Tom Wootton - Visionary off the Edge

In three previous blog posts I created the impression that my friend Tom Wootton’s new book, Bipolar in Order, is a prime example why American civilization is in decline, which is true. I also made it clear that Tom is a visionary who got us thinking that we could lead better lives than the poor unfortunate souls operating within the “normal” emotional bandwidth.

In his 2007 book, The Depression Advantage, Tom represents himself as a person with “over 40 years of direct personal experience with bipolar symptoms” who, during one 15-year stretch “fluctuated between increasingly more extreme mania and depressions.”

But in January 2009, I played a video of a presentation he gave, in which Tom disclosed that, as well as manias and depressions, he had also experienced schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia? I got my first taste of trouble during this time when I asked Tom to write a guest blog for me. He suggested the preface to the new book he was working on. Fine, I said, so long as the preface works as a blog piece. Often they don’t. His draft repeated his assertion that he had experienced schizophrenia. I said he needed to delete the schizophrenia reference and replace it with psychosis.

Here is the email in full he sent back to me: “What is the difference between schizophrenia and psychosis?”

Suffice to say, our guest blog project never got off the ground.

Tom, in his new book, retreats from his claim of having experienced schizophrenia, instead referring to his delusions and hallucinations as “bipolar I schizoaffective.” Even the experts are confused about the schizoaffective diagnosis, but it’s safe to say that there is an overlap between bipolar and schizophrenia and that many individuals experience symptoms of both.

Nevertheless, in his book, Tom claims expertise in helping others gain control over the psychosis in schizophrenia, but he cites no case studies. His one and only example is John Nash in the movie version of “A Beautiful Mind.” John Nash is a real individual, but the movie treatment, especially in relation to his psychotic delusions, is fictional.

“In the beginning of the movie,” Tom writes, “his hallucinations helped him to see solutions to his mathematical problems. This ability earned him a Nobel Prize.” Imagine, Tom asks, if John Nash had been able to harness those abilities.

Sylvia Nasar’s book of the same name, upon which the movie is based, paints an entirely different picture, revealing an early John Nash as high functioning, though clearly a social oddball. The mathematical breakthroughs that led to his Nobel Prize occurred BEFORE his schizophrenia broke out. Once the delusions set in, by Nash’s own admission, he lost 25 years of his life to the illness.

Ms Nasar’s narrative suggests that Dr Nash may have been straddling a dangerous fault line where genius borders madness, but that is an entirely different discussion.

Since Tom gives workshops, it is reasonable to assume that he would have been anxious to document people he worked with, people he rescued from the hells of schizophrenia who went on to lead full lives. I would have loved to have read about this. Instead, all we get is a fictional example.

A fictional example.

This sort of thing goes over well in public speaking, where a skilled presenter can manipulate crowd emotions. At the NAMI CA conference last year, Tom actually drew applause from his fictional use of John Nash. But the left-brain world of the printed word demands substantial non-fiction documentation.

A personal example then? At both the conference and in his book, Tom describes experiencing the sensation of being crushed by a bus and finding himself inside his wife. Tom tells us this delusion is part of a pattern of similar ones that visit him. But instead of being freaked out, Tom tells us, or trying to put these delusions out of his mind, he incorporates these experiences as part of his own personal growth.

Had Tom restricted himself to his own experiences and built on them, he would have found many people who would have related. I, for one, have a creative and very quirky mind. Weird shit runs through it. And, like Tom, I too find myself contemplating my weird shit rather than ignoring it.

To be crushed by a bus. To be dead and in someone else’s body. Had this experience happened to me, automatically I’d be asking myself stuff like: What was it like to be dead? Is dead overrated? When is going into dead mode helpful to me?

Trust me, Stephen King turned this kind of thinking into a career. Tom is using it to seek greater insight and spiritual growth. Tom’s point is that it is not the psychosis that is bad - it’s how you react to the psychosis. Oddly enough, this is vintage Freud. The pre-brain science era DSM I of 1952 views mental illness as maladaptive reactions to one’s environment, including “schizophrenic reaction.”

There is some validity to rehabilitating this viewpoint, and the time is ripe for a full and spirited conversation. To a certain point, we all have the power to choose. But the kind of fleeting psychosis Tom experiences - or for that matter my own weird shit - is not schizophrenia, nor, for that matter, heavy duty psychosis. Being robbed of all power to reason is a whole different phenomenon.

