NAMI Papers on and about the Circle City Clubhouse

 A fit retort, these three mental health articles of mine below, on the pretensions and ineffectiveness of the Circle City Clubhouse, the Clubhouse system generally, and what real mental health recovery looks like.  Sadly, mental health consumers such as myself have few resources available, and in fact, more pseudo-resources than actual resources-- among them the Circle City Clubhouse and Indiana NAMI, bot of which I'm a member of, but a highly distressed one. --GF.   

I’M WHAT MENTAL HEALTH RECOVERY LOOKS LIKE

 My latest mental health/mental illness writing, finished April 16, 2023, and submitted for publication in the Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  I think it's pretty much self-explanatory, and in combination with the other mental health writings on the Circle City Clubhouse, a positive statement on the whole process of actual mental health recovery back into "normality," not just the pseudo-recovery of being warehoused that the Clubhouse actually promotes. But on April 25, it was rejected for publication by the Clubhouse, which alleged it was but a "personal statement" and could lead to decline in participation in Clubhouse activities.  With good reason, I'd note:  the Clubhouse model is based on doing mindless menial labor for it for free.  Which is the very definition of slave labor!  Work for the Clubhouse, save the Clubhouse money it'd otherwise have to pay for janitorial and routine maintenance services, and get no reward for it.  Not even an encouraging "Job well done" from the Clubhouse staff, for that contradicts the Clubhouse definition of "equality" of members.  All are equal--in mediocrity and expectation of staying mediocre!  No wonder the Clubhouse has such massive turnover in active members; do more than what is condescendingly "expected" of you, become infantilized by the Clubhouse itself! --GF. 

Excuuuuse me if I toot my own horn, so to speak, but I’m precisely what full mental health recovery looks like—and can stand thus for Clubhouse members as a role model for mental health recovery.  Think of me as I am now:  a self-sufficient adult living fully on my own, with a full-time job at decent wages.  I live in my own apartment without the bother of having to have roommates to enable me to afford the rent, own my own car fully (a good one, by the way, a 2015 Toyota Camry, completely paid for), pay all my own bills, buy all my own groceries, without outside assistance from welfare, disability, or food stamps, and hold a full-time unionized job which is layoff-free, pays a decent wage with built-in wage increases, and has benefits and seniority protections.  I make $46,000-$49,000 a year through the combination of my wages, my Social Security (I’m over the age of 65), and my small pension through the union.  I’m now a normal, successful, self-sufficient adult, no longer living in poverty, no longer having to demean myself to qualify for welfare benefits, and what’s more, I’m also psychologically healed through a regimen of 70 months of excellent psychotherapy, which made up for (finally!) being stuck in 47 years of inept and malfeasant psychiatric care, which simply allowed me unconscionably to fall through the cracks.  I no longer have the outward signs or behavioral problems assorted with my psychiatric illness, borderline personality disorder with chronic depression.  I now live a normal life with a normal adult lifestyle. 

 

I haven’t had a major depressive episode since 2003, haven’t been on antidepressants since November 2004 (went off them in the first place because Gallahue CMHC of Indianapolis, the CMHC for my catchment area, in a fit of pique, denied me psychiatric care or access, as well as medicine, from June 2004 to February 2005), was finally moderated off antidepressants by a psychiatrist (at Gallahue, ironically) from February-December 2005, following which he ruled I no longer needed them.  And I haven’t since!  I’ve suffered no major bouts of depression since 2003.  Sure, I get irritable or melancholy sometimes, like any person, but no longer have recurring bouts of debilitating depression, bouts so severe they would immobilize me for days—

haven’t now for two decades! 

 

I have now finally “outgrown” my mental illness, and am no longer trapped by it.  You can too, many of you Clubhouse members, if you have the gumption to work on recovery instead of resigning yourselves, as though by unchangeable fate, to your diagnosis; and if you can get needed help to do this from the psychiatric system and from the Clubhouse staff.  (Unfortunately, getting such from either one of these is often challenging, to say the least.  But that’s why you need to be stubborn and demanding when dealing with both CMHC and Clubhouse staff!  Yes, you must demand the adequate treatment you need to recover.)  I was helped luckily by a private psychotherapist and a private psychiatric clinic which accepted my Medicare, so I was no longer in the clutches of the CMHC and university clinic system, which simply put my life on hold for 47 years (all the while getting paid for it by state agencies, either in Michigan or Indiana). 

