NAMI Paper: Psychiatry Finally Makes a Necessary “Mea Culpa”

 

As part of my process of recovering from borderline personality disorder, I’ve been reading psychiatric textbooks on its etiology, development, and treatment.  I also read NAMI’s first book written by its chief psychiatrist, Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, You Are Not Alone.  One of the heartening things I’ve learned from this reading is, psychiatry is finally offering “mea culpas” for its past mistakes—at least to other psychiatrists, and people interested in the dynamics of psychiatric treatment.  While heartening, it’s also both surprising and disheartening, because psychiatry is just not known for a public face of admitting it was wrong.  Which it has been, and so, while it is heartening to finally see psychiatry admit it’s made errors, it’s also disheartening, because its usual public face is, “Don’t worry, we know all the answers.”  Which has been the public face of psychiatry at least since the days of Freud, and maybe even all the way back to Kraft-Ebbing, the inventor of the modern case study, who was so sure that the cause of mental illness could be found—in masturbation!  Freud and later psychiatrists were also so sure the causes lay in their own often arcane theories of the unconscious mind, even though they were also so sure that competing psychiatric theories of the unconscious were so very, very wrong!  Following B.F. Skinner, the behaviorists were all so sure that we humans were basically like pigeons, and could be trained just like pigeons to modify destructive behaviors.  And so it was, and so it has been, until very recently. 

 

Of course, none of these psychiatric notions was at all noted for providing empirical evidence to back up their various claims of successful treatment.  If they relied on evidence at all, it was only anecdotally, through carefully-written case studies, or else by referring to an alleged self-consistency in their various theories.  But that is not, needless to say, how they were presented to the public at all.  What we can properly call the “psychiatric spin machine” was busy triumphing how it had found the way, or a handful of various ways, to solve the problem of mental illness, and restore its sufferers to “normality,” whatever that meant—as so much of what was touted depended on who was doing the touting.  Whether it was freed libido (for the Freudians) or modifying behavior to stay within acceptable bounds (for the behaviorists), the answer to the “unacceptability” of mental illness was now at hand.  There were even those who touted the superiority of the “mentally ill” (think Foucault, who, in his confusion, sees humane treatment of the mentally ill as depriving them of their “liberty” to be mad, and who reduces all of psychiatry except Freudian psychoanalysis to mere “positivism;” or R.D. Laing, who maintained that insanity was but a sane way to respond to a crazy society; or all those insisting that those on psychotropic medication go off such drugs immediately, and be “cured naturally”).  Freud was probably the first one to tout his particular way—psychoanalysis—as the way to cure mental illness once and for all, but he soon enough spawned psychiatric and psychoanalytic rivals to challenge his particular way.  Needless to say, all these various claims were advanced without much in the way of clinical evidence demonstrating their success, but relied more on beguiling theories that were supposedly self-consistent as evidence of efficacy.

 

Such, in a nutshell, was the history of psychiatry before the advent of the current fashionable notion (for lack of better terminology) of “evidence-based treatment,” i.e., supposedly statistically sound analyses of large groups of psychiatric patients receiving certain treatments, with comparisons to control groups not receiving such, and from such studies, assessing their effectiveness.  From such studies, it was determined that psychoanalysis did not pass the evidentiary bar, but that other therapies did—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, certain drug and other medical treatments for schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, etc.  They passed the evidentiary bar based on measured outcomes, were thus “scientific” treatments with proven efficacy, finally making psychiatry a “real science,” a “real medicine.”

 

But even in the heyday of “unscientific” psychoanalysis, the psychiatric spin machine touted it as not only the way, but even as the only way!  So also with its chief rival, behavioral modification.  Same also for Jungian, Adlerian, Gestalt, and other approaches. Thus, each treatment had its own spin doctors, its own pitchmen and admen when it was touted before the general public, which, of course, lacked the ability to discern truth or falsehood among the various claims, and claimants.  But the psychiatric spin machine, nonetheless, was adamant: “Despite the various rival claims, we, Official Psychiatry (representing whatever claimant sounds most acceptable to you, John and Jane Public) now have all the answers.  We are the Authorities, and authoritative as such.”  Such was the marketing of Official Psychiatry: “We have all the answers you are looking for.”  And such was how psychiatry and psychiatric efficacy was sold to the general public.  “We are also Real Medicine,” touted Official Psychiatry—whether Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, behaviorist, or whatever.   “When you are looking for Mental Health, come to us, for we have All the Answers.”

