Breaking Through Schizophrenia Recovery with Dale Walsh

with schizophrenia . Who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia . Dale has been a coach for years and he has developed a live love method for the families and the people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia . So we're going to be talking to him about his method and why he's so passionate and everything that he's up to .

So , Dale , thank you so much for joining me today .

Rather than explaining in five minutes , I think this does it in like one , yeah go right ahead If I could have the liberty . Absolutely . It's called Dale Reviewing what Actually Happened and it goes like this Hi , I'm God was a joke I made after killer Dartmouth toke of some Primo Ivy League smoke which apparently caused me to croak .

Because in mental hospital I awoke With roomie Gabriel , the main bloke , who did my delusions angelically stroke , while the doctor claimed my brain broke the moment divine gag . I spoke testifying I was only bit quack , which clinicians diagnosed as psychotic attack , preventing me from getting sanity back .

Until I came to TNEC Hackensack to pursue resident therapy program track and deal with my evident lack of reason among psychiatric patient back who never gave me any slack under interrogation . The story didn't crack that was absolutely beautiful .

Positive symptoms are things that are added to a person's reality , such as hallucinations , delusions , disorganized thinking , incoherent speaking and stuff .

And then negative symptoms are like withdrawal , social anxiety , depression , as I said , withdrawal , and so , basically , doctors go on about like the symptomology , and you know , to tell you the truth , kerbal , I never had a . You know , I'm a pretty rare schizophrenic because I never had a hallucination in my life , even when I was doing LSD .

In my life , even when I was doing LSD , my whole problem was delusions .

But that notwithstanding , just from my own lived experience , I've come up with a definition of schizophrenia that I think basically sums up the illness very concisely and is a lot easier to understand than the jargon that doctors and therapists use , and that definition is a schizophrenic is living in a reality that was not conceived on earth .

Uh , to me , a recovered schizophrenic is something I call a genius , and that's someone who has integrated his or her reality into that of the general culture of the matrix .

So , basically , I , when , when , when you first get schizophrenia , and until you get to reach a certain point in recovery , you're going to be basically exiled from a society and , um , and you know , I , I this is a I'm not saying this as a judgment , this just seems to be what happened .

You know , I basically was like an outsider , even though I was like living by myself .

For , you know , from 1981 on , I began by being hospitalized for 13 weeks and then I came to a psychiatric program which I said in my poem for five and a half years where I was given intensive therapy for three times a week , group therapy twice a week , and basically I was basically forced into therapy , and that's one of the reasons why I feel I've been so

successful in my recovery . But recovery from schizophrenia basically means being free as a hospital being , you know , hopefully on your own or at least in some sort of like independent living situation , even if it's a supervised , you know apartment or something , even if it's a supervised , you know apartment or something . But when I was first

in the hospital my first hospital , you know I said to my doctor , I said why am I here ? And he said , well , if you broke your leg , dale , you'd come to the hospital . And I said , yes , and he said , well , you broke your brain .

And for the longest time this was back in 1975 , but you know , for the longest time , uh , even up to probably like 15 years ago uh , schizophrenia was basically a death sentence . It was like a life sentence of hopelessness , because people said that you broke your brain and there was nothing you could do .

And the most you could ever hope to do is cope and live by yourself and stuff . There was no hope for marriage or even college .

I mean , I'm a college graduate , I graduated with honors from Fairleigh Dickinson University , but you know , but the popular , the stereotypical idea of a schizophrenic is they're just going to be a babbling idiot for the rest of their lives , and that's obviously not true .

But the fact is that to recover from schizophrenia takes a great will of self-will , self-awareness and self-determination , because it is a bitch of an illness .

My coaching , my mentoring , is devoted to not only helping people , you know , communicate better with their loved ones and to , you know , have an ongoing dialogue about the challenges they face on a daily , more long-term situation , but it's also , more importantly , it's to help them reclaim , or at least achieve , self-integrity that many of them lose in the caregiving

process , just because , you know , schizophrenia can be so consuming , not only to the patient but also to the caregivers the to the patient , but also to the caregivers that I , a lot of times the caregivers become codependent on their loved ones and find their whole meaning in life , you know , taking care of their loved ones .