 

Some of you will be able to do this easier than others; but do it anyway as you are able, and support and encourage each other in your efforts!  As my excellent private psychotherapist noted, “Recovery means meeting challenges and overcoming them.”  We’re all faced with challenges, but it lands squarely on our shoulders to overcome them, and not let them overcome us or defeat us.  So, go to it, I say! 

 

You too can be like me, a fully recovered mental health consumer; you don’t have to resign yourselves to the second-class status of a “mentally ill person” the whole of your lives.  You can go out and get a good-paying job (as I did), you can complete your education (as I did: earning my college degree despite my mental illness), you can maybe even buy a car, perhaps live without a passel of roommates needed to make rent affordable, and certainly, with a decent-paying job, live on what is no longer a poverty-level income.  It won’t be easy, but it can be done.  And I say finally, if I can overcome nearly 54 years of being trapped in “mental illness,” then you can too!  You may not all recover to the same extent; but I believe almost all of you at the Clubhouse are capable of being more than what you are now.  The Chinese have an apt saying on that, on making the effort to do better: “Don’t fear going slow; fear standing still.”  Too many of you at the Clubhouse are merely standing still, are merely stagnating.  But I offer you myself as an example that it doesn’t have to be that way.  It won’t happen overnight; it didn’t for me.  But it’s like climbing a mountain—sooner or later, you reach the peak if you keep at it! 

A “Modest Proposal” Reply to Susan C. and Rob

 

Susan C. and Rob went to the Meet and Greet session of Indiana’s General Assembly, where they earnestly urged lawmakers to fund mental health services, and which they wrote about in the March 2023 issue of the Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  (Circle City Clubhouse is a “mental health recovery” program, in my opinion not a very good one, of which I am also a member, although certainly not an active one.  However, I have previously published seven articles in the Newsletter, the most to date by any bylined author.)  Given the very poor state of mental health services in Indiana, and a foreboding sense that funding such uncritically would be pouring money down a rathole, I wrote this satirical reply to Susan C. and Rob along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s noted “A Modest Proposal,” which I also submitted for publication in the April 2023 issue of the Newsletter.  Publication of my reply, however, was declined there on the grounds that it would be “discouraging.”—GF.

 

English satirist Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame) wrote his very noted “A Modest Proposal” in response to the problem of Irish poverty.  Ireland was then a British colony, and the British were fretting about what to do about massive poverty there.  It was also a “can-do” time, this 18^th Century, full of all kinds of cockamamie schemes for “uplifting” the poor—so Swift suggested one of his own in “A Modest Proposal”:  sell the Irish children to the British rich as food!  In that spirit, I’d like to suggest my own “Modest Proposal” to Susan C. and Rob in the March 2023 Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  They called on the Indiana state legislature to fund mental health treatment here, but I say “No!  That’s just pouring money down a rathole.”  I say instead, “Defund mental health care in Indiana, because mental health care here is so very poor, so downright crappy!” Indiana NAMI ranks Indiana as 45^th out of the 51 states plus D.C. in quality of mental health treatment.  Other indices also place Indiana in the bottom 10 of the states in terms of quality and access to mental health care.  So why should we, the taxpayers, pay for mental health “treatment” that is mediocre and worse?  Why should we, the taxpayers, pay the salaries of “mental health professionals” who are abysmal, who are just deadwood who need to be bagging groceries or driving trucks?  Why should we, the taxpayers, pay for “mental health treatment” the patients just don’t even receive, because what they do receive is so bad, so terribly inadequate?   Why, why, why?   So, I say, “Defund the whole bad lot!”  That’s my “Modest Proposal.”