 

Now, psychiatry is admitting, at least among other psychiatrists and informed students of psychiatry, “No, we don’t have all the answers.  And a lot of the answers we had in the past have not panned out.”  Gone thus is the universal efficacy of psychoanalysis, gone also is the notion that schizophrenia results from bad parenting, gone as well is the notion that personality disorders are untreatable, and being questioned is the notion that there will come a time when there will be a pill for every psychiatric disorder, that it’s all a matter of unbalanced brain chemistry, and other nostrums within psychiatry, each one fashionable at one time, many of them now discarded, with psychiatrists themselves admitting (at least among themselves), “No, we oversold ourselves to the general public.  We simply have not produced a lot of the results we promised.  Our State of the Art isn’t so Stately after all.”

 

This was most ruefully brought home to me in my life, during my 47 years of inept and malfeasant psychiatric treatment, where I was reduced to a desperate, dependent outpatient with my life literally on hold.  I had believed in the promises of psychiatry, and as a troubled youth, I literally jumped at the chance to get psychiatric help for my troubles and depression when it was offered to me by my Resident Advisor in the dorm I occupied as a college freshman.  So began my fruitless odyssey of nearly five decades spent in university clinics and CMHCs (Community Mental Health Centers), where all I did was age, nothing more.  I found out the hard way that many of the oversold promises of psychiatric treatment simply weren’t true.  But within it I remained, feeling quite hopeless without my psychiatric “fix,” which somehow got me through to the next session without making things any better.  I felt trapped:  unable to advance within psychiatric treatment, but convinced by psychiatry itself that, without it, all would be hopeless.  So there I stood (or rather, sat) immobilized, somehow suspended between a sense of “almost (but not quite) normality” and “abject mental sickness,” with little actual life going on around or about me.  I was trapped.

 

Later, after this 47-year debacle, which went on and off (but mostly on) from 1965-2012, I did finally get the psychiatric help I needed from a private therapist, beginning in 2014.   He applied his version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (previous therapeutic approaches had been pretty much haphazard, directionless), which was both conversational and helpful, but most of all, he was engaged with me, and I felt it.  I felt his empathy, his compassion, his understanding, whereas with so many of the previous therapists I sensed only their indifference, their unconcern with me personally, even their boredom, their sense of “I have to put up with this to get a paycheck, so I will.”  My good therapist of now once said to me it was “unconscionable” the way the university clinics and the CMHCs had let me “fall through the cracks,” as so often I was not 100% qualified for this offering, but also not 100% qualified for that offering, so I got nothing, according to the rules set by these most bureaucratic systems.

 

I had encountered good, capable therapists in the university clinics and CMHCs, which is much of what kept me going back in anticipation, but for the most part they were either fired or quit.  It seemed only the most bureaucratic, the most merely timeserving, were the ones that survived, and I got far too many of them.  I didn’t have much contact with psychiatrists as such in the clinics and CMHCs, as my condition wasn’t deemed responsive to medication, which suited me fine, as I was all too aware of medicinal side effects from the medications psychiatrists prescribed.  However, in 1986 I was finally put on effective medication for my chronic spells of depression, which would often immobilize me in despair for days at a time, and out of which I emerged usually jobless, when I was finally prescribed lithium, later supplemented with Prozac.  I was on these antidepressants for 18 years, 1986-2004, when my CMHC suddenly abandoned me for a year because I had too “volubly” complained about the case manager messing up most ineptly my application for SSDI benefits I was entitled to, but found myself, in 2004, without my Prozac and lithium—and also, most importantly, without depression!  When this CMHC let me back in, February 2005, I saw the staff psychiatrist and told him directly I’d been off antidepressants since November 2004 and hadn’t had any depressions, so he agreed to monitor me while off antidepressant meds.  He so monitored me until December 2005, after which he said I didn’t need them anymore.  What had happened, I surmise, is that the antidepressants I’d been on did actually change my brain chemistry, my way of thinking, so I was now permanently thinking in a non-depressive mode.  I haven’t suffered from a depressive spell since 2003, 20 years ago as I write now.  So, no, my experience does say one doesn’t have to stay on medication forever; however, if one does go off meds, always be sure to be monitored off them by a psychiatrist or other medical doctor.  That I have learned.