And uh , so what I try to do in my live love program is like help them to come to a realization , not only of how to better communicate with their loved ones and give them tools to understand and most , you know , one of my main purposes is just to tell them about what the illness is .

You know the symptomology , you know their delusions , hallucinations , organized thought and how to communicate with their loved ones and ultimately , just , but you know , more importantly is to be able to get back their own mental health , away from the codependency and the sort of like pathology that they might assume , taking care of their loved one and also improve

their family relationships with the other people who are not affected by the illness in their family , because that's another big factor . You know , when someone gets schizophrenia it can be . It usually is extremely disruptive to the whole family .

And you know , not only do siblings become jealous that you know their parents are paying so much attention to the loved ones , but it's just like the loved one himself . Him or herself can cause a lot of conflict , and so you know it does put strains on marriages and family relationships . So that's something else that I help people with .

But the Live Love program , I feel , is like a general therapeutic method that could be generally adopted in a lot of ways , not just in psychiatry .

One thing that I emphasized at the very beginning is mental illness is not a two-week hold . It's not going to go away in two weeks . It's going to be a lifelong fight to get your loved one .

And one challenge that people seem to don't really think about is that when someone gets schizophrenia , their personality , usually their identity , completely transforms , and so the caregivers are sort of left in a position where they're mourning the death of the loved one that they knew and they are very reluctant , just because it can be very difficult to communicate ,

they're very reluctant to get to know the new person their loved one has become , and there's a lot of grief that can go on . And , of course , there's shame and guilt , because people feel guilty and shame . They feel shame for having a loved one's schizophrenia and they feel guilt because they feel it's their fault that the schizophrenia came at all .

And that's something that I really work on helping people get over , because it doesn't serve any purpose .

And ultimately , there's something called agnosognosia , which is another big obstacle and that very few people know about , but it's something that I basically , in the first session , the learn session , I make sure that they understand or at least have the concept . And agnosynosia is a concept taken from neurology for stroke victims .

That means the patient is unable to comprehend that there's anything wrong with their brain , unable to comprehend that there's anything wrong with their brain .

So the analogy I've come to use about this is if you go up to a blind person and you put a book in front of them and say , read it , he's obviously not going to be able to read it because he can't see it . And agnosygnosia is the same thing with mental illness .

The people that have agnosygnosia , which affects as many as 60% of people with serious mental illness , can't understand that they have a mental illness and therefore they're going to be very reluctant to take drugs , medications that they you know , that make them feel terrible and they feel are unnecessary and also makes getting them into therapy very difficult .

It's a horrible drug and nobody should have to take it . But you know I , as I said , I was hospitalized 15 times at Kerr Ball and probably about 10 of those times was because I stopped taking my medication . Because as soon as I stopped taking my medication , my symptoms would return and I would be in the hospital within two days to two weeks .

And actually the last time I was in the hospital in 2025 was because I admitted myself , because I was self-aware enough to know I was psychotic , and it was because one of my medications stopped working . So I went into the hospital , got on new medication and everything and I was out within five days .

But uh , you know I , I can't overstress the importance , at least in my case , and I'll be on medication my whole life . But you know , I mean someone with diabetes is going to be on insulin , probably most of their , all their life too . And there are a lot of uh illness , physical illnesses where I mean even , say , just blood pressure .

You know , if you have blood blood pressure , it's recommended you uh take medication , uh , and however long it takes , and of course it is possible to get off the medications . Uh , in fact I've I've tried traded down .

I was on like uh 30 milligrams of my antipsychotic for 40 years and in the last 10 years I've gone from 30 milligrams to 10 milligrams a day .

And you know , I , I great , and but medication I just from my own experience , I you know I get very wary because you know , people say used to say to me there's nothing wrong with you , dale , you're the most normal person I've ever seen , you're the sanest person I've ever known , and say two things .