There is a dangerous tendency to romanticize and trivialize schizophrenia, then morally judge those who fail to live up to our own often unrealistic expectations. Tom’s book is rife with this. Clearly, he has yet to spend a day negotiating rounds of transactions in public places dragging around someone with raving psychosis. Until he does, Tom needs to stick to his own experiences.

Reality is a treacherous place, where ivory tower ideas tend to founder. Tom compares himself to Columbus finding a new world. After reading Bipolar in Order, I see him more as a blind visionary who sailed off the edge.

This series of blog pieces sets the scene for future conversations. Stay tuned ...

Tom Wootton - A Visionary Overreaches

In two of my most recent blog posts - Bipolar in Flux and Visionary or Out of Touch - I made it clear that my friend Tom Wootton’s just-released “Bipolar in Order” is the worst piece of crap ever assembled between two covers. Besides the book being extremely badly-written and a blatant advertisement for his workshops, the author displays a complete ignorance of an illness he claims an affinity to.

But my first two pieces were actually highly-complimentary, focusing on Tom as a visionary who got us thinking that our manias and depressions, with mental discipline, could be turned to our advantage.

“Normal” people don’t have a chance against us, once we get our disorder “in order.”

Love him or hate him, you really have to admire Tom for putting that thought out there. Tom is by far the best public speaker I’ve ever come across in the field of mental health, and early last year I decided to view the master at work by checking out some videos of his talk segments. Here is what he said in his intro:

Some of you are going to think I’m crazy, which is true. I’ve got bipolar I, extreme manias, totally out of control, extreme depressions, and schizophrenia ...

Schizophrenia? My brain initially didn’t process the statement. It was only a day or two later that something went off in my head: “Did Tom actually say he had schizophrenia?” No, I thought. My mind is playing tricks on me. I actually went back and replayed the thing.

Yep, Tom actually said he had schizophrenia.

When we first met in the summer of 2006, Tom had been representing himself as someone with bipolar. His book from that year, "The Bipolar Advantage," focused exclusively on mania, with a work-in-progress on depression.

In the video I viewed, Tom referred to his own delusions and psychosis and paranoia, which I have no reason to doubt. After all, many depressions and manias come preloaded with these symptoms. But schizophrenia? There is a lot more to schizophrenia than psychosis and delusions and paranoia. Psychosis gets all the attention, but a major reason antipsychotic medications are not a magic bullet for schizophrenia is they fail to address the many cognitive dysfunctions associated with the illness, as well as the “flat affect” features.

Moreover, the DSM mandates a minimum time requirement of six months. This threshold is totally arbitrary. What is important is that the experts view schizophrenia as a long-term “chronic” illness, as opposed to the “episodic” nature of mood disorders. In other words, hallucinations and other psychotic features that occasionally come and go do not rate as schizophrenia, which is a good thing as otherwise four percent of the population would be walking around with a schizophrenia label instead of just one percent.

But if Tom truly had schizophrenia, why didn’t this come out in “The Bipolar Advantage,” which was largely autobiographical? Why didn’t this come out in the numerous conversations I had with him? More important, why didn’t it come out in a workshop I saw him present in Orange County in late 2006?

I had just moved to southern California. Tom was giving the talk under the auspices of a county mental health agency and here was the catch: He couldn’t just talk about the depression and bipolar advantage. It had to be something like the mental illness advantage. His talk had to include everyone.

The organizer of the workshop proved extremely efficient in busing in a large audience comprising those using county mental health services. This was not your typical DBSA segment that Tom was used to addressing, people with an “invisible” illness who do not stand out from a crowd. Far from it.

A number of individuals wheeled in grocery carts with their possessions. A good many looked lost and disoriented, some with thousand-mile stares in their eyes. The dress code was highly eclectic, featuring thrift shop specials, often randomly arranged. No doubt, individuals with depression and bipolar were well-represented, but it was clear Tom was addressing a large number with schizophrenia.

“Hey, I’m no different than you,” Tom could have told this group of people. He could have disclosed his struggles with schizophrenia and had everyone eating out of his hand. Instead, it was clear that there was a separation between speaker and audience. Tom gave a masterful presentation, of course, but afterward he admitted to me it was the toughest audience he had ever faced.

