Author: Chris Bruni

I discovered a secret that might just be true:

Having a salad with a meal or before going out to a party will keep you fuller longer.

The CSA box arrived with bell peppers, eggplant, green beans, zucchini and kale.

The kale salad filled me up and I didn’t feel like eating a lot more of the other food.

I’ll give you the recipe for a kale salad. You can often find kale at a Greenmarket.

Kale Salad:

One head kale, leaves cut into pieces

Green peppers cut into strips

Beets, roasted in oven 350 to 400 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, then peeled and diced

Goat cheese cut into small medallions

walnuts, optional

Mix the vegetables into the salad and then top with the goat cheese medallions. Sprinkle with walnuts if you’d like.

To cut the bitterness of the kale if you’d like: toss with olive oil and lemon or olive oil and vinegar.

I’d love to hear from others about whether having kale is a way to halt hunger longer after you eat it. This is what happened to me so I wonder about this.

Organic vegetables are the best bet even when you weigh in other factors. Absent choosing organic, choosing mostly fruits and vegetables is the better way to go than buying processed foods.

Healthy food is happy food. It can boost your mood too.

What’s not to like about that?

The three-and-a-half years I spent involved in a community mental health system were the worse years of my life.

I recommend you research, research, research any kind of treatment options you’re presented with. I can’t in good faith recommend a person attend a traditional day program.

I’m a champion of an IPRT or Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Treatment program where you set a goal with a 12 to 24 month completion date and act resilient to get your life back on track.

This too: I recommend social skills training and also cognitive remediation for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. These treatments should be given as early in the recovery period as possible.

No: I’m not a fan of having people languish in traditional day programs or outpatient clinics that are little more than a babysitting service.

One director who had me speak to her patients lamented that they didn’t want to get jobs or go to school. She tried to have me pump up the audience to be inspired to take these risks. My talk fell on deaf ears. A friend suggested I had good things to say and did well: that it was only the audience that wasn’t buying in.

So: how can a community mental health center help clients if its director has assessed the patients don’t want to better themselves?

It’s a Catch-22. And certainly there are better community mental health centers out there. I’ve written about one great center in Topeka, Kansas at HealthCentral. I intend to write news articles about other agencies that truly help individuals conquer their mental health challenges.

Until “best practices” is the norm: I don’t think it’s wise to rely on treatments like “line dancing” and “yoga” that haven’t been proven to guarantee results.

Research, research, research your treatment options.

I will talk in a future entry about my other observations about mental health providers.

Brene Brown in her book The Gifts of Imperfection quotes a leading researcher who defines hope as a strategy not a feeling:

The act of setting a goal, taking steps to achieve it, and revising your plan or changing your goal when the original one doesn’t work out.

In this way: hope heals.

I stand in solidarity with others who were told subtly or directly that there was no hope for them because they had schizophrenia.

After I came out of the hospital, I was shunted into a community mental health system ill-equipped to help me. The very counselors who should’ve helped me stigmatized me.

This is why I’m no fan of the current “consumer recovery movement” as it now exists. I’m a member of the Positive Psychiatry Movement instead. There’s a difference.

The consumer recovery movement parrots opinions as if they were facts. Their denial of anosognosia as a real symptom is an opinion not a fact.

Anosognosia or the lack of insight that you have an illness is documented in over 15 research studies. It is caused by frontal lobe lesions in the brain and upwards of 50 percent of individuals with schizophrenia have it as a symptom.

I stand on the side of science and kindness in treating people living with mental illnesses. The idea that mental illnesses are not real medical conditions is also not a fact. It’s an opinion that can’t be proven either.

The consumers who champion community mental health systems as the best way to get treated are sadly mistaken in my humble view because of my experiences in this kind of center. Years ago on the Internet a staff member of a community mental health system wrote an article in which she claimed no one with schizophrenia could recover or achieve remission.

With staff like that, how are most community mental health systems equipped to help people?

I will report back in here what I think is a better option for a person newly diagnosed with schizophrenia.

It employs hope as the ultimate strategy.

The latest zucchini recipe I cooked was easy and I recommend it in the summer when the vegetable is plentiful at markets.

Slice in half two zucchini and scoop out the insides. Sprinkle generous grated parmesan on the zucchini. Bake in the oven at 350 for 25 to 30 minutes. Cut into chunks to eat and enjoy.

I zoom in on zucchini in the summer. It’s one of the most healthful vegetable options and one of the tastiest in my estimation.

Another foolproof recipe is to cut zucchini into coins and sprinkle grated parmesan on it and saute in olive oil for about 5 to 10 minutes. You can check the vegetable’s firmness to decide how soft you want to cook it.

Voila: easy, cheesy vegetables that provide calcium, protein and vitamins.

I will shortly post here excerpts from my memoir Left of the Dial that will be on sale at the latest by December 1st. This forum will also be where I talk about things related to the Left of the Dial lifestyle.