Mental Health Writings: NAMI’s Attitude toward Mental Health Consumers such as Me Is—Decidedly Unfriendly!

 I used to call my mental health writings “The NAMI Papers,” but as I no longer consider myself part of NAMI, even though formally I’m a dues-paid member until the end of November 2023, which I explained in detail in the post just below this that detailed Indiana NAMI’s egregious malfeasance toward me, I now call my mental health writings simply “Mental Health Writings.”

 

Simply and directly, I am fed up to my Fish (my last name) fishy gills with NAMI at all levels, national, Indiana, and Indianapolis.  Indiana NAMI’s actions against me on June 6, 2023 (of which I wrote on my last blog, September 19, 2023), was the absolute last straw.  I won’t dwell on the details of what happened then, as you, the readers, can easily read them for yourselves, but I had finally had it with the insensitivity and malfeasance of NAMI at all levels toward me:  from the condescending e-mail sent me by one David Binet of national NAMI (who hoped for me to “heal” after he’d rejected my complaint in its entirety by simply referring to the Executive Directors of both Indianapolis and Indiana NAMI as “professionals,” implying they could do no wrong); the slight and refusal to get back to me as promised by the former Indianapolis Executive Director, with whom, before Covid, I had met cordially once a week, and, because of this, felt validated as a mental health consumer; Indiana NAMI’s Executive Director refusing to respond to any of my e-mails sent her prior to June 6, 2023, but in response to that one only, accused me of “harassment” to the Indiana NAMI Board of Directors, which then reprimanded me, barred me from NAMI activities even though I was a fully dues-paid member, and same as Mr. Binet, said to me that because it and the persons I had contacted in NAMI disagreed with my complaints, that mere statement of disagreement meant ”they consider the matters closed,” to quote directly from Indiana NAMI’s Board of Directors June 6 letter!  (No matter whether or not I considered the matter closed; I was irrelevant.)  Only one person in the whole of NAMI, at any and all levels, has been at all kind and considerate to me:  Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Duckworth, national NAMI’s Chief Psychiatrist, with whom I’ve shared several pleasant e-mail correspondences.

 

But all this horribleness from 2019-2023 was not the first time NAMI had shafted me.  All the way back in 2005, it did a number on me too.  Back then my application for SSDI benefits I was entitled to wasn’t going through, and though I asked about this repeatedly with my Gallahue CMHC case manager in Indianapolis about this, all he’d reply was, “It’s not going through,” though each time I asked me to tell me what he was doing , he refused to do so, which was causing me great anxiety.  (Needless to say, although I was working, a regularly but strictly seasonal job that left me unemployed much of the year, I needed that SSDI badly.)  I complained about this to Indiana NAMI and Indiana NAMI responded by—barring me from further contacting it on this!  However, the anxiety I suffered caused me to be “liberated” from my job, and so I went over to the case manager’s office and asked him pointedly to show me just what he was doing that was holding up my application.  I found out, ruefully:  he was entering as the address of Gallahue CMHC only “Gallahue Mental Health,” an obviously incomplete address that the computer, being the big idiot that it is, was rejecting.  Needless to say, I was appalled, and rightfully so!  So I entered the complete full address, “ Gallahue Community Mental Health Center,” and voila! the application went through, while my case manager stood there dumbfounded as an ape.  Within twenty-four hours all the necessary paperwork was completed, after being incredibly, stupidly, held up for four months!  That was June 2005.  In August, I received all my SSDI, current payments as well as back payments.  I gave my case manager, whose last name was Bell, and whose intelligence clearly was not ringing clear as a bell, the invidious moniker “Dull Thud,” and even wrote a satirical song about him and this incident, “He’s Just A Dull Thud.”  I also volubly complained about this all to both my case manager and my Gallahue psychotherapist, both of whom responded by—refusing all contact with me whatsoever for a year, not resuming contact with me at all until August 2006!  (However, later on my therapist became quite helpful with my other complaints against Gallahue.)

