Mental Health Writings: OPEN LETTER TO THE MEMBERS AND STAFF OF CIRCLE CITY CLUBHOUSE

 written by

George Fish,

mental health consumer,

Clubhouse member

since January 2016

 (It's time someone finally called out that close-to-an-absolute scam, the Clubhouse system for mental health consumers that's supposed to aid in their recovery (but doesn't, in many cases), and which vary in quality so widely one often wonders if different Clubhouses are even in the same Clubhouse system!  Certainly, one of the very worst is the Circle City Clubhouse in Indianapolis, Indiana, to which this "Open Letter" addresses itself--GF)

Yes, I’ve been a Clubhouse member since the beginning of 2016, although I deliberately haven’t been active since the pre-COVID days before 2020.  I did return once not quite a year ago, in 2023, as an example of positive mental health recovery, and even shared a document I had written on my recovery, which was well received (and actually read!) by Clubhouse members, and which was originally recommended for publication in the Clubhouse newsletter; but that was scotched by the then-Assistant Executive Director, Pat, who claimed that my recovery was strictly a “personal” one (whatever that means!), and besides, I’d also urged Clubhouse members to make more demands on staff members to make sure their needs were met (isn’t that what Clubhouse staff members are there for?), which was a big “No-no” for Pat.  Yet, “personal” or not, for my recovery really had nothing to do with the Clubhouse, my recovery is very much real, and is recognized as such by all those who did Know Me When, and now know me as I am now.

 

However, unlike almost all the new Clubhouse members who are interviewed for the Clubhouse newsletter (by the way, a very insipid and too much real-content-free newsletter), I was not doing nothing before I joined the Clubhouse.  I had just started a full-time job that previous summer, on August 15, 2015, and, though very late in life, I was now employed in a job that was permanent, layoff-free, which paid decently, and had union protection!  I was also actively engaged in very effective psychotherapy, and had been since July 2014, and was to remain in active therapy until the end of June 2019—69 months of most helpful psychotherapy to make up for 47 years of very bad, frequently malfeasant, and very ineffective psychiatric treatment I’d endured at CMHCs (Community Mental Health Centers) and university clinics from September 1965 to beginning of June 2012!  Further, even though it took me 11 years, I’d also earned a university degree (Bachelor of Arts in economics, Indiana University), and had, through Indiana Vocational Rehabilitation, earned a certificate as a paralegal—while also suffering from my mental disorder of a schizoid personality disorder and chronic depression.  So, unlike way too many Clubhouse members, I was far from doing nothing before I came to the Clubhouse!  Where too many come, I’m afraid, simply because the housekeepers, supposed mental health professionals, and others refer them simply to get them from being underfoot.  And to my mind, too often this is just substituting one kind of warehousing for another. 

 

Yes, I’ll be blunt, as I will be throughout this Open Letter.  In fact, from reading the Clubhouse newsletter, I know of only two exceptions:  one was a college graduate like me, and was an active rap singer; the other, Alec C, has a good union job at UPS.  So, both were far from dead-end kids with too little gumption to make anything of their lives—which, unfortunately, is not the case with far too many Clubhouse members of my acquaintance.  As an excellent psychotherapist I once had put it so well, “Recovery means meeting challenges and overcoming them.”  However, one does not come to the Clubhouse to learn how to “overcome;” one too often comes to the Clubhouse simply to mark time, and do unpaid menial labor, for which there is zero reward.  Some have been coming to the Clubhouse for years, and are no more on the track to recovery after all those years than they were at the beginning.  Far too often, the Clubhouse, with its terrible dearth of programs, is just someplace you come to kill time and stagnate.   

 