 

I kept with my Cognitive Behavioral therapist until 2020, and shortly thereafter went to other therapists at a private clinic (both these places were exceptional among private practitioners, as opposed to public CMHCs, in that they accepted my Medicare, without which I couldn’t have afforded them).  In all, I had 69 months of effective psychiatric care, which wiped out the previous 47 years of inept care.  That, and the scientific fact that personality disorders do tend to heal themselves over time, actually made me able to feel fully recovered, and to be a “normal” person now, although I was in my early 70s when I finally had such success.  So, my own experience does not make me anti-psychiatry; however, it certainly does make me anti-bad psychiatry, which I do definitely feel is all too common.  And I do believe a lot of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals would agree with me.  Certainly that was the lesson I drew from my dismal years in the university clinics and CMHCs, which do not pay well, but which do provide perks and benefits, among them “iron rice bowl” security of employment once hired.  It should be pointedly noted, though, that I did file three written complaints against four therapists I had in the CMHCs (two of them worked together as a team, the other two saw clients alone) who had been especially pernicious in their psychiatric treatment of me, and I do wish now I’d filed complaints against several more.

 

Modern evidence-based research on treatment of personality disorders indicates that there are several effective modalities of treatment, but that it is also important for the therapist to be not only skilled, but also empathetic, considerate, and understanding.  I would generalize that to say, that applies to all therapeutic relationships.  If the so-called therapist is hostile or indifferent to his or her client (and in the university clinics and CMHCs, as I found out myself, so many are), then the whole relationship is undermined, and effectiveness of therapy is reduced to naught.

 

Sadly, even though I am a strong believer in public medicine and supporter of Medicare for All, I have to admit that CMHCs were a good idea that just had too many obstacles in the way to make them effective, which is why so many of them give only mediocre care.  Their budgets are set by politicians who are often hostile to the whole concept, and the community resources truly needed by the mentally ill are often beyond what is available.  The result too often is inadequate care, neglect, jail instead of treatment, and the proverbial “falling through the cracks.”  (By the way, I was once jailed for a week for a suicide attempt; I was placed in a cell for psychiatric observation because there were no hospital beds available!)  My own rueful experiences in CMHCs attests to this.

 

This excursion into my own mental health recovery history indicates how I went from an uncritical believer in the automatic effectiveness of psychiatric care into an informed skeptic of so much of it.  I once myself was a true believer in what the psychiatric spin machine peddled.  I learned better the hard way, though lived experience.  That is why my welcoming of the “mea culpas” psychiatry now gives (at least to itself) is so rueful.  But in our capitalist society day, so often marketing is everything, and can spin the bad or indifferent into the positive good.  Think only of cigarettes, sugary soda pop, or bottled water instead of tap water!  And in the end, I did indeed benefit from good psychiatry.  But it is necessary here to do the math, and to point out that my 69 months (5.75 years) of good psychiatry in a “career” of 52.75 years as a psychiatric outpatient (with occasional hospitalizations; from which I was often prematurely released as too “normal”!) had to overcome 47 years of bad psychiatry.  This meant that the good psychiatry came only to 11% of my time, as opposed to 89% of my time trapped in the bad!  Not a good augury, by any means.

 

But the spin continues, always trying to put a pretty face on what are not always good results.  For example, an online psychotherapy site advertises that therapy is effective for 75% of its patients.  But what of the 25% for whom it is not effective?  Too often the blame for ineffectiveness is put on the patient, going all the way back to Freud’s famous case of his patient Dora, who was blamed by Freud himself for not positively accepting his rather hairbrained suggestion that she marry the man she accused of harassing him!  She was simply dismissed as “hysteric.”  (Which was a common psychiatric diagnosis of women back in Freud’s time, the ending years of Victorian prudery, with its expectations of what was socially “proper” for women, i.e., submissive acceptance.)