Naturally, I concurred. After all, what could he possibly know about schizophrenia? It turns out absolutely nothing.

More to come ...

Tom Wootton - Visionary or Out of Touch?

In my most recent blog piece, I indicated that my friend Tom Wootton’s new book, "Bipolar in Order," was a piece of shit and don’t buy it. I’m sure one day Tom will thank me.

But I come neither to praise nor bury Tom. My friend is at the center of a very important dialogue that he helped create. On one hand, he comes across as a brilliant visionary thinker miles ahead of everyone else. On the other, it’s easy to dismiss him as an unmitigated idiot totally out of touch with the real world. I’ve met both Toms. Let’s start with the visionary:

Tom’s first book, "The Bipolar Advantage," should have been called "The Manic Advantage." Convincing others to view their illness in a positive light has always been a hard sell, but, compared to depression and psychosis, there is much to like about mania. I guarantee that if a “mania stabilizer” were to come on the market - one that could keep us in a high productivity, high creativity, high sociability state forever without flipping us over the top or crashing us to the bottom - there would be one hundred percent compliance.

Indeed, I had written extensively on the subject before ever encountering Tom. In particular, I had a beef about psychiatrists medicating our personality out of us. When I raised this with John Gartner, author of “The Hypomanic Edge,” he likened the situation to the pitcher in Bull Durham, the guy with the 100 MPH fastball who keeps beaning the mascot. “We want to slow it down just enough so that he can deliver the ball where it’s supposed to be”, Dr Gartner explained to me, say to 95 MPH, not 50 MPH.

Make no mistake: Mania has wrecked my life more than once. But we should be wary of those who would indiscriminately clip our wings.

When I met Tom in 2006, his thinking was way ahead of mine. “I don’t want to be 80 percent better,” I heard him tell a workshop at a DBSA conference that year. “I want to be 120 percent better.” I never thought of my illness that way, but Tom had a point. Bipolar confers upon us a host of advantages that leaves the rest of the world for dead. So, if we could get out of our illness mindset and learn to master our gift of fire without getting burned we could be better - yes, better - than everyone else.

It’s all about that mania stabilizer. Too often, we can’t handle the overload. We flip out. We crash. But suppose we could train our minds to remain in control? Tom raises this point in his latest book, and I was treated to a sneak preview of his thinking at a NAMI CA conference last summer in greater LA.

In his talk, Tom displayed a PowerPoint of a Ferrari. A Ferrari has a stable platform so you can go around corners, he explained. But if you try to follow it in a mini-van with stuff loaded on top, you will flip over. Both vehicles are stable in the garage, he went on to say. But I don’t want to be stable in a garage, he concluded. I want to be stable while I’m driving.

According to Tom, if we better learn how to manage our behaviors so we are not simply reacting, we can lead great lives within a wide range of emotions.

A wider range of emotions includes depression, and here Tom has a much harder sell. The dominant view is expressed by Peter Kramer MD, author of “Against Depression,” who contends in a NY Times piece that “depression is not a perspective. It is a disease."

Most of us would readily agree, but then again, where does introspection and thinking deep end and depression begin? Besides, who wants to be happy all the time? In his book, “The Depression Advantage,” Tom focuses on the lives of Christian and eastern saints, and how their despair was the necessary prelude to spiritual breakthrough and growth. Likewise, Tom observes, in our own lives, our descents into darkness can sensitize us into achieving higher awareness and superhuman insights.

So, if you are experiencing depression and thinking deep without being incapacitated, is it truly depression? Who knows? More accurately, is it an illness? No way, Tom contends. True, no one wants to experience the devastation of depression or mania, but living within a very narrow emotional bandwidth also sucks. If we can learn to operate within a much wider bandwidth, says Tom, then our lives are going to have much greater meaning, with many more possibilities.

You may have issues with this, but there is no denying that Tom is on to something. Just so he doesn’t overreach.

Next: Tom overreaches.

Tom Wootton - Bipolar in Flux (This is Neither Good Nor Bad, but Hear Me Out)

My friend Tom Wootton has a new self-published book out, "Bipolar in Order: Looking at Depression, Mania, Hallucination and Delusion from the Other Side." My short review: The book sucks, don’t waste your money.