I was active in the Circle City Clubhouse from January 2016 until late summer 2019.  I remember my first introductory orientation to the Clubhouse well:  I was impressed initially with what it seemed to offer; at last, I had found a welcoming home as a mental health consumer!  However, what I hadn’t realized at the time was that my hosts were but able presenters, they had been scripted well.  When they were off-script, as they later were at the Clubhouse, they were both horrible and knew little to nothing, although both liked to opine based on their really substantive lack of knowledge!  My next encounter at the Clubhouse was the beginning of the disillusionment—here I encountered one of my original hosts, Nathan, going off on a ten-minute rant about how he, an evangelical Christian, wished he could afford to tithe, even though he was broke and couldn’t hold a job for any length of time!  I also encountered Clubhouse cliquishness, as no one ever greeted me or said even “Hi” to me this whole time of 2016-2019.  Despite this, I participated; and my outside friends were really glad I had at last found a place congenial to sharing my experiences, substantially negative, as a mental health consumer.  Alas, it was not to be!  The last thing Clubhouse members were was open about their experiences and encounters as mental health consumers; very quickly, I realized how mind-dead almost all of them were, especially the regular attendees.  I shared my mental health writings I’d done earlier with the Clubhouse, donating copies to the Clubhouse library, which were soon lost, and with no staff member knowing what had happened to them, which, to me, was an unacceptable travesty.  Didn’t the staff exercise normal supervisory duties over the Clubhouse members?  The answer, I found out, was No, that “benign neglect” was the way of the Clubhouse world, even when it led irresponsibly to my documents getting irretrievably lost.  Which was so shameful I can never forgive the Clubhouse for allowing that to happen.

 

All this despite my initially being quite active in the Clubhouse, notably from the time I joined, in January 2016, until the summer of 2018, and even somewhat afterward.  For example, I published eight articles under my byline in the Clubhouse newsletter, the most that anyone has published under his/her byline.  I also prepared for the 2018 Clubhouse retreat a 14-page paper of suggestions on how the Clubhouse could be improved, and gave specifics in this paper on just what I found wrong and inadequate with the Clubhouse.  I penned fourteen pages out of love!  Yes, tough love, but that’s legitimate love, especially when I saw the Clubhouse messing up, functioning quite badly.  Alas, I wasn’t even allowed to present my paper, even though then-Assistant Executive Director Lindsay Brock promised me I’d be allowed to.  (No longer employed at the Clubhouse, where Executive Director Jay Brubaker was her supervisor, she’s now Jay’s live-in girlfriend, although he calls her his “fiancé;” however, in this “woke” age, supervisors having even consensual sexual relations with work subordinates have gotten into deep trouble for it.)  When my paper was finally introduced as part of the day’s agenda, Brock, instead of calling on me to present an outline of my tome, turned the floor over to others instead, people who had never read my paper, but who criticized me sharply for even writing it.  One of those persons who did this was long-time Clubhouse member Savella, and she was followed by another woman who essentially repeated Savella.  Long-time member Nathan again then chimed in, attacking me for not spending more time at the Clubhouse despite what he knew to be true, that I worked full-time, I was fully self-supporting because of my job, and thus didn’t have the “leisure” to hang around the Clubhouse that Nathan did, because he always seemed to be regularly unemployed!  (Holding a job for a while, only to lose it.)  All this was hardly fair to me, but no one at the Clubhouse objected, neither members nor staff—even though it was obvious that my specific voice was being summarily silenced!  

 

Of course, I differed substantively from most Clubhouse members, even though, like them, I had a psychiatrically diagnosed mental illness.  For one thing, I’m a college graduate, who, even though it took me 11 years, still graduated despite my mental illness! I’m also employed full-time, and completely self-supporting—no welfare, no SSDI, no SSI, no working merely part-time when I wanted full-time work, and now, because I also receive Social Security and a small pension from my employer in addition to my wages, make $48,000 a year and own outright my own car.  I’m also a talented, extensively published writer and poet whose writer’s biographies appear in Who’s Who in America for both 2019 and 2020!  In other words, I had (and have still) a lot of gifts that could’ve been real assets to the Clubhouse, and to its members, but I was prevented from using them properly, even though I had wanted to.  In other words, I was shunned by the Clubhouse, by members and staff alike. 

 

The only Clubhouse staffer who had any positive regard for me was Peter Hofstetter, the Clubhouse’s best employee ever, and one of the first to be laid off because of COVID, while far less able Clubhouse staffers kept their jobs.  A horrible mistake on the Clubhouse’s part, for which the Clubhouse bears full responsibility.  Peter was conscientious and able, which can’t be said of all Clubhouse staffers, most of whom are nothing more than do-little-or-nothing glorified babysitters.  Of course, Clubhouse staff wages (except at the top) are abysmal, but since most Clubhouse staffers do almost nothing, and don’t even do a good job at the little they do, it’s only “fitting” in a way they are paid like the teenage babysitters they essentially are—even though they’re older than teenagers and are required to have college degrees!  I’m in the union at my job, and as an active trade unionist I look askance at the paltry wages Clubhouse staffers accept.  (Wages so low that Peter, when he worked at the Clubhouse, was forced to dip into his savings to maintain himself on his job, as he had a wife and children to also support.)  I remember asking a former staffer (not Peter) how much he was making, and from the info he gave me, I calculated he was only making around $11.50 an hour—this in the late part of the second decade of the 21^st Century!  I hope you staffers are now doing better than that, though I really doubt it; if you are, most likely it isn’t by much; and why you would stomach such low wages when you are required to “earn” them by having a college degree in the first place, I find exceptionally appalling! 