 

But the history of psychiatry is often a history of fads, and what was the cutting edge of yesterday is often dismissed as wrongheaded nonsense in trendy today.  But as a former work colleague put it so well metaphorically, “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes.”  The leading figures of psychiatry both historically and now were, and are, intelligent, educated men and women.  So there is often a kernel of truth in what they said and wrote, even if much is dismissed later.  That goes for Freud, as well as for others.  And what is considered “cutting edge” today may well be cavalierly dismissed in the future.  “State of the art” should thus be regarded as tentative, “the best as we know now,” but always, subject to later change or modification.  Same as in physics, or chemistry, or in any science.

 

But such honesty, such “This is what we know now, but that could all change,” goes against the effectiveness of marketing the product.  And, after all, psychiatry is a business, an income-generator, as much as it is a profession or science.  And a good business does not plant doubt, even informed doubt, in the minds of its prospective customers.  But if psychiatry were to be truly honest, psychiatrists and psychotherapists would admit to their prospective clients seeking help:

 

I may well be able to help you, but perhaps not.  I believe I am a skilled and able practitioner,

but perhaps I am not right for you.  Then again, although I feel I am State of the Art in what I know, we in psychiatry don’t yet know as much as we’d like to, and perhaps what problems you bring to the table may be beyond our present state of knowledge.  Having said that, it is now up to you to decide if you want to give it a go with me.

 

Needless to say, such blunt honesty could be bad for business!  Good for ethics, of course, but bad for business.   And goes against the grain of the psychiatric spin machine, with its omnipresent messaging that it has all the answers, even when it doesn’t.  As the examples given above demonstrate.   With psychiatry as with so much else, “Caveat emptor.”  Which is why, though psychiatry’s “mea culpas” are welcome, and we the public should be glad they have finally been given, there may well be more to come.  Of necessity, of course, as times change, and knowledge grows.  As the Communist Manifesto states so notably, “all that is solid melts in air….”  That holds for psychiatry as well.    

 

 

 

     

 

         

 

            

A NAMI Paper on NAMI: Malfeasance at All Levels, Local, State, National

 I’m a member of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), have been since December 2019.  I joined as a mental health consumer hoping to find support in my recovery from my diagnosed psychiatric disorders, borderline personality disorder with chronic depression, and also to advocate for my fellow mental health consumers, to ensure they get the excellent treatment they deserve—treatment not only competent and evidence-based, but also given with empathy, compassion, and understanding.  Alas, I was to be disappointed.  Despite that they should be the focus of any group supposedly advocating for mental health, I soon found out that mental health consumers are given short shrift in NAMI at all levels, delegated to the “back of the bus” in favor of rich “caregivers,” i.e., families that can financially afford to support dependent adult children with mental illness, as well as also favoring both the Psychiatric Establishment and Big Pharma.  Tellingly, all three are major donors to NAMI.  As the old saying goes, follow the money.

 

Prior to Covid, in 2019 and into early 2020, I was feeling quite positive about my relationship with NAMI.  I met weekly with then-Greater Indianapolis NAMI Executive Director Julie Hayden, in friendly and extensive chats that made me feel valued as a mental health consumer.  I attended Indianapolis NAMI’s Christmas party and Hayden encouraged me to write on mental health issues (I am an extensively published writer and poet).  She even sent me a Christmas and birthday present (my birthday’s in December) on behalf of Indianapolis NAMI.  But all changed with the onset of Covid restrictions, which, it certainly does seem to me, NAMI at all levels—local, state, and national—used as a pretext not only to shut down operations, but to also have its staff members use as an excuse to take extended vacations, leaving ordinary NAMI members in a lurch.  Certainly, that was true of both Indianapolis and Indiana NAMI Executive Directors, the aforementioned Ms. Hayden, and Indiana NAMI Executive Director Barbara Thompson, who simply became unavailable for the next three years (Hayden went to another job), as well as NAMI local and state presidents, who neither answered phone calls, letters, or e-mails.  Which I, as a blue-collar Essential Worker grocery stocker, who had to keep on working in a public setting, and thus faced coming down with Covid myself (though I did get all my vaccinations, including boosters, as available), found not only wrongheaded but unconscionable.  Ms. Thompson has yet to respond to any of my e-mails over this period of time, which, quite frankly, I find rude and vulgar.  Same goes for one David Binet of the national NAMI staff, who sent me one very condescending e-mail in response to my expressed concern on both Hayden and Thompson being so incommunicado, and who also has never responded to any other e-mails from me.  Seriously—if NAMI employees lack the courtesy to even answer e-mails, how is that not egregiously rude and dismissive?  Does it not indeed show contempt for the rank-and-file NAMI dues-paying membership?  However, I do have to state that national NAMI’s chief psychiatrist, Dr. Ken Duckworth, has been unfailingly polite and responsive to my e-mails sent him!  The one sole bright spot in this whole affair.

