Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World

Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness

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Darrell Herrmann, a retired US Army captain and former computer programmer, shares his remarkable journey of living with schizophrenia since 1984 and his mission to help others with severe mental illness live better lives.

• Former US Army captain specializing in field artillery and nuclear weapons before developing schizophrenia
• Earned a computer science degree and worked as a programmer for 18 years after his military discharge
• Spoke to over 30,000 people in hospital groups before COVID, helping patients understand psychosis
• Author of "Straight Talk About Living with Severe Mental Illness," available on Amazon
• Explains that diagnosis often changes and finding the right medication takes time and patience
• Defines psychosis as experiencing hallucinations and delusions while losing touch with reality
• Developed a personal three-bucket strategy to sort real experiences from hallucinations
• Advocates for comprehensive education programs for people diagnosed with psychotic disorders
• Believes the mental health profession itself is often the biggest source of stigma
• Argues most mental health professionals lack proper training in understanding and treating psychosis


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intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)

Speaker 1:

Welcome to why Not Me? The World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City USA, nashville, tennessee. Join us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. Their stories Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world. Hopefully, you gain more awareness, acceptance and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to why Not Me? The World Humanity Over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event.

Speaker 1:

Joining us today is Daryl Herman. He's a retired US Army captain and computer programmer from a small family farm in Weston, kansas, about 30 miles east of Dodge City. Specialized in field artillery and nuclear weapons, his military career ended after he sought treatment at an army hospital, believing he was being drugged with experimental medicine. Doctors recognized his delusions and emerging psychosis, leading to his discharge. He later earned a college degree and worked as a professional programmer, but job stress triggered mild delusional thinking, prompting him to go on disability. Since then, he's found purpose in volunteering, speaking to patients and writing a book, straight Talk, about Living with Severe Mental Illness. He continues to advocate for those with serious mental health challenges, bringing tremendous insight to his work. It's truly an honor to have him here generously sharing his deep insights and remarkable journey with us. Thanks for coming on. No problem, let's tell us a little bit about your story, because pretty fascinating story of what you've done, what started your getting in to support the NSSC.

Speaker 2:

I developed schizophrenia in 1984 when I was a captain of the United States Army. My specialty 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. 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. And when I went on disability I made it my mission in life to do everything I could to help other people with severe mental illness live better lives. Ever since then that's what I've been doing.

Speaker 2:

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. 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 have 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. 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 talking to them and answering their questions and finding 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. It's the things that everybody needs to know, the basics they should know when they're dealing with cerebral illness, but sadly, most people don't know them.

Speaker 1:

When you first sit down with a new group, what is some of the things that you do say to them to make them realize that they are not in this by themselves. They have someone that will help and definitely know that they are not alone.

Speaker 2:

Most of them know that 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, so most of that was just unheard of. They thought their life was over when they got a diagnosis with a psychotic illness.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so everyone that has this illness is affected differently, of course, then you have to approach it and focus on the things that are most important to them and their lives. What do you find that are some of the more important things that people will bring up to you that they may not know or they may just need more clarification about it?

Speaker 2:

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 or any of these things. It's affecting you some other time. It often changes and that's one thing they need to know, so don't get worried about your diagnosis changing. It happens.

Speaker 2:

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. 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

It's just something happens, like cancer or diabetes. There's no blame. It's an illness just like any other. I think that's a great thing to point out. Now that you've addressed that, I think it needs to be more focused so people do realize that it's not their fault. Sometimes people with psychosis, because of the stigma that's attached with it, think that they're bad, but they're really not. They just need some help. So how do you address this with people so they can realize that they are not these demons people think they are. They just need some help.

Speaker 2:

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 in 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. Hallucinations are sensory experiences you have that others around you don't. For instance, you may hear voices that aren't there. 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.

Speaker 2:

Delusions are fixed, false beliefs you may have, but those around you don't. They could be anything imaginable. It 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. 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, once you're longer psychotic.

Speaker 2:

To be psychotic you have to have hallucinations, illusions, 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. The 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 To you. It was still real.

Speaker 2:

And unless someone tells you about hallucination, 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 adenocytosis, or lack of insight, is. No one tells people what psychosis is, what hallucinations and 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.

Speaker 2:

If you're told you have schizophrenia, basically you think that's a villain or a horror movie or a mass murderer or some other dangerous, scary person 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 asshole 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think you had in your writing. You had something that was pretty impressive in the fact that a lot of people might not realize this or think about it, but you just touched on it just slightly there. I'd like to expand on that, and that's the fact that after they get the medication and it helps them they still have the memories of what they thought happened, what they went through. How do you get past that? Because some of these memories can be very delusional, as you were saying, and not real. So how do you get past that with the medication, so that you can separate the two, so you can still move forward and not let the past memories affect you? Medication doesn't have anything to do with that at all.

Speaker 2:

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. There are things that happened to me 40 years ago, my first psychosis, that to this day I don't know what was real, what was hallucinations, delusions, 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. 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 major portions of their lives that are fiction, but to them it's real and factual because that's what their mind tells them Okay.

Speaker 1:

So when that happens, is it medication and therapy of just talking it out that will help them at least better understand what they've been through, so they can move forward and have that better life that they want to have? The medication has nothing to do with that.

Speaker 2:

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. 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

They'll fight you when you had the groups that you had, did you go into those kind of topics or what kind of conversations did you have within those groups, and how long did that usually last as far as the group time Groups- typically lasted 45 to 50 minutes.

Speaker 2:

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, 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 hallucinations and delusions, even though you're not psychotic?