 

At my own blue-collar job, which requires only a high school diploma (and sometimes not even that, if one has an especially stellar work record), I started out in August 2015 at $10.70 and hour, which went to $12 an hour in October that year, and built-in annual wage increases even since, doe to our union contract.  I’m now up to $17.60 an hour, an over 60% increase!  Furthermore, and needless to say, my making halfway decent money at my job is also therapeutic for my mental health recovery.  Which is why I refuse to do any work at the Clubhouse, as it is for free, i.e., it is, by definition, slave labor.  Were the Clubhouse to have  assigned me to college graduate-level jobs, I might’ve considered working for free; however, since all Clubhouse jobs are mindless menial labor, I’m not about to do them for free.  I do mindless menial labor at my regular job, and I’m not about to do any such for free!  It’s either pay me adequately, or expect no work whatsoever from me!

 

Nor does the Clubhouse do anything substantial for its members to find and hold jobs, a key part of re-entry into “normal” societal life.  In the first place, the Clubhouse focuses on resume writing, which is useful only for professional positions; it’s job applications that have to be filled out to get the prospective employer’s attention, not resumes, and most employers are wanting to know the applicant’s job record for the previous five years—and it the applicant doesn’t have one, or it’s not a good one, that’s a hurdle that has to be jumped over.  Clubhouse staff should be helping prospective jobseekers how to overcome that, but aren’t.  Also, they should be helping jobseekers to know where to look for work, and how to properly pass a job interview.  Again, the Clubhouse staff does none of those things.  The Clubhouse further has far too few Transitional Employers, can’t seem to recruit more, and can’t seem to hold onto them in many cases.  Again, the staff should be working with Executive Director Jay Brubaker and the Clubhouse Board of Directors  to overcome that.

 

Further, from what I can gather, many Clubhouse members are high school dropouts, a sure killer of a decent future.  The Clubhouse staff should be offering programs to help members get their high school diplomas, or if that’s not possible, their GEDs.  The Clubhouse staff should also be helping people develop literacy and math skills, should be recommending books to Jay and the Board that they should include in the Clubhouse library, and insist that the Clubhouse library have a budget to purchase books.  The staff should also be encouraging members to read, and to utilize the Clubhouse and public libraries.  Last, the staff should cajole, gently and tactfully, yet insistently, Clubhouse members to show gumption and initiative, and actively set goals for themselves, all the better to achieve mental health recovery.  One is not “recovered” simply because on is on SSDI or SSI and doing nothing; recovery means holding a “normal” job, and interacting in society like “normal” persons, not like people with debilitating disabilities.

 

Yes, the Clubhouse staff, from the top down, from Executive Director and Assistant Executive Director on down, has to be more proactive in cajoling and incentivizing Clubhouse members to show gumption and not be so passive!  Also, Clubhouse members need to “importune” staff members to fulfill their needs, set up programs to fulfill those needs, and to ensure that staffers are meeting their needs.  This toddler-neglectful babysitter relationship between members and staffers has got to end!

 

The Circle City Clubhouse makes the outrageous claim that 310 of its members, out of a total membership since its existence of 320, have recovered!  This is a pure lie.  Truth is, most people who ever attended the Clubhouse either dropped out, or showed up once, at their orientation meeting, and were never heard from again.  But I say, they didn’t leave because they “recovered,” they left because they saw how little the Clubhouse had to offer them.  (One of the reasons I also left the Clubhouse.)  But of the 320 members who’ve come (and usually have gone) through the Clubhouse, only about 20 are active participants, and they tend to be the same old participants.  Which I’ll say it bluntly, only indicates that they’re—stagnating!  They somehow enjoy the meaninglessness of Clubhouse life; but they certainly aren’t “recovering” from their mental illnesses. 