 

Although mental health consumers such as myself should be the raison d’etre of NAMI’s existence—after all, it’s official full name is the National Alliance on Mental Illness—sadly, not only are we not, but the above experiences that other mental health consumers and I have had with NAMI only show that we are essentially held in contempt.  Although we who suffer mental illness are urged to overcome the “stigma” associated with psychiatric treatment and get psychiatric treatment ourselves, we are considered by NAMI to be far less important than “caregivers,” i.e., those families and their members who care for mentally ill persons as adult dependents—which is both classist (only the rich can afford to care, perhaps for a lifetime, an adult dependent who does not work, or works only part-time) and counterproductive to actual mental health recovery.  As I found out ruefully when, suffering from my devastating disorders of borderline personality disorder and acute depression I lived far too long under the same roof as my abusive, blaming parents, my recovery made vast strides when I lived independently of them, and had to function as a self-sustaining adult.  (By the way, neither of my parents would’ve been caught dead at a NAMI meeting or contacting NAMI:  they blamed me for seeking psychiatric help, saying I brought “shame” upon the family by doing so!)  Independence from my alleged “caregivers” was liberating for me, as it is for so many other mental health consumers. 

 

Unfortunately, too many families as well as NAMI and mental health professionals don’t see it that way—they see “recovery” as only being dependent and perhaps qualifying for a pittance of SSDI or SSI funding, and not at all being independent and actively participating in the workforce like “normal” people.   Now I grant, not all mental health consumers are capable of doing this:  triage is in order, and some consumers will need to be cared for as dependents, some perhaps for a lifetime, and completely unable to work, while others will only be able to work part-time; but many others can recover fully, and recover well, only all too often they’re not enabled to do so; neither by the psychiatric system, by NAMI, by the overtouted Clubhouse system, nor by their alleged “caregivers.”  However, now in my full recovery, living a completely “normal” life and making a decent income, I am mentally healthier than I ever was.  For which I owe much more to my own gumption than I do to NAMI or psychiatry; and although I benefitted massively from sixty-nine months of excellent psychiatry, my life was also put on hold and I was reduced to a desperate, dependent outpatient by forty-seven years of malfeasant and inept psychiatric “help.”   Further, despite my mental illness, I also earned a college degree; I would make an excellent mental health aide to NAMI if I qualified, but alas I don’t, simply because my college degree is in economics instead of social work or psychology, which is but a most arbitrary distinction.  (NAMI’s peer-to-peer recovered mental health consumer assistants are required to have either social work or psychology degrees; but as far as I’m concerned, too often psychology or social work degrees are merely akin to degrees in the storied, infamous “basket-weaving.”  My college degree required mastering math and logic skills as well as learning a foreign language, I pointedly note.)

 

So, goodbye, and good riddance, NAMI!  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out of my life!     

Mental Health Writings: I criticized Indiana NAMI. Indiana NAMI “Read” My Complaint—and Banned Me!

 

I’ve been a dues-paying member of Indiana NAMI since December 2019, which also makes me a member of Indianapolis and national NAMI.  I had planned on attending Indiana NAMI’s Leadership Summit on June 17, 2023, its first live meeting since Covid.  However, I was unable to get the day off work.  So I e-mailed Barb Thompson, Indiana NAMI’s Executive Director, on June 6 informing her I would not be at the meeting, and thus would not be able to “confront” her (my word; I meant verbally, of course) for ignoring all my earlier e-mails to her raising issues about the Circle City and other Clubhouses (a most inadequate “mental health recovery resource” I’d participated in), as well as Indiana and Indianapolis NAMI, numerous e-mails to Ms. Thompson she never had the courtesy and respect for me ever to respond.  For which I properly felt miffed.  Well, this time Ms. Thompson “responded,” sort of.  She took my June 6 e-mail as “harassment,” reported it to Indiana NAMI’s Board of Directors, which acted on her complaint that very day, and, sure enough, later that day I received a copy of a letter written to me by the Indiana NAMI Board of Directors, dated that very June 6, informing me that henceforth I was “barred from attending any forthcoming NAMI Indiana in-person or virtual events, [Emphasis added—GF] specifically including the leadership conference.  If you trespass, appropriate steps will be taken, no matter how much NAMI Indiana would regret the need.  Additionally, you are barred from contacting NAMI board of directors, staff, or members and from appearing at NAMI Indiana’s offices.”  However, I was not removed from being a member of Indiana NAMI or any other NAMI body!  I simply could not attend or participate in any “forthcoming NAMI…events” indefinitely, nor could I contact NAMI in any way.  A perfect Catch-22 statement from Indiana NAMI’s Board of Directors!

