Brain Tangles

SHIRLEY DEANE/MIDYETT is a citizen of both Australia and the United States, speaks with a Texas-American accent, and descends from Welsh and Cherokee Indian heritage. She has been a mental health professional for over 45 years in both Australia and America. She has been a counselor and psychotherapist in early-episode psychosis programs, and with severely mentally ill clients in community mental health and drug rehabilitation centers. She has conducted many training workshops and presented at numerous state, national, and international conferences. Shirley holds a degree in psychology, one of the first Post Baccalaureate Honors Certificates in Biomedical Communications from the University of Texas, and a post-graduate certification in Myofunctional Therapy. An eidetic neuro-psychotherapist combining art and behavioral psychology, she trained with the Eidetic Research and Marketing Analysis Centre in Toronto, Canada. Experienced in both in-patient and out-patient settings, she was on staff with five community mental health centers in America and became supervising manager in three of them. She is a certified addiction specialist and served on staff with two rehabilitation in-patient units, working with men and women on probation and parole. Shirley has worked in Australia since 1986, in both staff and senior-management positions in the mental health field. She served on a team conducting a pilot drug-and-other-addictions program for a major not-for-profit community treatment center, and on a team developing an early-intervention episode psychosis program, and then managed the team that introduced and expanded the pilot program to another region within Western Australia. In addition to counseling, training, program development, and consulting, Shirley worked as a mediation officer with the Australian Department of Justice. Shirley is experienced in working with people in crisis, including providing support in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Semi-retired from 2010 until 2014, she traveled the Grey Nomad Caravan trail around Australia, continuing during that time to expand her painting portfolio and gathering insight into the challenges facing seniors coping with retirement and aging issues. In 2015, she returned to Western Australia and volunteered her services to not-for-profit community service organizations, conducting strategic-planning workshops. Actively retired, Shirley continues to maintain her interest in the multitude of changes impacting society, particularly mental fatigue and stress in corporations and the mental-health community. She has accepted several challenges conducting intensive team-building workshops focusing on human communication, reinforcing mental fitness, and addressing stress addictions. In 2016, Shirley became associated with Louise Rabbone of "The People Catalyst." She developed and conducted two intensive team-building training programs. One of these week-long intensives was with an Aboriginal community in the outback of Western Australia. She says she is semi-retired. NOT!

Victor Midyett learned about the importance of saying what you mean and meaning what you say at his mother's side in India while she and Vic's father faced the many cultural challenges of being missionaries, she a city girl from Brooklyn, New York, and he a farm boy from Tennessee. He grew up having to adjust to the challenges of being understood when attending ​12 different public schools, boarding schools, and correspondence school courses ​in five different​ countries, language structures, and​ educational systems. Learning how to translate and communicate precisely (and hopefully quickly) meant he could more or less adapt and survive in whatever country and culture he lived in. As an adult in Australia, he began working in the sales profession, where he was often forced to make use of what he had learned about identifying the difference between what a person said he wanted and what he actually wanted. After Vic married Shirley - or Jake, as he calls her - he was faced with another challenge, of learning to help her translate what she was saying in "American" into "Australian." His "Missionary Kid" stories of growing up in India have been published on the weblog Moristotle & Co., and many of his childhood memories were recounted in a book about his father, JT: ANOTHER MIGHTY MIDYETT, by his cousin Randy Somers. Learning to help himself and others to be honest and straightforward, both verbally and in writing, has given Vic great satisfaction in life. His favorite quote is an example of how he strives to live his life, with others and within himself: "Truth does not alter according to our willingness to accept it."

Editor-in-chief of Moristotle & Co., a weblog with an international staff filing reports, stories, and provocations from around the world. Art, poetry, nature, photos. Writer and editor since mother's teat, in old age manages a weblog beat, sometimes opines in rhyming lines, and chooses words to set in measured feet. Testimonial: "His editing is impeccable. If I were to die between sending a manuscript and his publication of the edited version, I would bless it from above."