 

The Clubhouse spends an inordinate amount of time on fund raising, for what ends no one knows, and, again, just as with Clubhouse household maintenance, dragoons Clubhouse members to assist in fund-raising activities, once again, for free.  Unconscionable, same as having members do Clubhouse maintenance work for free!  Clubhouse members deserve to be paid for their work; not to do so is to use them as slave labor, as I’ve also said above.                

 

I’m just not impressed by Executive Director Jay Brubaker, whom I’ve known since 2016, and know him to have one, and only one, real talent, that of schmoozing.  He knows how to schmooze the Clubhouse Board, he knows how to schmooze the naïve Clubhouse members, he knows how to schmooze away any objections that staff might have; in other words, he’s skilled at that, but nothing more.  He’s a failed lawyer who could be making a lot more money were he a halfway decent one.  He’s just skilled at getting away with stuff.  He once tried to punish me for being too “negative” about the Clubhouse, then denied he’d ever threatened me with reprisal, but then I showed him the e-mail he’d sent me threatening me, and he had to retreat, bleating lamely that acting against me “was not [his] intent”!

 

However, Jay could have used his lawyer’s background and, presumably, the lawyering skills it gave him to advise the Clubhouse members when they drew up their statement for the Clubhouse on what would be allowed in the newsletter in terms of articles, and what one could say in the newsletter.  As it was, the statement drawn up was much more restrictive than legally required, and Jay could’ve properly used his legal skills to advise these neophyte members in drawing up a proper statement, one that was fully in accordance with statute law and court rulings, but was also not overly restrictive.  This “hands off” approach that seems to be required of Jay and the staff actively works against the best wishes of the Clubhouse members, however, as they lack the expertise that Jay and the staffers supposedly have.  After all, Jay and the staff all have to possess college degrees to even work in the Clubhouse, so presumably they’d have good ranges of expertise—something valuable to ordinary Clubhouse members!  But alas, ordinary Clubhouse members are just cast off to drift, to muddle through inexpertly, by the Clubhouse’s strict “hands off” approach, an approach that hurt me personally when, due to lack of proper supervision, my mental health writings given gladly as a gift to the Clubhouse were unconscionably lost forever.  Passive babysitters are definitely not what the Clubhouse needs!

 

In ending, let me point out that my absence from the Clubhouse has also been a time of—active mental health recovery for me!  My mental health is sterling, the result of five years and nine months of excellent psychotherapy done by compassionate and understanding mental health professionals.  I have finally put my dismal decades of horrible mental health treatment at the hands of CMHCs and university clinics, the quintessential poor people’s mental health treatment outlets, far behind me. (I feel for all of you still having to use the CMHCs for your mental health treatment, because they can be so terribly inadequate, especially in Indiana, which ranks 45^th out of the 51 states plus D.C. in terms of adequacy of mental health services.  I lucked out.  I was able to find excellent private alternatives that accepted my Medicare. [I don’t know any private provider who’ll accept Medicaid.])   I am no longer in therapy, and I am also no longer interested in participating in the Clubhouse, save in only one regard—when Clubhouse International comes around to review the Circle City Clubhouse’s accreditation, and how well it is doing its job (which is, let me bluntly say, doing it inadequately), then I’d like to address the Clubhouse International accreditation body on why Circle City Clubhouse should be decertified.

Unless, of course, the Clubhouse takes my criticisms of it to heart (as expressed in this Open Letter, and in earlier writings to the Clubhouse), and makes necessary changes and improvements.  But if the Clubhouse continues its presently highly inadequate business-as-usual, then it needs to be decertified!

 

Other than that, I wish not to be involved, although as I am writing this Open Letter in good faith, I do hope it will be received in good faith also, and I encourage all at the Clubhouse who wish to, members and staffers alike, to reply to me and my Open Letter.  Say anything you want, be as firm with me as you wish, but I do require this:  you must be civil!  No profanity, no name-calling, no verbal abuse whatsoever.  You’re all adults—write like adults!  You may send all such replies to me via my e-mail, georgefish666@yahoo.com.  (Yes, that is the Mark of the Beast from Revelation!  I’m proudly an ex-Catholic atheist, proud survivor of Catholic parental and school system abuse.)  I end, “Therapeutically yours, and wishing Clubhouse members much better than they’re getting.”  Yes, you can recover!  Each of you can improve your situation!  Just have the gumption to try!  Keep in mind always the old Chinese saying:  “Don’t fear going slow, fear standing still.”  Yes, even a little bit of progress can be a lot.  Don’t forget it.