One is you must have known some pretty crazy've ever known . I'd say two things . One is you must have known some pretty crazy people , then . And secondly , I'd say see me without my medication and tell me I'm sane . And so medication to me has been an essential foundation of my recovery .

and also doing a lot of hallucinogenics like LSD , mescaline , lsd mescaline and mushrooms and psilocybin . And so my mother had a diagnosis , was herself mentally ill , and I feel that , you know , looking back , I feel that maybe if I'd just taken the marijuana that you know , I would have been okay and that's basically what a lot of doctors have told me .

But uh , the fact is that the hallucinogenics took me over the point to psychosis and um . So , and I you know when , when I got to the program , as I said , I was in a program for five and a half years and I was smoking marijuana every day .

I would go down the hill to the projects and buy like two or three joints every night , and so my doctor always said , you know , he ended up saying that marijuana was my nemesis , because he said every time I escalated my , my use of marijuana , I'd go to the hospital , which was true for a while , but uh , actually , curveball from I , I was smoking marijuana

every day until the age of 52 . So basically I had like 35 years where I was smoking marijuana every day and after a while I got so used to marijuana that it wasn't having that deleterious an effect on my mental health .

But you know , but for a long time , especially if I stopped smoking marijuana and then I would go back and smoke a joint , I'd be almost immediately in the hospital almost every time .

So you know , people think that self-medication is good and you know I'm not going to put down marijuana because I don't want to be a hypocrite , because I did love it for 35 years and I did give it up abruptly , cold turkey , in 2007, . So I've been straight , sane and sober since October 2007 . But it does have a .

You know , even if it's not a primary agent of psychosis , it does have a complicating effect on the whole process of recovery and it's probably , you know , I think one of the reasons why I didn't make as much progress as I did for a long time is just because my progress was being slowed down by my constant use of marijuana and beer .

Basically , I feel that some agency , I'm not sure who , basically blew up my brain . You know people say you know drugs , blow your mind , my mind , my brain literally blew up my brain . You know people say you know drugs blow your mind , my mind , my brain literally blew up and I called that the death of Dale .

And I feel that that was the recovery began , because not only did I see how sick I had been , saying I was God for 10 years , I was God for 10 years but I also felt that in that implosion Dale's whole basic personality was blown away , was blown out , including the delusions , including the schizophrenia and everything , and I became Dewey , who is my alter ego .

But the pain of losing Dale was so great to me that I would react extremely angrily , almost madly , whenever anybody called me Dale and I'd say I'm not Dale , I'm Dewey . And you know people love Dale . You know , I mean Dale was a very good guy and Dale is a very good guy . You know , I mean Dale was a very good guy and Dale is a very good guy .

You know , basically Dale's back now , but Dale was a very good guy and people were like taken back and they couldn't like make the transition from Dale to Dewey , as I was being forced to .

So after the death of Dale , I went into the hospital three days later and , um , you know , I was uh in the , I was in the in the hospital and , um , I'm getting this is the point of psychotic anger . So I was uh passing a staff member in the hall and he said , hi , dale . And I just turned on . I started yelling at the top of my voice .

I said I'm not Dale , I'm Dewey . And basically he's saying calm down Dale . And of course , every time he says Dale , I'm getting more and more angry and it was a furious rage . So within 15 seconds I was surrounded by five security guards and they pulled me away from the staff member and told me to go to my room .

And so , long story short , they said you just bought yourself a ticket out of here . So I was afraid they were going to send me to Bergen Pines , which was the notorious county hospital . This was in Hackensack Hospital and they said , you just bought yourself a ticket out of here but luckily nothing came .

You know , I stayed in Hackensack and everything , but I was just like so full of rage that you know it was like unbelievable . And you know this is what and it has to do with paranoia too , kerfol , because you know the paranoia comes and you know you can't see reality when you're paranoid and therefore you're living in a world of delusion and paranoia .

And you know this is something that I talk about . A lot is , uh , you know , I think it's very unfair that every time there's a mass shooter , uh , that people immediately say what's his diagnosis ?

There , he must have mental illness and everything , because people can be filled with hate whether they're psychotic , you know , whether they have a diagnosis or not , but the fact is it's a 50% more likely that a person with serious mental illness will have violence perpetrated against himself rather than perpetrate and rather than do violence himself .