But life is seldom so simple. Some background ...

I first met Tom in late summer 2006 at a DBSA conference outside of San Francisco, where he was scheduled to present two workshops. I had just read his first book, "The Bipolar Advantage," and charitably told him it read alright. Tom is a master speaker from a corporate background who readily acknowledged writing wasn’t his forte. My website review minced no words:

Probably the worst-written book of all time by the biggest non-dictator narcissist of all time. But that is just a minor quibble. Tom convincingly argues that we should not consider ourselves disadvantaged. Rather, he lays down a convincing argument that we are wired to run rings around those who have the misfortune to be born normal. All that is holding us back is our tendency to lose control and our own misperceptions of our illness, and Tom has answers for that.

“There is no good or all bad,” Tom opened in his first workshop at the DBSA conference. He started out by having us name all the bad things about mania. That was easy. The list filled up pretty fast.

Okay. Now the good things. The creativity, the productivity … Surprisingly, this list filled up extremely fast. Tom pointed to the wall. The “good” list was longer than the “bad” list. Knock me over with a feather.

Tom zeroed in on one of the list items, racing thoughts, which can alternatively give rise to brilliant ideas or get us unstuck. Learning to focus can change this so-called “bad” trait into a “good” one, Tom pointed out. The corporate world highly values original thinkers, not the pathetic head-scratching that passes for brain-storming.

Tom’s second presentation zeroed in on what is “good” about depression, such as introspection. It was depression that made the saints become saints, Tom reminded us. Think of the long dark night of the soul. This theme would be incorporated into Tom’s second (and much better-written) book, The Depression Advantage. In our own lives, our descents into darkness can sensitize us into achieving higher awareness and superhuman insights.

My own book was due out in another month, and the title - Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder - was a dead giveaway that my thinking at the time synced with where Tom was at in 2006. But Tom was well out in front of me. He was the visionary and paradigm-shifter, and the best public speaker by far that I had run across in all my years of attending mental health conferences.

So it was a couple of months later I found myself on the road for a week in Chicago with Tom, sharing the speaking duties for some short talks he was giving to various groups in the community.

Tom was the master. I was the apprentice. By tagging along with Tom, I hoped to pick up some valuable speaking skills and overcome my phobia about breathing loud in front of people. My book was hot off the press and I had to get out there and promote it. This involved popping out of my comforting hole in the ground and doing more than look at my shadow.

Under Tom’s patient tutelage, the fearful writer cowering behind the lectern, both hands in a death grip, with his face buried in a script squeaking out as if begging for mercy was put to rest. In his place a completely unrecognizable individual strode the stage, looking his audience in the eye, and directly engaging them without notes.

I can assure you that a good many people still think, with good reason, I suck as a speaker, and I would be the last to dispute this. But what they never knew nor had cause to suspect was that they were witnesses to a miracle. Let’s put it this way: You think nothing about the driver of the car that nearly cut you off on the freeway. But your disinterest would change to amazement if you were to discover that the driver was Stevie Wonder.

The miracle bled over into my personal life. Speaking before a hundred people or more suddenly made everything else look easy. In no time, I was much more at ease in small groups and one-on-one. This led to a major healing, and Tom gets all the credit, as well as my eternal gratitude.

In our conversations, Tom indicated to me he wanted to come out with a new edition of "The Bipolar Advantage." I responded this would be a very good idea. As brilliant as Tom was, he was as good a writer as I was a speaker. I let him know that he could use a much better calling card than the current edition of his book. Whenever the time was right for him, I advised, I would be there.

I vividly recall when Tom first sat down with me to coach me. We were in the breakfast room of a cheapo hotel about an hour out of Chicago, drinking bad coffee and trying not to regurgitate from the stench of industrial strength disinfectant. The first thing I told Tom was I had left my ego outside the door and that he had license to rip me apart. For me, this is an activity that ranks right up there with having dental work with no Novocain. But this was why I was here, 700 miles from home.

I only wish I could have returned the favor. That somewhere down the line we could have reversed roles. But for that to have occurred, Tom would have had to face me across the table and tell me he left his ego outside the door. It never happened.

Much more to come ...