 

That is all I have to say, and I wish you all well.  I give all of you, members and staff alike, my love:  tough love, to be sure, but tough love is sometimes the best kind of love one can give—or get.

  

 

 

Mental Health Writings: Open Letter to the Members and Staff of Circle City Clubhouse

 I've been a member of the Circle City Clubhouse since January 2016, and am now deliberately inactive, for the reasons given below in this Open Letter--GF

Yes, I’ve been a Clubhouse member since the beginning of 2016, although I deliberately haven’t been active since the pre-COVID days before 2020.  I did return once not quite a year ago, in 2023, as an example of positive mental health recovery, and even shared a document I had written on my recovery, which was well received (and actually read!) by Clubhouse members, and which was originally recommended for publication in the Clubhouse newsletter; but that was scotched by the then-Assistant Executive Director, Pat, who claimed that my recovery was strictly a “personal” one (whatever that means!), and besides, I’d also urged Clubhouse members to make more demands on staff members to make sure their needs were met (isn’t that what Clubhouse staff members are there for?), which was a big “No-no” for Pat.  Yet, “personal” or not, for my recovery really had nothing to do with the Clubhouse, my recovery is very much real, and is recognized as such by all those who did Know Me When, and now know me as I am now.

 

However, unlike almost all the new Clubhouse members who are interviewed for the Clubhouse newsletter (by the way, a very insipid and too much real-content-free newsletter), I was not doing nothing before I joined the Clubhouse.  I had just started a full-time job that previous summer, on August 15, 2015, and, though very late in life, I was now employed in a job that was permanent, layoff-free, which paid decently, and had union protection!  I was also actively engaged in very effective psychotherapy, and had been since July 2014, and was to remain in active therapy until the end of June 2019—69 months of most helpful psychotherapy to make up for 47 years of very bad, frequently malfeasant, and very ineffective psychiatric treatment I’d endured at CMHCs (Community Mental Health Centers) and university clinics from September 1965 to beginning of June 2012!  Further, even though it took me 11 years, I’d also earned a university degree (Bachelor of Arts in economics, Indiana University), and had, through Indiana Vocational Rehabilitation, earned a certificate as a paralegal—while also suffering from my mental disorder of a schizoid personality disorder and chronic depression.  So, unlike way too many Clubhouse members, I was far from doing nothing before I came to the Clubhouse!  Where too many come, I’m afraid, simply because the housekeepers, supposed mental health professionals, and others refer them simply to get them from being underfoot.  And to my mind, too often this is just substituting one kind of warehousing for another. 

 

Yes, I’ll be blunt, as I will be throughout this Open Letter.  In fact, from reading the Clubhouse newsletter, I know of only two exceptions:  one was a college graduate like me, and was an active rap singer; the other, Alec C, has a good union job at UPS.  So, both were far from dead-end kids with too little gumption to make anything of their lives—which, unfortunately, is not the case with far too many Clubhouse members of my acquaintance.  As an excellent psychotherapist I once had put it so well, “Recovery means meeting challenges and overcoming them.”  However, one does not come to the Clubhouse to learn how to “overcome;” one too often comes to the Clubhouse simply to mark time, and do unpaid menial labor, for which there is zero reward.  Some have been coming to the Clubhouse for years, and are no more on the track to recovery after all those years than they were at the beginning.  Far too often, the Clubhouse, with its terrible dearth of programs, is just someplace you come to kill time and stagnate.   

 

