I are sitting there, we just had this little moment, we just went, oh.
And I said, you know what, Dee? When I was your age, you might have got punched for doing that, you might have got shouted at. And I know that still happens, but actually how beautiful that we're. How important, beautiful and vital that we're at a point where a 50 year old white heterosexual guy is saying to his daughter. And I'm not saying I'm better than anyone, I'm just saying that it's becoming more common that a white heterosexual male might say to his daughter, oh, that's beautiful, isn't it? Two people in love.
Because that's the change that we're seeing and that's really important.
I don't think we've seen that in psychosis and schizophrenia, I really don't.
Because otherwise we wouldn't have laws that belong perhaps in the fifth century.
[00:51:56] Lucy: Do you have any ideas about how we get there?
[00:52:00] Matt: Well, I don't know.
I think people have tried to get rid of the labels. It doesn't really work. It's not really the labels, it's the expressions.
Like the world is like a shaman for us. In my mind it's telling us that there's great big problems now. We're seeing some of them. We're seeing the wars and we're seeing the violence and we're seeing some extreme, hideous things that are inhumane.
I think our only hope is on a basic one to one scale on everyday life to take some responsibility. And I know lots of people have said that, but I don't think it's in mental health services that we will cure this because the archetype of psychiatric institutions is schizophrenic and we haven't really moved away in the modern era. You've added borderline personalities, constructs to that. Equally as offensive and horrific in terms of. I mean that just is insane, that whole construct. Because although I know men get it as well, that label, but in essence it's talking about women being hysterical and we just covered it up with this bizarre modern language. Well, you know, then we go back to burning women who didn't drown. And we're not any further forward if we start using that type of. Not even just the language, but we behave towards women who express that they have a distress in the world, which is every man and woman and any identity in the world knows distress. I don't know the answer other than for me it's about deconstructing the mental health settings that we know and being brave enough to say, at my sports club, when someone's distressed, I don't refer them on, I stop playing sport and I sit down with them. You know, if we do that with 5 year olds, 6 year olds, 7 year olds, 10 year olds, it's not a billboard campaign, it's about taking responsibility for our actions.
I think so. No, I don't have any good answers.
We need to we need to return to society that it's okay to be how you are.
[00:54:07] Lucy: Matt, it's been an amazing conversation today. I want to thank you for your honesty, for pointing out truths and having the bravery to do that. And I just feel like you haven't pretended to be anyone else but yourself. And I really value that. In this mammoth conversation, what feels most important for listeners to take with them?
[00:54:27] Matt: It's an important question. And perhaps my point about all this is that if anyone listens to me for the entirety of a podcast, I presume they'll have had a million thoughts based in their own lives.
And what I tell them they might want to consider to think about going forward probably won't resonate.
What would I like other people to think about knowing that they almost certainly won't resonate with it because they've got their own stories.
It's all about you as to how you respond to another person.
And the mental health system pretends it's all about the person in distress, and that's not bad.
But the whole system is set up upside down.
So we research the outcomes of interventions on individuals, and what we should be doing is researching the outcomes on individuals of the behaviour of staff.
And then we could start to address what staff could do less of and allow people in extreme states to move beautifully through.
So that's what's on my mind with all of this stuff around extreme states is how do we get out of the way and allow people to move through their journeys?
Loren Mosher talked about being with, not doing to, but actually being with people is very difficult because we have to take responsibility for our own stories.
But I will say Just Listening was inspired by a book by Leon Redler and Stephen Ganz. One of the things that start their book they talk about we all learn from each other. And again, that's a cliche, but it is true, is that maybe the psychotic person is actually teaching us just one aspect of the incredible human species in homeostasis.
And so let's allow them to tell us both how they arrived there and how they'll leave there. And you won't do that by telling them anything.
[00:56:28] Rachel: I share Lucy's sentiments about being grateful for the time with you. Today we have a final closing question, which is can you tell us about an act of care that you've witnessed, experienced recently, big or small, that stayed with you?
[00:56:47] Matt: One of my colleagues went and looked after a small baby so that the mother could do something else. It's a pretty average everyday experience, but the kindness of making the little effort to do that was probably very beautiful for both people, and that probably personifies what I think we can do.
[00:57:07] Lucy: Thank you so much, Matt. You've been incredibly generous with your stories and sharing your thoughts and ideas with us. Highly original. I don't think you're complicated. I think you're just really an original person.
And it's made me think overall about how much we have over complicated this life when it doesn't need to be. So thank you for bringing that to light today.
[00:57:30] Matt: Thank you both.
[00:57:44] Rachel: discovery college acknowledges that the views shared in this podcast reflect personal experiences and are not a substitute for professional mental health advice. They do not represent the views of Alfred Health.
[00:57:56] Lucy: Thank you for listening to our podcast. If you wanted to stay in touch or learn more about discovery college, please head to our website. discovery.college.