January 13, 2023 Letter to the Circle City Clubhouse

 The Circle City Clubhouse is an alleged "mental health recovery program" that is not effective at all!  I've been a member of the Clubhouse since January 2016, and my disappointment with it, as well as the disappointment with it expressed by my friends and my former psychotherapist, is quite manifest.  Yet it continues when it should not, and even gets uncritical endorsement from Indiana NAMI, which it certainly doesn't deserve, as this letter to the Clubhouse below makes quite clear.  We mental health consumers need effective programs, not pseudo-programs such as the Circle City Clubhouse; yet it is a sign of the refusal of society as a whole to respect the natural needs of us who've been struggling with "mental illness" that, instead of effective programs, we get stuck with pseudos such as the Circle City Clubhouse.  I researched what I wrote in the letter, and I stand by it 100%.  Clubhouse Executive Director Jay Brubaker told me pointedly he would not respond to my "insults," to which I answer that the appropriate response to "insult" is "If the shoe fits, wear it!"--GF.

TEXT OF MY LETTER TO CIRCLE CITY CLUBHOUSE

Dear Circle City Clubhouse:

 

Your newsletter asks me to contribute my employment news as a loosely defined Clubhouse member (because I don’t consider myself a Clubhouse member anymore, even though I am a mental health consumer), so here it is.  I was successfully employed at my job at Kroger before I even became a Clubhouse member—I became a member in January 2016, but had been successfully employed at my job since August 15, 2015.  I started out at $10.70 an hour.  I’m still employed at Kroger, and now make $16.60 an hour, a 55% increase in my hourly wage, and the first job I ever held where I actually got regular wage increases!  I attribute this to the fact that my job is unionized (UFCW Local 700), and that thus, wage increases are part of the union contract, as are many other benefits and protections I have.  Between my wages, my Social Security, and my Kroger pension, which is also through the union, I made nearly $49,000 in 2022.  Not only that.  After 69 months of successful psychotherapy that overcame 47 years (yes, 47 years!) of malfeasant and inept psychiatric treatment, overwhelmingly through Indiana CMHCs, I’m now fully recovered from my mental health malady of borderline personality disorder and chronic depression.  I’ve been successfully off antidepressants since November 2004, had it confirmed by a psychiatrist in December 2005 that I didn’t need antidepressants anymore, and haven’t had a depressive episode since 2003.  I am what mental health recovery looks like!  And you notice how different it looks than the average denizen of the Clubhouse, overwhelmingly comprised of people who are not recovering, but who are sadly staying the same, and stagnating!

 

I’ve gotten news updates on the Clubhouse from other former members, and what is clear is that the Circle City Clubhouse is one very flawed institution, one that does not advance mental health recovery!   Circle City Clubhouse has the chutzpah to claim it’s helping 310 mental health consumers recover, but that’s utter nonsense—perhaps 310 people have gone through the Clubhouse, but most do not stay.  Your hard-core participants only number about 20, and not only has the Clubhouse driven out all its college graduate members, it’s also, I say, driven out most, or even all, its members who are high school graduates.  What I saw of the 20 people who attended the Clubhouse regularly, though I don’t know this as a fact, but it seems to be a reasonable surmise, is that the majority, or even all, of the regular Clubhouse attendees are high school dropouts, and the Clubhouse is thus but a rest lounge for unskilled, uneducated, menial workers!  This last point is important, because I do mindless menial labor at my Kroger job, but I get paid $16.60 an hour for doing it.  Which is why I will never do work at the Clubhouse for free, as it demands—doing work for free is the very dictionary definition of slave labor, lest we forget.  The Circle City Clubhouse’s “work therapy” is nothing but mindless menial work, and is limited to such unskilled jobs as toilet cleaning, emptying wastebaskets, and peeling potatoes.  The Clubhouse relies on this free labor to save money on cleaning and other needs, otherwise it would have to hire someone to do these.  The Clubhouse thus exploits its members.

 

The Clubhouse now has to insist all its hires be college graduates, as it should be, yet it only pays them about $11.50 an hour—for a job that requires a college degree!  Sheesh!  Do I need to remind the Clubhouse that my Kroger job requires only a high school diploma, although I have a college degree (in economics), and I make $16.60 an hour at it!  This coming summer my pay will go up to $17.10 an hour, and in the summer after that, to $17.60 an hour.  Yet you hire required college degree holders as substantially less than that!  No wonder you get such bad, inept help, such as Evan (whom I nickname Evan the Inept) and Marissa (ditto, Marissa the Cipher).  In fact, except for Peter, whom you laid off, you have never had decent employees at the Clubhouse!  Peter was easily your best employee, yet you paid him so little he had to dip into his savings to make ends meet.  Then you laid him off.  Now he works at an auto parts store making more money at yet another job that requires only a high school diploma than he did at the Clubhouse at a job requiring a college degree!  He was easily the best employee you ever had.  So how did you treat him?  By sticking it to him!