I was active in the Circle City Clubhouse from January 2016 until late summer 2019.  I remember my first introductory orientation to the Clubhouse well:  I was impressed initially with what it seemed to offer; at last, I had found a welcoming home as a mental health consumer!  However, what I hadn’t realized at the time was that my hosts were but able presenters, they had been scripted well.  When they were off-script, as they later were at the Clubhouse, they were both horrible and knew little to nothing, although both liked to opine based on their really substantive lack of knowledge!  My next encounter at the Clubhouse was the beginning of the disillusionment—here I encountered one of my original hosts, Nathan, going off on a ten-minute rant about how he, an evangelical Christian, wished he could afford to tithe, even though he was broke and couldn’t hold a job for any length of time!  I also encountered Clubhouse cliquishness, as no one ever greeted me or said even “Hi” to me this whole time of 2016-2019.  Despite this, I participated; and my outside friends were really glad I had at last found a place congenial to sharing my experiences, substantially negative, as a mental health consumer.  Alas, it was not to be!  The last thing Clubhouse members were was open about their experiences and encounters as mental health consumers; very quickly, I realized how mind-dead almost all of them were, especially the regular attendees.  I shared my mental health writings I’d done earlier with the Clubhouse, donating copies to the Clubhouse library, which were soon lost, and with no staff member knowing what had happened to them, which, to me, was an unacceptable travesty.  Didn’t the staff exercise normal supervisory duties over the Clubhouse members?  The answer, I found out, was No, that “benign neglect” was the way of the Clubhouse world, even when it led irresponsibly to my documents getting irretrievably lost.  Which was so shameful I can never forgive the Clubhouse for allowing that to happen.

 

All this despite my initially being quite active in the Clubhouse, notably from the time I joined, in January 2016, until the summer of 2018, and even somewhat afterward.  For example, I published eight articles under my byline in the Clubhouse newsletter, the most that anyone has published under his/her byline.  I also prepared for the 2018 Clubhouse retreat a 14-page paper of suggestions on how the Clubhouse could be improved, and gave specifics in this paper on just what I found wrong and inadequate with the Clubhouse.  I penned fourteen pages out of love!  Yes, tough love, but that’s legitimate love, especially when I saw the Clubhouse messing up, functioning quite badly.  Alas, I wasn’t even allowed to present my paper, even though then-Assistant Executive Director Lindsay Brock promised me I’d be allowed to.  (No longer employed at the Clubhouse, where Executive Director Jay Brubaker was her supervisor, she’s now Jay’s live-in girlfriend, although he calls her his “fiancé;” however, in this “woke” age, supervisors having even consensual sexual relations with work subordinates have gotten into deep trouble for it.)  When my paper was finally introduced as part of the day’s agenda, Brock, instead of calling on me to present an outline of my tome, turned the floor over to others instead, people who had never read my paper, but who criticized me sharply for even writing it.  One of those persons who did this was long-time Clubhouse member Savella, and she was followed by another woman who essentially repeated Savella.  Long-time member Nathan again then chimed in, attacking me for not spending more time at the Clubhouse despite what he knew to be true, that I worked full-time, I was fully self-supporting because of my job, and thus didn’t have the “leisure” to hang around the Clubhouse that Nathan did, because he always seemed to be regularly unemployed!  (Holding a job for a while, only to lose it.)  All this was hardly fair to me, but no one at the Clubhouse objected, neither members nor staff—even though it was obvious that my specific voice was being summarily silenced!  

 

Of course, I differed substantively from most Clubhouse members, even though, like them, I had a psychiatrically diagnosed mental illness.  For one thing, I’m a college graduate, who, even though it took me 11 years, still graduated despite my mental illness! I’m also employed full-time, and completely self-supporting—no welfare, no SSDI, no SSI, no working merely part-time when I wanted full-time work, and now, because I also receive Social Security and a small pension from my employer in addition to my wages, make $48,000 a year and own outright my own car.  I’m also a talented, extensively published writer and poet whose writer’s biographies appear in Who’s Who in America for both 2019 and 2020!  In other words, I had (and have still) a lot of gifts that could’ve been real assets to the Clubhouse, and to its members, but I was prevented from using them properly, even though I had wanted to.  In other words, I was shunned by the Clubhouse, by members and staff alike. 

 

The only Clubhouse staffer who had any positive regard for me was Peter Hofstetter, the Clubhouse’s best employee ever, and one of the first to be laid off because of COVID, while far less able Clubhouse staffers kept their jobs.  A horrible mistake on the Clubhouse’s part, for which the Clubhouse bears full responsibility.  Peter was conscientious and able, which can’t be said of all Clubhouse staffers, most of whom are nothing more than do-little-or-nothing glorified babysitters.  Of course, Clubhouse staff wages (except at the top) are abysmal, but since most Clubhouse staffers do almost nothing, and don’t even do a good job at the little they do, it’s only “fitting” in a way they are paid like the teenage babysitters they essentially are—even though they’re older than teenagers and are required to have college degrees!  I’m in the union at my job, and as an active trade unionist I look askance at the paltry wages Clubhouse staffers accept.  (Wages so low that Peter, when he worked at the Clubhouse, was forced to dip into his savings to maintain himself on his job, as he had a wife and children to also support.)  I remember asking a former staffer (not Peter) how much he was making, and from the info he gave me, I calculated he was only making around $11.50 an hour—this in the late part of the second decade of the 21^st Century!  I hope you staffers are now doing better than that, though I really doubt it; if you are, most likely it isn’t by much; and why you would stomach such low wages when you are required to “earn” them by having a college degree in the first place, I find exceptionally appalling! 