 

Further, the Board accused me of stating “publicly” (I did so only by an e-mail to Ms. Thompson, not through any other forum.  I didn’t even tell personal friends of it) that while I would “confront” (the Board of Directors did get that right) Ms. Thompson, I would do so, I allegedly stated (which I didn’t) I would do so for “her behavior” (which is false; I did not use those words, which in the Board’s letter to me were put in quotation marks as though I’d stated them verbatim), when I was only going to confront Ms. Thompson on refusing to honor me by responding to at least one of my several e-mails to her!  Anyway, I had e-mailed Ms. Thompson on June 6 precisely to inform her I would not be attending the June 17 Leadership Summit, as I’d earlier planned, because I—was scheduled to work instead!  All of which was clearly stated in plain English! 

 

As to the original e-mails sent Ms. Thompson, which uttered specific complaints against the Clubhouse system (of which I was a member, by the way, though a deliberately inactive one) and the speech given on the Clubhouse system by one of its leaders back in 2019 (a speech I said at the time, in a private online chat, I though was nothing but empty public-relations fluff), for which I was barred by Ms. Thompson at that 2019 virtual meeting, and my $40 registration fee confiscated, I registered my obvious dissatisfaction, for which I had every right.  Indiana NAMI’s Board of Directors didn’t see it that way, however, as the Board wrote me on June 6, “The various individuals you contacted heard your complaints and responded to you their disagreement; they consider the matters closed.”  While Ms. Thompson did have what she euphemistically called a “conversation” over the phone with me about the Clubhouse, and I did receive one very condescending e-mail from one David Binet of national NAMI, it is simply not proper for only one party to a dispute to render the matters “closed!  As the old saying goes, “It takes two to tango,” two parties to a dispute to decide if the matters are closed.  Obviously, on my part, they were not.  However, I will give Indiana NAMI’s Board credit for doing one thing properly: it sent me a check by mail for the $40 improperly confiscated from me, which was the only thing the Board did appropriately.

 

I mentioned above that while I was barred from participating as a fully dues-paid member of NAMI (which I was, and still am, until the end of November 2023), my NAMI membership was not rescinded—I was simply suspended in midair, held in a state of limbo, by the Board of Directors.  I was soon made aware of this when I received unsolicited e-mails from Indiana NAMI asking me if I’d like to volunteer for certain NAMI activities (from which “forthcoming” NAMI activities I was indefinitely barred), would like to vote for NAMI officeholders, and would even like to attend the Indiana NAMI State Convention!  Yes, Indiana NAMI directly asked me if I’d like to participate in “forthcoming” NAMI activities I was barred from attending—and no, you can’t make this shit up!  I noted this discrepancy once again in an e-mail to Ms. Thompson (which I was at least technically barred from sending), but once again, as per usual, I received no response.  This, the personal slighting of me by Indianapolis NAMI’s former Executive Director, the degradingly condescending e-mail mentioned above by national NAMI’s David Binet, and the deliberate and ongoing slights and insults from Ms. Thompson and the Indiana NAMI Board of Directors has made me seriously rethink my NAMI membership; so, most likely, in fact, 99% assuredly, I will not be renewing my NAMI membership when it expires the last day of November 2023.

 

On my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blog, I specifically criticized both the Circle Clubhouse, and implicitly the Clubhouse system, in blogs on April 18 and May 12, 2023, and specifically criticized all levels of NAMI, Indianapolis, Indiana, and national, in a blog also on May 12.  I stand by these criticisms 100%, and according to the letter I received from Indiana NAMI’s Board of Directors, these blogs caused consternation within NAMI.  Well, tough beanies!  Free speech is free speech, and if I’m wrong, let the Clubhouse system and NAMI prove me wrong!  As for me, I proudly refer all interested readers to my blogs, where the articles I’m referencing are very easy to find. 

 

            

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

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.   

