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 6th-8th -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
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