 

In 2021 I attended two Indiana NAMI statewide virtual meetings by Zoom, and in both meetings, I was wrongly treated.  In the first, a supposed Leadership Summit, not only was my mute off, I responded only by silent “chat” to the remarks by a spokesperson for Indiana’s Clubhouse system, which, quite frankly, I found to be only public relations fluff, and lacking in substance.  For this, Ms. Thompson abruptly removed me from access to the meeting, thus causing me to forfeit my $40 registration fee.  She later contacted me (only once, and the only time she’s ever contacted me, in a period of two years) to have what she termed a “conversation” about this, where it was clear she had a clear misunderstanding of what I’d actually done, and the “conversation” was left hanging.  I have e-mailed her repeatedly on this, but she has not responded, and, as far as I’m concerned, Indiana NAMI owes me my $40 wrongly forfeited.  Indiana NAMI is having its first in-person meeting, another Leadership Summit, in late June of this year, 2023, and I promise all, I will confront Ms. Thompson on her behavior!

 

At a later meeting in 2021, I was victimized by another Indiana NAMI staffer, who pulled a bait-and-switch on me.  I submitted a query to the panelists, mental health professionals who had been mental health consumers themselves, asking for their feedback on the 47 years of inept and malfeasant psychiatric “care” I’d received at Indiana CMHCs and university clinics, which had put my life on hold and reduced me to a desperate, dependent outpatient not receiving the help I really needed.  The staffer host read my question, which pointed out the bad care I’d received, then asked the panelists to comment—not on the bad care I’d received, but on the good care they’d received!  This soon degenerated into a back-and-forth on art therapy, and I signed out of the meeting in disgust.  Again, this was neither addressed nor redressed.

 

As for national NAMI, the same indifference to my concerns as a mental health consumer NAMI member have prevailed, with the sole exception of Dr. Duckworth, who expressed warmth toward me and a wish that he’d been able to interview me on my experiences for his recent NAMI book, You Are Not Alone.   I have submitted my mental health writings to the appropriate NAMI body for publication, but they have not been published, because, quite frankly, I write in an adult style and format for adult readers.  I simply do not write in that breezy, superficial 6^th-8^th -grade-level way NAMI demands of its writers (including the hapless in this regard Dr. Duckworth), so that even a half-literate housewife does not feel intellectually “challenged” by NAMI’s message, which comes across to me, a college graduate, as ofttimes far too superficial and saccharinely overoptimistic.  NAMI would do well to behoove itself of both George Packer’s “The Moral Case Against Euphemism,” his devastating critique of “woke” language and fashionable “dumbing down” in the April 2023 issue of the Atlantic; and the late trenchant writer Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided (Picador, 2009), her equally devastating critique of “positive thinking” and eternal optimism (for which she urges substituting—realism).  As a NAMI member, of course, I receive its state-affiliate newsletters and its national magazine, the NAMI Advocate, which I routinely find hopelessly superficial and tritely breezy in their presentations, and overoptimistic to the point of being treacly in their subject matter.  No, this is not good writing, not by a long shot.  It’s not even conventionally adequate.  No, it’s just irritating and simplistic.  Certainly, all that comes across in the latest issue of the Advocate (Spring 2023), in its articles devoted to “Identity and Mental Health,” where “identity” and “culture” are given, in tune with the superficial approach of postmodernism, very static and set-in-stone connotations.  Reality, needless to say, is far more complex and flexible.  While I personally have a superficial “identity” of cis white male, I also have deeper and more substantive identities of blue-collar unionized Essential Worker; university graduate in economics with a strong math and statistics background; extensively published writer and poet, even at the national level; ex-Catholic militant atheist who has moral as well as intellectual objections to religion; abused child and adolescent, victim of multiple abuse from parents and relatives, teachers and bullying classmates, ignored when not denigrated; and that far from exhausts all my various “identities,” which all come together to give me my own particular, integrated, unique personality!  (I should also add, not just “mental health consumer,” but “victim of psychiatry” as well!)