 

Then there was Lindsay Brock, the Assistant Executive Director, who was an employee under Executive Director Jay Brubaker’s supervision, and is now—Jay's live-in girlfriend!  Do I need to mention the obvious conflict of interest here, or mention the CEO who was fired for having a consensual affair with his Chief Financial Officer?  But then, Jay is but a schmoozer and toady who sucks up to the Clubhouse Board and has the Board in his back pocket.  He’s a lawyer by training, but was not a good one, as I’ve found out—one prime example of his lawyering being that he was so proud that, after a long period of wrangling, he got his client into arbitration, even though referring to arbitration was in in the original contract to begin with!  I’m a trained paralegal who worked under good lawyers, so I know inept lawyering when I hear about it—and that’s why Jay is not a lawyer, but an NGO worker!  He’s just not good enough for effective lawyering—which became massively evident when the Clubhouse members came up with a statement on what constituted acceptable free speech and what did not, which was drawn up more strictly than it needed legally to be.  Jay could’ve played a constructive role as a trained lawyer by advising the Clubhouse members on what was required, but he refrained from doing so.  The supposed “mental health professionals” who are Clubhouse employees thus don’t even do the jobs they’re supposedly capable of, what they really should be doing—they are but glorified babysitters who don’t supervise the children under their watch!  And very sadly, that is what many, if not most, regular Clubhouse attendees are—adult children in their mindsets, capabilities, and actions.  No wonder college graduates such as I, not to mention those with at least a high school diploma, find the Clubhouse so utterly lacking.

 

But I did participate in the Clubhouse until 2019, and in 2018 even went to the effort to draft a 14-page paper I submitted to the Clubhouse retreat that year in an attempt to offer constructive criticism and suggestions that in my opinion would’ve improved the Clubhouse.  Lindsay, who was Chair of the retreat, promised me I’d have the chance to present my paper, but then she reneged—instead, she allowed Savella (ah, good ol’ Savella the Special Bella!), another person, and Nathan (ah, Nathan—chronological age, 40s, emotional age 13!), none of whom had read my paper, to speak instead, and who trashed me personally!  Now, if that isn’t severe ineptness at one’s job!!  But such is par for the course at the Clubhouse.

 

Let it also be noted that I’ve contributed seven articles under my own name to the Clubhouse newsletter, more than any other signed writer—yet they were all just ignored!  Well, what do you expect from people who are most likely not even high school grads, and thus functionally illiterate?  I’ve heard reliably that Chuck (yes, Chuck the Muck, rhymes with f**k!) can’t even read, yet he always wants to do everything, even that which he’s incapable of, and relies on manipulative appeals to pity to get his way. 

 

Recently, but only recently, the Clubhouse has done some things right.  It reached out to its member list (which is overwhelmingly comprised only of paper members, not actual participants in the Clubhouse) during COVID-19 back in 2020 to see if anyone needed anything.  I didn’t, of course, but that was thoughtful.  The Clubhouse newsletter has now gotten around to including words of praise and encouragement to members who get involved in Transitional Employment or other jobs, but it’s a case of, despite this, “too little too late,” in my opinion.  Despite this small but good improvement in the newsletter, the newsletter still remains insipid and infantile, not a vital read by any means.  Thus, I cannot in any way, shape or form consider the Circle City Clubhouse an asset or a resource for mental health consumers.

 

This letter needs to be widely shared within the Clubhouse, and presented to all the alleged members, paper and otherwise.  It should be included as an insert in the next newsletter.  I invite all, Jay, Board members, all staff members, all Clubhouse members, to reach out to me with comments.  You may e-mail me at georgefish666@yahoo.com, or else mail me at my address.  I welcome feedback, and will make an honest effort to respond (although since I work full time, I have massive time constraints), but feedback sent to me must be civil.  I will not tolerate nastiness, ad hominem arguments, or name-calling.  Also, criticism of what I wrote must be based on the facts of what I wrote, and must make an earnest effort to be concrete, accurate, and constructive.

Critically yours,

George Fish