NAMI: Don’t Overlook Personality Disorders

 

Personality disorders are as common as clinical depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia, and can be as devastating to their holders as are these mor recognized mental illnesses—although personality disorders are more overlooked, as their sufferers seem more “normal” than those afflicted with depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia.  The Mayo Clinic’s website gives a good, concise overview of personality disorders, which are classified as mental disorders rather than, like depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia, mental illnesses.  The Mayo Clinic’s link, “Personality Disorders,” can be accessed here:  https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/personality-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20354463.  2014’s state-of-the-art handbook on what is currently known about personality disorders, Handbook of Personality Disorders: Second Edition (Livesley and Larstone, eds., Guilford Press; available both in hardback and paperback), notes that personality disorders are about 55% genetic and 45% environmental, and, in line with what the Mayo Clinic states above, can result both from parents with personality disorders, as well as abusive or chaotic childhood social environments.  There are many varieties of personality disorders, as both the Mayo Clinic and the Handbook of Personality Disorders attest, and sufferers from personality disorders can have problems with relationships, with employment and employability, and with schooling and graduation.  As a sufferer from personality disorder myself, I can attest to having struggled over my lifetime with all of these.  As persons with personality disorders get older, however, many of their symptoms are attenuated and they become more “normal,” though usually with ongoing relationship problems (for example, while I now have an intimate network of friends, they are paltry in number), problems with unemployment and underemployment (again, in my case, although a college graduate, I work a steady blue-collar labor job), and problems in schooling and graduation (it took me 11 years to finally complete the requirements for graduating with a Bachelor’s degree).  Sufferers from personality disorders are also troubled by extreme, over-the-top, emotional overreactions (I suffered these too, especially with anger, which triggered angry outbursts).

While personality disorders were described in the psychiatric literature as early as 1938, for a long time they were considered incurable; however, that has changed, and a variety of long-term psychotherapies have successfully been used for treatment (medication is not regarded as effective, except for symptomatic relief).  The Handbook of Personality Disorders list several psychotherapies that have proven effective; among them are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, mentalization, and an eclectic approach that combines techniques from several of the successful therapies (while the various schools of psychotherapy that are useful have differing theoretical perspectives, in practice, their techniques are overlapping and similar).  Personality disorders are also comorbid with other mental illnesses, particularly with depression and bipolar, according to the above-cited Handbook.  The point of psychotherapy in treating personality disorders is to enable the patient to see underlying defects in his/her thinking, and to replace wrong thinking with more realistic thinking.  This is a process that involves regular psychotherapy for a year or two, although in my case, successful psychotherapy has taken considerably longer, probably because  for 47 years (1965-2012) the  psychiatric therapy I was subject to at CMHCs was considerably wrongheaded and malfeasant, leaving me chagrined as a desperate, dependent outpatient—something that did not change until I started in 2014 with a private psychotherapist who used his particular version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

As for childhood social environment as a cause of personality disorders, the ACE study (Adverse Childhood Environment), based on a sample base of 17,000 clients of California’s Kaiser Permanente health insurance program, provides important clues to the kind of parents who are more likely to have children with mental health issues.  Specifically, there are four kinds of parents who are high-risk for creating such children:  parents who abuse, belittle, curse, or berate their children; parents who are mentally ill or have personality disorders themselves; parents who are alcoholics or drug abusers; and parents who have been imprisoned, or who engage in illegal activities.  In my particular case, both my parents definitely fell into the first category, and may also have fallen into the second, as they were both given to over-the-top outbursts of rage that would go on in tirades for 10-15 minutes at a time.

However, based on my experience as the holder of a personality disorder, with proper psychiatric treatment, with a stable job and a solid friendship network, even if small, the prognosis for recovery is solid and strong, even at a later age.  Given the prevalence of personality disorders, it is a shame that NAMI and other mental health advocates don’t recognize and educate on them nearly as much as they need to.

 

    

The NAMI Papers

 The seven blog entries below are all contributions on mental health/mental illness issues originally asked for by Indianapolis NAMI, the leading mental health advocacy organization in the U.S., which, unfortunately, is not as effective an advocate on behalf of mental health consumers as is needed.  These articles were submitted to national NAMI for publication, and were all rejected, I think because they were just too damn good for NAMI's low-middlebrow standards.  What NAMI wants, unfortunately, are breezy, facile, feel-good articles that are essentially akin to the non-professional writer contributions to the Reader's Digest, leavened with a good dose of the superficial Power of Positive Thinking "philosophy" associated with Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller.  However, as an extensively published actual writer and poet, including at the national level, I was not about to lower my standards to produce for NAMI such superficial, breezy pabulum.  Yet, my articles below definitely deserve publication, as any judicious reader will plainly see.  Hence, I have posted them on my "Politically Incorrect Leftist" blog in hopes of their finding the wider readership they deserve.     