 

Thus does all this sum up my thumbnail sketch of objections to all levels of functioning that characterize NAMI today, of which I am, as well, a dues-paid member who will renew his membership at the proper time, and who also promises to fulfill my “proper role” as a NAMI member by being critical of it when it deserves criticism, at the local, state

Another NAMI Paper Sharply Critiquing the Circle City Clubhouse

 

This critique supplements my January 13, 2023, letter on the Circle City Clubhouse, which was posted in April 2023 on this very “Politically Incorrect Leftist” blog, and builds on the information brought forth in that letter.  What is different is, I researched the criteria for Clubhouse affiliation given by Clubhouse International, as well as noting that while Clubhouses have been extensively covered in the academic social science literature, the studies done to date have numerous flaws:  among them, no randomized samples or randomized control groups, use of mental health recovery measures that are limited to self-assessment, and I would add, only looking at certain select Clubhouses, and improperly generalizing from that sample.  Which has led, in my informed statistical opinion (I have a college degree in economics), to the Clubhouse model being vastly overrated, and wrongly credited for achievements it has not made.  That is certainly true for Circle City Clubhouse. 

 

Clubhouses, although extensive geographically, vary widely in quality and availability of programs, with Circle City Clubhouse, the main Clubhouse in Indianapolis, having a major paucity of programs, thus being really limited in the mental health consumer services it provides.  Carriage House, the Clubhouse in Ft. Wayne, as one example, has a savings bank available for use by its members, but no such exists for Circle City.  Clubhouses are supposed to offer three tiers of employment programs, 1.) transitional employment, 2.) supported employment, and 3.) independent employment; but Circle City only offers transitional employment, and that is spotty.  Circle City Clubhouse has only one transitional employer now that I’m aware of, and has lost several transitional employment sites in just the last few years.  As for supported employment (i.e., employment with staff support assistance for maintaining employment) and independent employment (i.e., Clubhouse members finding, with help and encouragement, employment on their own), neither exists at Circle City.  Nor are Clubhouse members encouraged or cajoled to seek employment, even when they’re capable of doing such, so that many Circle City Clubhouse members who could benefit from employment do not, in fact, do so.  Though Clubhouse International maintains it seeks employment for its members at “prevailing wages,” here in Indianapolis the “prevailing wage” varies considerably depending on the nature and size of the business.  I would imagine Circle City Clubhouse’s transitional employers in Indianapolis and environs pay only minimum wage or maybe a little above, which is still at a truly dismal $7.25 an hour; but also here in Indianapolis, my employer, Kroger pays a starting wage of $14.25 an hour, nearly double!  Crew Car Wash and Target here pay starting wages of $15 an hour, so as is easily seen here, what the “prevailing wage” for the type of work Clubhouse members get to engage in can mean either an income that is indeed very low-wage, or an income nearly double that.  As a trade unionist supportive of the union in my workplace, I naturally find that appalling!  Yet, I don’t see Circle City Clubhouse or any of its staffers trying to address that.

