Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Darrell Herrmann : Straight Talk About Living With A Severe Mental Illness
Tue, 20 May 2025
Send us a textDarrell 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 psychosishttps://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: What is Darrell Herrmann's background and experience with schizophrenia?
I developed schizophrenia in 1984 when I was a captain of the United States Army. My specialties 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.
Chapter 2: How did Darrell transition from military service to civilian life?
And when I went on disability, I made it my mission in life to do everything I could to help other people with serious mental illness live better lives. Ever since then, that's what I've been doing. 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 were 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.
Chapter 3: What insights has Darrell gained from speaking to hospital groups?
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 talk to them and answer their questions and find 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 subliminal illness. But sadly, most people don't know them.
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.
Most of them know they're not the only one. 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.
To most of them, that was just unheard of. They thought their life was over when they got a diagnosis with a psychotic illness.
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?
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. You may have schizophrenia some other time. It often changes.
That's one thing they need to know. So don't get worried about your diagnosis changing. It happens. 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the key points from Darrell's book on living with severe mental illness?
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.
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 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, or 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. Delusions are fixed false beliefs you may have that others around you don't. They could be anything imaginable,
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, to be psychotic, you have to have hallucinations and delusions, 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. 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. And unless someone tells you about hallucinations and 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 anosognosia or lack of insight is.
No one tells people what psychosis is, what hallucination 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. If you're told you have schizophrenia, basically you think that's a villain, a horror movie, or a mass murderer, or some other dangerous, scary person.
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Chapter 5: How can individuals cope with changing mental health diagnoses?
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?
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. 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 in my first psychosis that to this day, I don't know what was real, what was hallucinations, 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. 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?
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Chapter 6: What is the importance of understanding psychosis?
The medication has nothing to do with that. 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. 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. 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 hallucination delusions even though you're not psychotic? 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 hallucinations. 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, to experiencing things that are not real at any time.
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 take and get a better side of where they were.
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Chapter 7: How can one differentiate between reality and hallucinations?
I think that's the biggest problem with our mental health system today is that no one teaches you this stuff. When you first become a psychiatrist, you sit down and talk 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 an antipsychotic 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. 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. 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 are 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. Eve Fulatori, 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 state library, the book, Survivors Get Your Frame Doctor, E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., This was one of the first books ever written about schizophrenia as a physical medical illness for the layman. That told me what I need 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. 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?
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.
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Chapter 8: What strategies does Darrell recommend for managing psychosis?
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 the stigma away from people that don't understand it. Because I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is the average person 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.
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 judges. sheriffs and law professionals and just basically anyone that didn't know this information.
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.
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 would hope that they're going to have.
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. 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 profession 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.
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