NAMI and Parents

 

My late parents wouldn’t have been caught dead joining NAMI or attending a NAMI meeting.  Their attitude on mental health, mental illness, and seeking psychiatric help was made clear in their attitude toward me when I voluntarily sought psychiatric help—in doing so I brought shame upon the family!  My relatives had the same reaction.  My parents were clearly what psychologist Dr. Susan Forward called “toxic parents”—parents who were abusive, who were abusers.  Though my parents never physically abused me—they didn’t have to, they intimidated me by their constant screaming at me.  That is, when they weren’t ignoring me completely.  The noted Kaiser Permanente ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study of 1995 delineates this clearly:  abusive parenting can cause lifetime mental health, relationship and addiction problems for the children involved.  And there are four particular classes of parents for whom this is notably true:  parents who regularly denigrate or belittle their child; parents who themselves suffer from mental illness; parents who have serious drug or alcohol abuse problems; and parents who are jailbirds, former jailbirds, or who are engaged in illegal activity.  My parents clearly fit into the first category, and possibly into the second category.  Although I had, according to the latest psychiatric research, a 55% genetic propensity to inherit the personality disorder I suffered from, my parents’ abuse made it certain, I believe we could say, that I had a 100% chance of having psychiatric problems.  Which I did for literally decades.  As I’ve written poetically, it takes only one thing to become a natural parent: “the ability to fuck”!  Biologically, sperm meeting egg produces a child.  Period.  Even when the parents involved are utterly unfit for parenting.  As were mine.  I realize this goes against the grain of official NAMI, but, frankly, Freud was really onto something when he posited that mental illness has its origins in parental failure.  He was indeed at least half-right, and the ACE study confirms it.  NAMI needs to reform its facile view that mental illness is entirely genetic and can’t be helped, and its naïvete about toxic parents and toxic parenting.  Bad, toxic, inappropriate parenting does play a key role in gestating mental illness.  Lest we forget or ignore.   

NAMI and “Spirituality”: an ex-Catholic Atheist’s Perspective

 

A while back, the NAMI Indiana newsletter summarized a Huffington Post article that claimed, based on a sample of 87 respondents, mostly Catholic and Buddhist, that a sense of “spirituality” was integral to mental health, and upheld that position itself.  Needless to say, and self-evident to anyone with a statistics background (which I, as holder of a university degree in economics definitely have), such a small sample size is grotesquely too tiny to have any statistical validity at all; and that the sample was skewed toward Catholic and Buddhist respondents undermines the statistical necessity that the sample taken must be random, which obviously in this case it is not—so such a conclusion has no legitimacy whatsoever.  Also, the recent and current events of Catholic priest-pedophilia and Catholic priests and bishops using Catholic nuns and convents as harems and sources of sex slaves, along with the Catholic bishops’ and cardinals’ deliberate cover-up of decades of priest-pedophilia, and coupled with the ethnic cleansing of non-Buddhists carried out under the aegis of Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and Sri Lanka, denies any moral authority whatsoever for either Catholicism or Buddhism to claim any “moral high ground” when it comes to “spirituality,” the alleged necessity of “spirituality” to mental health, or the tenets of  morality!

 