 

Another major gripe I have with Circle City, and one that may extend to many other Clubhouses as well, is that in its “work-oriented program” of having Clubhouse members do simple maintenance, food prep and other labor to occupy themselves and contribute, these members work for free, are given absolutely no wages or incentives.  Such labor for others (and the Clubhouse is an “other,” it stands as an institution with rules and structures that members must subject themselves to) is the very dictionary definition of—slave labor!  As a person influenced by Marxism, I definitely agree with Marxism’s premise that humans are fulfilled by productive labor.  But the only labor available at the Clubhouse is all unskilled mindless menial labor such as cleaning toilets, emptying wastebaskets, pushing mops or brooms, or simple food prep.  Labor that gives no chance to grow in productivity and competence, or learn new work and employment skills.  It’s all dead-end labor for free, and saves Circle City Clubhouse much money it would otherwise have to spend on outside maintenance or food prep contractors.  All this fits the direct dictionary definition of labor exploitation:  Clubhouse members add value through their labor to the Clubhouse, but get nothing back in return.  In fact, not even a staffer saying to one worker (but not to all), “Job well done,” for that would violate the Clubhouse meaning of equality: high quality and low quality of performance are on an equal footing alike!

 

That is a key reason why. when I would show up at the Clubhouse, I would always refuse to do any work.  I wasn’t about to allow myself to be used as a source of slave labor for free, and certainly was not, as a university graduate, going to allow the Clubhouse to confine my labor, skills, and education to uses that were menial and mindless.  I note that at my present job at Kroger I do mindless menial physical labor, but it is far more therapeutic, for I gain a decent hourly wage out of it.  (Currently $16.60 an hour, or about $35,000 a year.)  I put up with its mindlessness and physical strain because I am rewarded, am given incentive, for doing so.  Totally unlike the Clubhouse, where the workers don’t even receive a simple “Thank you” and are just taken for granted, denied all opportunity to advance in work skills that would be useful in a real job situation.  They are consigned, thus, to being mere myrmidons used unconscionably by Circle City Clubhouse to save money through what can only be called a form of “wage theft.”  They don’t even get minimum wage, but just how much money do they save the Circle City Clubhouse each year?!

 

To add insult to injury, Clubhouse members are also pressured and dragooned to help the Circle City Clubhouse in its incessant fund-raising campaigns—again, for free!

 

That does much to explain why the Circle City Clubhouse can’t retain its college grad or even high school grad members, but, as I surmise, is but a resting lounge for what are, in so many cases, only high school dropouts.  Circle City Clubhouse grotesquely maintains it has helped 310 mental health consumers recover, but that 310 is only the total number of people who have passed through its doors, and only a few remain for any length of time. (Many come one time, and never come back.)  From my experience, the core membership of Circle City is only about 20 people.  But once a Clubhouse member, always a Clubhouse member, at least on paper, even when one has no interest whatsoever in the Clubhouse.  I once looked forward to participating in the Clubhouse, having finally found a home for myself as a mental health consumer, a hope also shared by my friends and my psychotherapist.  Alas, it was not to be!  I ran early on into a wall of cliquishness and clannishness, a wall so extensive other Clubhouse members didn’t even say “Hi” to me, and was soon stymied by my inability to use my educational and other skills productively in any kind of Clubhouse setting (though I did manage to publish articles in the Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter, which was fulfilling, even though no one seemed to read them).  Yet, it was so apparent things could be so much better!  Yes, a Culture of Mediocrity prevails, both among members and staffers alike.  Staffers are, in social work jargon, regarded as “generalists,” but really they are mere baby-sitters who play a very passive role in the Clubhouse, even though they’re required to have college degrees.  Of course, from what I’ve been able to determine, they’re only paid like baby-sitters, an unconscionably low hourly wage.  Marissa, a Circle City Clubhouse staffer, admitted I earn more than she does at her job, at $16.60 an hour, which will go up to $17.10 an hour in July; 2023 yet my job only requires a high school diploma, and hers a college degree!

 

Clubhouse International is aware of these and other deficiencies at Circle City Clubhouse when it does its periodic accreditation review, but to date has only given Circle City a “Tut, tut, do better” admonition.  In my opinion, Circle City shouldn’t be accredited at all, given its overall lousy performance that does little, if anything, for real mental health recovery (my recovery, for example, owes nothing to the Clubhouse, despite my formal membership in it since January 2016).  Nor should it be given charitable donations—that’s just throwing money down a rathole, in my opinion.  However, to be honest, I will grant that Circle City has recently made some positive changes, but they are, in my opinion again, not only long overdue, but too little, too late.  They’ve only marginally improved the functioning of Circle City Clubhouse, but which still stands at mediocre or worse.  And probably will continue to do so.