So that's just something that people need to keep in mind . But , uh , you know , I , you know that that's just an exam . I mean , I very rarely experienced psychotic rage . I you know my , and my doctor said my , my illness was psychotic bliss , so I would just lose reality , being too happy most of the time .

And , you know , have like agencies that you're going to call , whether it the police , there's a mental health group in your part , in your area , or something . But , um , the it's a , it's a catch-22 , because you can't force uh people to get treatment until they go psychotic . But once they go psychotic , then they're a danger to themselves .

So and that , and you know , the other thing is , uh , you can't be committed to in a hospital until unless you're a danger to yourself or to others , and that's up to the interpretation of the courts . So , um , you know , uh , an answer to your question what can you do if they refuse treatment ?

You just have to like have patience and , uh , you know some people I , I know who , I , I know would like uh sort of like sneak the medication into their food and you know , not tell them and everything . I think that's where sneaking might be necessary .

But , uh , it's ultimately it's a matter of responding , not reacting and also developing listening skills , because instead of just like getting frustrated that they're refusing to see a doctor , refusing to take their , it's much more a matter of like engaging them in conversation and helping them down , you know , just coming to see their point of view , because the more

dialogue you have , the more communication there is , the more empathetic you can be and therefore , the more you can understand how to neutralize their objections .

a poet . I have an archive of 5,000 poems , so I want to put out one or two books . I have five books on Amazon and I want to publish one or two more within the next year .

And I also have a memoir which I wrote which is called Escape from the Ivy League , and that's the story of what happened to me at Dartmouth , about my first great psychotic break , and so I'm thinking about publishing that on KDP , self-publishing on Amazon , and basically I'm just like I'm trying to find .

I'm working on building my business and helping people , you know , get over the fear of exposing themselves and telling me , you know , coming to me and saying you know I have this problem , say , my son is a schizophrenic and I don't know how to handle it .

And so I actually have a Calendly link it's wwwcalendlycom slash DaleCoach55 , where you can make an appointment for a 45-minute free consultation , and you know . So basically , I'm just trying to figure out ways , curtis , of how to get people to come out of the shell of their shame and guilt and get in touch with me .

One thing people have to know about is adenosine , and there's a great book called I'm Not Sick and I Don't Need Help by this doctor , dr Xavier Amador , a-m-a-d-o-r , and it's a story of his relationship with his brother who had schizophrenia and had agnosynogia for basically 17 years , and how he developed a good dialogue and basically rebuilt the bridges of

relationship with his brother . And so I guess the most important thing I can say is don't lose hope . As I said , the four things love , hope , faith and patience I think are essential components of not only understanding and being a successful caregiver , but it's also an essential part of a recovery for the person who's going through the illness .

Uh , so , um , that's about it . I , I just uh , you know , I , just I .

It took me basically uh , 15 years to I mean , I talked about the death of dale but it really took me about 20 years to get out out of my delusions , and I guess that's one last thing I'd say is that if someone you have , you know , has delusions , then , you know , don't think it's just like a matter of like one or two bad thoughts or faulty thoughts or

have , because delusion goes much deeper than that . Delusion is a structure at the very foundation of a person's identity and that's why I took that thermonuclear hit in my head to knock me out of my delusions .

And although that might seem extreme , the fact is that you know it's an ongoing process to get through to someone who is seriously mentally ill and therefore you have to just take small steps and celebrate little wins . And sometimes you know you can bribe people .

You know if people don't want to take their medication , for instance , or another thing that is that happens is self-care . You know people stop taking showers and everything . So uh , don't be above . Uh , a little bribery . If your loved one smokes and he's not taking his medication or he's not taking a shower , then make a deal with him .

Say , uh , okay , I'll buy , I'll buy you cigarettes for the next three days if you take your medication . And uh , you know , and uh , take a shower , and it doesn't even have to be cigarettes , you can do it with the his favorite meal .

You know , say I'll , I'll reward you with lasagna , which is your favorite dish , if you'll take your medication for the next two days . And tracking is also very important . You know if someone is reluctant to take medication , then try to keep track of what they're doing .

If you have any guests or suggestion , topics or feedback for the show , curtis Jackson 1978 at attnet is the place to send them . Thank you for listening and supporting the show .