Psychiatrist Eli Chesen, in his book Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Collier Books, 1972), very admirably points out the perils and deleterious effects of too great an attachment to religion and “spirituality.”  But he still upholds, in my mind, a psychologism, a simple “belief in belief,” with his notion that religion can do some good by teaching appropriate moral values.  However, drawing on my experience as both a Catholic child and adolescent and later atheist adult, I think that appropriate moral values flow more readily from secular humanism than they do from any religion, no matter how “enlightened;” and that “enlightened" religions are such precisely because they’ve been positively influenced by—secular humanism!  (Secular, of course, does not mean atheist; it simply means indifference to religious claims.  Humanism means, of course, human-centered.)  My direct experience with the Catholicism I was born and raised in, and which was inculcated in my through twelve years of Catholic schooling, has taught me that the values religions promulgate and teach are often quite arbitrary and selective—and I’ve seen the same thing in those raised in other religious traditions.  As a key example, within Catholicism, and within Christianity in general, it’s specifically noted that Jesus himself admonished his followers that this commandment was “like unto” the first, of loving God with one’s whole mind, body, and soul, and every bit as important—loving one’s neighbor “as thyself.”  Yet, “Hate thy neighbor” is quite common within Christianity, especially when one’s neighbor is different:  of a different creed, or different sexual orientation, or of a different race or ethnicity, or a “nerd,” or otherwise deemed an undesirable person.  Indeed, I, myself, suffered as a Catholic child and adolescent from my Catholic classmates’ bullying and social ostracism because I was “different”—too physically weak and non-athletic, too “nerdy,” too much given to reading!  Same with my Catholic parents—too much not a “chip off the old block,” too “nonconforming,” too much into intellectual pursuits, not athletic or interested in sports enough.  These were enough to make my Catholic childhood and adolescence, especially from the ages 10 through 18, a living hell!  Also, racism was widespread among my white Catholic classmates, as was disdain for the Civil Rights Movement among both my Catholic classmates and my Catholic parents—a disdain I did not share, and was thus punished for and screamed at for rejecting!  Further, what “values” that were taught us in the Catholic schools were arbitrary, selective, very conforming to right-wing viewpoints, were rigidly upheld, and above all, were quite different and distinct from any notion of “Love thy neighbor as thyself;” which, as I recall, was never taught us in the Catholic schools I attended from 1953 through 1965!  Instead, we were taught a simplistic, totalizing anticommunism, a disdain for Protestants and all other non-Catholics, hostility toward Jews as Christ-killers who had really shady ethics (something Catholicism did not change until the early 1960s at Vatican II!), and above all, once we reached adolescence, the absolute necessity of constantly policing our genitals and romantic/sexual attachments, lest we fall into perdition! Along with absolute obedience and unquestioning allegiance to Catholic authorities and Catholic moral, “spiritual,” and even temporal, authority.  The Church was first, all else was strictly secondary.  Those were the Catholic “values” I was raised on, the Catholic values my classmates and I were specifically taught.  No mention ever of “love thy neighbor.”

 

So it seems to me that when NAMI embraces “spirituality” as necessary for mental health, it’s really saying that, for some reason, simply a belief in some sort of otherworldly, anthropomorphic but supra-human, benign father figure is somehow beneficial to mental health.  Yet NAMI does not answer how such a father figure could be benign and yet punish transgressors with eternal punishment in hell, which is taught specifically by Christianity (at least historically for about the last 2,000 years) and Islam, and certainly implied in some forms of Judaism; while Hinduism posits an equivalent cycle of endless reincarnations into undesirable animals for such transgressors!  All at the hands of an allegedly benign God or gods who somehow love us humans, but whose sense of justice requires very severe, even unending, punishment.  Not exactly consistent with Logic 101, to say the very least!  NAMI’s adherence to such is thus certainly naïve, if not outright false.  In fact, as I state at the bottom of this essay, it’s directly contradictory to the positive peace and humane morality I’ve found as a mental health consumer who’s specifically an—ex-Catholic atheist without an ounce of “spirituality”!

 

Then there are those expressions of religion, of “spirituality,” that are mental illnesses themselves.  As in people who believe they are God, or Jesus, or some saint, or have been given a specific divine mission to carry out by God, even if it is to harm others; not to mention people who believe, are convinced, that God is directly talking to them!  There are also mental health consumers, among them people I’ve known personally, of a New Age “spiritual” bent, who advise other mental health consumers, “Go off your psychotropic medication and let God heal you!”  Indeed, there are many mental health consumers, and even some prominent “mental health professionals” (author Seth Farber, for example, comes to mind, as do those associated with the group MindFreedom) for whom the quintessence of mental health “recovery” is—going off one’s psychotropic medication!  Even just quitting it, cold turkey!  Further, many mental health consumers, both recovering and non-so-recovering, are drawn to evangelical, even fundamentalist, Christian sects and denominations that teach that mental illness, poverty, homelessness, and other adversities in life are God’s punishment for “sin,” and which demand, or at least strongly pressure, their adherents to tithe, i.e., give 10% of their income to the church, even when they have only a poverty-level income.  These, too, all these above, are also “spirituality.”