 

At my own blue-collar job, which requires only a high school diploma (and sometimes not even that, if one has an especially stellar work record), I started out in August 2015 at $10.70 and hour, which went to $12 an hour in October that year, and built-in annual wage increases even since, doe to our union contract.  I’m now up to $17.10 an hour, soon to rise to $17.60 an hour, an over 60% increase!  Furthermore, and needless to say, my making halfway decent money at my job is also therapeutic for my mental health recovery.  Which is why I refuse to do any work at the Clubhouse, as it is for free, i.e., it is, by definition, slave labor.  Were the Clubhouse to have  assigned me to college graduate-level jobs, I might’ve considered working for free; however, since all Clubhouse jobs are mindless menial labor, I’m not about to do them for free.  I do mindless menial labor at my regular job, and I’m not about to do any such for free!  It’s either pay me adequately, or expect no work whatsoever from me!

 

Nor does the Clubhouse do anything substantial for its members to find and hold jobs, a key part of re-entry into “normal” societal life.  In the first place, the Clubhouse focuses on resume writing, which is useful only for professional positions; it’s job applications that have to be filled out to get the prospective employer’s attention, not resumes, and most employers are wanting to know the applicant’s job record for the previous five years—and it the applicant doesn’t have one, or it’s not a good one, that’s a hurdle that has to be jumped over.  Clubhouse staff should be helping prospective jobseekers how to overcome that, but aren’t.  Also, they should be helping jobseekers to know where to look for work, and how to properly pass a job interview.  Again, the Clubhouse staff does none of those things.  The Clubhouse further has far too few Transitional Employers, can’t seem to recruit more, and can’t seem to hold onto them in many cases.  Again, the staff should be working with Executive Director Jay Brubaker and the Clubhouse Board of Directors  to overcome that.

 

Further, from what I can gather, many Clubhouse members are high school dropouts, a sure killer of a decent future.  The Clubhouse staff should be offering programs to help members get their high school diplomas, or if that’s not possible, their GEDs.  The Clubhouse staff should also be helping people develop literacy and math skills, should be recommending books to Jay and the Board that they should include in the Clubhouse library, and insist that the Clubhouse library have a budget to purchase books.  The staff should also be encouraging members to read, and to utilize the Clubhouse and public libraries.  Last, the staff should cajole, gently and tactfully, yet insistently, Clubhouse members to show gumption and initiative, and actively set goals for themselves, all the better to achieve mental health recovery.  One is not “recovered” simply because on is on SSDI or SSI and doing nothing; recovery means holding a “normal” job, and interacting in society like “normal” persons, not like people with debilitating disabilities.

 

Yes, the Clubhouse staff, from the top down, from Executive Director and Assistant Executive Director on down, has to be more proactive in cajoling and incentivizing Clubhouse members to show gumption and not be so passive!  Also, Clubhouse members need to “importune” staff members to fulfill their needs, set up programs to fulfill those needs, and to ensure that staffers are meeting their needs.  This toddler-neglectful babysitter relationship between members and staffers has got to end!

 

The Circle City Clubhouse makes the outrageous claim that 310 of its members, out of a total membership since its existence of 320, have recovered!  This is a pure lie.  Truth is, most people who ever attended the Clubhouse either dropped out, or showed up once, at their orientation meeting, and were never heard from again.  But I say, they didn’t leave because they “recovered,” they left because they saw how little the Clubhouse had to offer them.  (One of the reasons I also left the Clubhouse.)  But of the 320 members who’ve come (and usually have gone) through the Clubhouse, only about 20 are active participants, and they tend to be the same old participants.  Which I’ll say it bluntly, only indicates that they’re—stagnating!  They somehow enjoy the meaninglessness of Clubhouse life; but they certainly aren’t “recovering” from their mental illnesses. 