 

Supporting details for my arguments above can be found in my January 13, 2023, letter to the Clubhouse, which should be read in tandem with this essay.  Perhaps the effect of these two highly critical Clubhouse posts will be salutary--waking up the Circle City Clubhouse to do much more, be much more, be more effective at it!  That, thus, would be the "constructive" role I could play as a Clubhouse member:  by being one of its most scathing critics, I'd be giving it a very much needed wake-up call.       

NAMI Paper: I’m Outraged at the Killing of Jordan Neely

 

 

I’m outraged that Jordan Neely is dead.  He didn’t have to die.  There was no reason he had to die.  He may have been very verbally upsetting, but he was a danger to no one.  He was a mentally ill man in the throes of his mental illness—that’s all.  At other times, in fact, he had been very much liked and appreciated for his Michael Jackson imitations, where he had done Jackson’s famous Moonwalk, to the delight of passers-by, who rewarded him with tips.  But on this particular day, May 1, 2023, his schizophrenia and PTSD had gotten the better of him, and so there he was, on a New York City subway train screaming at the top of his lungs some very disturbing things, which surely were upsetting to his fellow passengers, but he was keeping his verbal hostility to merely acting it out orally, and not assaulting anyone.  The only provocative activity Neely is accused of is throwing his jacket on the subway floor in a very dramatic way.  Passenger Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, took him to the floor in a chokehold that lasted for 15 minutes.  As an ex-Marine, Penny surely knew that a 15-minute chokehold was bound to be lethal for Neely—yet he persisted in it anyway.  Penny hollowly claims “self-defense,” but the online forum Reluctant Habits calls it more accurately, calling Penny “sociopathic,” “murderous,” someone with a “sick smirk,” and a “thug.”  [On May 11, Penny was charged with secondary manslaughter.  As of May 13, thanks to an endorsement from DeSantis, Penny’s Go Fund Me legal defense account had raised $1 million--GF.]

 

Neely was, of course, black.  Penny is white.  Many white people have a deathly fear of being victims of black-on-white crime, but really, how often do we, as both a society and as individuals, talk about white-on-black crime?  Such as the murder of Emmett Till (the white woman who lied about teenage Till making a pass at her died recently—of old age)?  Or Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin murdering George Floyd?  Or Breonna Taylor shot in bed by Louisville cops based on an erroneous search warrant?  Or, needless to say, all the “Strange Fruit” lynchings of black people in the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other white segregationist terrorists?  But these only start the list!

 

Media coverage of this atrocity has been fairly extensive, especially since Penny was named as suspect when the coroner ruled “homicide” as cause of Neely’s death.  I’ve read the details in three online sources:  in addition to the Reluctant Habits blog site mentioned above, there was a detailed story in the online Intelligencer of New York magazine on May 5 (updated on May 7), and a May 6 story by NBC News.  The Intelligencer story featured a longish video of Penny holding Neely in a chokehold, a disturbing video to say the least, as Neely’s legs are flailing, then go limp.

 

In the wake of this, both New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a law-and-order ex-cop, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul both issued mealy-mouthed statements in the face of indignation over Neely’s death, admonishing people to merely stay calm while the investigation proceeded.  Neely was homeless at the time of his death, had been arrested several times, and had warrants outstanding—but he really died as a “mentally ill” person once again allowed to fall through the cracks of a callous and unresponsive mental health system.  (According to the societal conventional wisdom, the mentally ill “bring it on themselves,” most conveniently “blaming the victim” for whatever happens to them.)  Ironically, it was Adams himself who had proposed rounding up New York City’s homeless mentally ill and putting them in treatment!  Which never happened, of course, and isn’t happening now.  But grandstanding on “mental illness” and proposing toughlove actions sells well to voters.  Even when nothing of substance happens.  Truly, the way we treat mental illness in society today, especially those without residences, insurance, or money, is insane.  And horribly, unconscionably, victimizing.