 

Chesen’s book cited above relates a very moving case history (pp. 75-76)  of someone fatally blinded, led to desperation, by his religion, his “spirituality”: a struggling married Catholic computer programmer with eleven children when he and his wife had wanted only four, but both of whom followed the Church and didn’t use birth control, and who committed suicide when it was apparent he could not support such a large family on his and his wife’s already-stretched-to-the-limit income; after which his wife went on welfare and gave the two youngest children up to foster homes![1]  (Yes, I know, that invidious, “nasty” question pops up, at least to this atheist:  Just where was God when all this was happening?)

 

When I was a Catholic child, I used to pray to God to protect me from those tormenting me, not realizing, in my naivete, that I was asking God to protect me from—his professed followers!  For indeed, as I attended four different Catholic grade and high schools with different student bodies, had professed Catholic parents and Catholic relatives on my mother’s side, and professed Protestant relatives on my father’s side, and have of course known or been acquainted with Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim religious believers in adulthood, I’ve specifically known, or acquainted with, over 500-700 professed Christians or students at Catholic schools in my lifetime; of these, I can say that only 60 of these were what I would consider morally admirable.  Or, only about 8-11% of the whole.  Moreover, of the rest, overwhelmingly they were cruel, insensitive, malicious, or slighting of me personally, and not uncommonly sanctimonious, self-righteous, and in complete denial they were doing anything harmful or hurtful to me, even when they were, and I called them on it!  I had only one-two friends at a time throughout my grade- and high-school years, and didn’t develop any real friendships until I was of college age and older—and with precious few exceptions, those who did befriend me were all  “immoral” atheists who really saw merit in me and actually practiced “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” even as Christians maintained that people were atheists only because they wanted to sin, and rationalize their sin away!  (But then, to Christians overwhelmingly, “sin” has solely to do with how one uses one’s genitalia, and has no relation whatsoever, except in a very abstract, formal, sense, to “love thy neighbor.”)  So, yes, I do have “problems” with cruel, insensitive, sanctimonious, self-righteous, and morally blind religious believers!  Among whom are many such who are absolute bigots toward those they deem “mentally ill”!  But I have no problems whatsoever with humane and humanistic religious believers of any stripe, among whom are some close friends of mine and very admirable, moral people, long-time fighters for social and individual justice—but who, I’ve found, are preciously few and far between among religious believers generally!  So, I content and devote myself to trying to live a conscientious life that is morally upright and admirable, living my life without God or gods, not as one still ruefully “worshipping” a malignant anti-God!  Such is now my positive life as an ex-Catholic atheist who has found full peace and contentment in a life lived without “spirituality,” someone who finds a deep “awe at the universe” more in the magnificent photographs taken by the Hubble telescope than in any notions taken from theology, no matter how allegedly “sublime” they’re portrayed to be.

 

               

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[1] Catholics, of course, are forbidden by the Catholic Church itself from using any form of “artificial birth control” (condoms, the Pill, diaphragms, IUDs, etc.) and must rely for family planning only on the rhythm method (often sarcastically referred to as “Vatican roulette”!), or else, abstinence from sexual intercourse entirely, to prevent pregnancy.  However, since the Church sees the purpose of sexuality as solely for reproduction, Catholics may not engage primarily in sexual activities (cunnilingus, fellatio, manual sex) that thwart reproduction, although Catholic married couples (sexual activity outside of marriage is strictly forbidden by the Church; that includes masturbation) may use such in foreplay only.  Such is determined by the Catholic Church authorities themselves, from the Pope on down, all of whom are (at least theoretically) celibate males who have been ordained as Catholic priests! (And only males can be ordained as Catholic priests.)  Nuns, by Catholic canon law, are subordinate within the Church to male priests (only from whose ranks may come valid Catholic bishops, Cardinals, and Popes); and lay Catholics are specifically designated as powerless, as their purpose in the Church is only to obey Church authorities.  Such is the reality of the Catholic Church that I, myself, was specifically taught and directly experienced, along with the duty of all Catholics, lay and clergy alike, to uphold these unquestioningly.  Although many Catholics do not hold such rigid views on sexuality, they are deemed illegitimate and “sinning” when they do so.  So, to remain good Catholics, they must not make such views public.  If they do express such views publicly they are deemed as “causing scandal” to the Church, and can be excommunicated.