Speaker 2:

Some of us still have hallucinations when we're not psychotic and properly medicated and have to carry on. 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 helping figure out how to sort out what's real or what's not real, what you're experiencing, because when you have a psychotic illness, you are subject to not experiencing things that are not real at any time.

Speaker 1:

When you experience that that's not real in your mind, that it is, how do you help or how do you get the people that are around them to understand what they need so that they can still help them get through what they're going through and then eventually, hopefully, they'll get a better side of where they were?

Speaker 2:

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.

Speaker 2:

I divide the things I experience up into three big buckets. 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, illusions. And I have a third bucket of things I'm just not sure about and I put things in little, three buckets based on my past experience with my own 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? 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.

Speaker 2:

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. 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 where I would 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

When you first started having these issues, was you aware of it, that it was going on? What was your thought process to get to that point of where you realized that, okay, this isn't real and this is. It took time.

Speaker 2:

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. 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.

Speaker 2:

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. 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. I just had to develop it on my own because no one taught me or told me how to do it.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So, with the fact that no one told you and you had to do it on your own, there's a lot of people out there. Unfortunately, they're not going to have that mindset to actually dig, find and try and work it out. So what would you give people that when they start having this? I mean, it's the big black hole. It's unknown, so anything unknown can be very scary, and when people get scared they will do things that they normally wouldn't do. To compensate for it, how do you tell them where they can take a deep breath and relax a little bit, to take and balance that, so they can figure out what's going on and what they need to do?

Speaker 2:

I think that's the biggest problem in the mental health system today is that no one teaches you this stuff. When you first become psychotic, they're going to sit down and talk to you about all this stuff, but no one does. 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 a psychotic 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. Well, as soon as you're no longer psychotic, they discharge you. 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.

Speaker 2:

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 were trying to do. You have to educate them or they can't come to this conclusion, really, until I found the book Surviving Schizophrenia by Dr E Fuller Torrey, 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. 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 same library the book Surviving Schizophrenia by Dr E Fuller Torrey MD. This was one of the first books ever written about schizophrenia as a physical medical illness for the layman. That told me what I needed to know and got me on the track to recovery. If I hadn't found that book, I don't think I'd be talking to you today.

Speaker 1:

Wow. So I guess the big question is you've been very fortunate that you found the book. You did your due diligence, you figured it out and you've been able to work it through so that your life can be what you'd hoped it was in the earlier life. Now how do we help those that they don't have that deep dive ability? They're just relying on doctors or they're just relying on psychiatrists or medication to stop it. How do we get it out there so that we can help the greater amount of people that need the help, rather than just a select few that might do what you did?

Speaker 2:

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. If you get diagnosed with it. It's free you information how to cope stuff like that. If you get diagnosed with schizophrenia, you get medication told to go on 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. That's where our mental health system's biggest failure is. At the end of the day is no one teaches you how to live with it.

Speaker 1:

The only way to get changes like that sometimes is through legislation, and even that can't help that part of it, because you're talking about doctors and the way that they treat people and help them and continue to try to help. It seems like the dog chasing his tail here. How do we figure this thing out?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think 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 the 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 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. The mental health profession, in my opinion, is the biggest source of stigma against severe mental illness there is.

Speaker 1:

Wow. That's not good, because they're the ones that are supposed to give you support and help. I've talked with several different people and they went through 10 years of hell, you know, basically figuring this thing out. But then, once they figured it out, got the right medication, got the right treatment, they've gone on to have very satisfying lives. So we need to get that out there so that not only the doctors and the mental health institutions know and promote it, but so that it can help take this stigma away from people that don't understand it, because I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is the average person. You know, like myself, that don't understand everything about it because we haven't been around it. So we've got to get the masses to understand that just because some label is put on somebody, it doesn't mean it's a death sentence.

Speaker 2:

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 sheriffs and law professionals and just basically anyone that didn't know this information, and 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because there's this big dark cloud hovering over it and stopping people from understanding that it's not the end of the world. It just means that someone has to take and help these people so they can get back on where they were and start creating the life that they had hoped that they was going to have.

Speaker 2:

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. 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.

Speaker 2:

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. It's totally foreign to them. And if you look at our mental health professional 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. 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 specialties in mental health where they have the skills to deal with this stuff, dealing with psychosis requires a very special skill set that, frankly, most mental health professionals do not have.

Speaker 1:

So, wow, I just didn't realize it was this deep. How do we get there? I mean, because there are so many layers to this. You've got the legal system, which we always worry about. We've got the medication to get them at least to get it to this. You've got the legal system, which we always worry about. We've got the medication to get them at least to get it to stop. And then you've got the knowing and the things that you've just gone. The one thing that kind of connect all these things together are the doctors and the nurses and all that that are supposed to help. So if they're a challenge, how do we get this to the point of where we can get those people that lessen that challenge and actually get into the ditch and help dig the ditch and help the people that need to help?

Speaker 2:

I think we've got to start with 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. 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.

Speaker 2:

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. 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? You just can't do that.

Speaker 2:

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? 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. So they're not even doing that and that's all they're required to do. They're not required to tell you anything else, not even required to tell you what your diagnosis is or explain what it means. Yeah, Wow.

Speaker 1:

So in closing, you've covered a lot of things and I think it's really good information that people need to hear. What would you like to say that you think is the most important thing for people to understand in the closing statement here?

Speaker 2:

I think the most important thing to understand is what psychosis is or what it does to a person, and beyond that, I think the next most important thing is for me 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.

Speaker 1:

Okay, great, yeah, it's been great. A lot of great information. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks, glad to help. Thank you very much, tony. It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to TonyMantorcom Contact then they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell everyone everywhere about why Not Me, the World, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world.