 

The Clubhouse spends an inordinate amount of time on fund raising, for what ends no one knows, and, again, just as with Clubhouse household maintenance, dragoons Clubhouse members to assist in fund-raising activities, once again, for free.  Unconscionable, same as having members do Clubhouse maintenance work for free!  Clubhouse members deserve to be paid for their work; not to do so is to use them as slave labor, as I’ve also said above.                

 

I’m just not impressed by Executive Director Jay Brubaker, whom I’ve known since 2016, and know him to have one, and only one, real talent, that of schmoozing.  He knows how to schmooze the Clubhouse Board, he knows how to schmooze the naïve Clubhouse members, he knows how to schmooze away any objections that staff might have; in other words, he’s skilled at that, but nothing more.  He’s a failed lawyer who could be making a lot more money were he a halfway decent one.  He’s just skilled at getting away with stuff.  He once tried to punish me for being too “negative” about the Clubhouse, then denied he’d ever threatened me with reprisal, but then I showed him the e-mail he’d sent me threatening me, and he had to retreat, bleating lamely that acting against me “was not [his] intent”!

 

However, Jay could have used his lawyer’s background and, presumably, the lawyering skills it gave him to advise the Clubhouse members when they drew up their statement for the Clubhouse on what would be allowed in the newsletter in terms of articles, and what one could say in the newsletter.  As it was, the statement drawn up was much more restrictive than legally required, and Jay could’ve properly used his legal skills to advise these neophyte members in drawing up a proper statement, one that was fully in accordance with statute law and court rulings, but was also not overly restrictive.  This “hands off” approach that seems to be required of Jay and the staff actively works against the best wishes of the Clubhouse members, however, as they lack the expertise that Jay and the staffers supposedly have.  After all, Jay and the staff all have to possess college degrees to even work in the Clubhouse, so presumably they’d have good ranges of expertise—something valuable to ordinary Clubhouse members!  But alas, ordinary Clubhouse members are just cast off to drift, to muddle through inexpertly, by the Clubhouse’s strict “hands off” approach, an approach that hurt me personally when, due to lack of proper supervision, my mental health writings given gladly as a gift to the Clubhouse were unconscionably lost forever.  Passive babysitters are definitely not what the Clubhouse needs!

 

In ending, let me point out that my absence from the Clubhouse has also been a time of—active mental health recovery for me!  My mental health is sterling, the result of five years and nine months of excellent psychotherapy done by compassionate and understanding mental health professionals.  I have finally put my dismal decades of horrible mental health treatment at the hands of CMHCs and university clinics, the quintessential poor people’s mental health treatment outlets, far behind me. (I feel for all of you still having to use the CMHCs for your mental health treatment, because they can be so terribly inadequate, especially in Indiana, which ranks 45^th out of the 51 states plus D.C. in terms of adequacy of mental health services.  I lucked out.  I was able to find excellent private alternatives that accepted my Medicare. [I don’t know any private provider who’ll accept Medicaid.])   I am no longer in therapy, and I am also no longer interested in participating in the Clubhouse, save in only one regard—when Clubhouse International comes around to review the Circle City Clubhouse’s accreditation, and how well it is doing its job (which is, let me bluntly say, doing it inadequately), then I’d like to address the Clubhouse International accreditation body on why Circle City Clubhouse should be decertified.

Unless, of course, the Clubhouse takes my criticisms of it to heart (as expressed in this Open Letter, and in earlier writings to the Clubhouse), and makes necessary changes and improvements.  But if the Clubhouse continues its presently highly inadequate business-as-usual, then it needs to be decertified!

 

Other than that, I wish not to be involved, although as I am writing this Open Letter in good faith, I do hope it will be received in good faith also, and I encourage all at the Clubhouse who wish to, members and staffers alike, to reply to me and my Open Letter.  Say anything you want, be as firm with me as you wish, but I do require this:  you must be civil!  No profanity, no name-calling, no verbal abuse whatsoever.  You’re all adults—write like adults!  You may send all such replies to me via my e-mail, georgefish666@yahoo.com.  (Yes, that is the Mark of the Beast from Revelation!  I’m proudly an ex-Catholic atheist, proud survivor of Catholic parental and school system abuse.)  I end, “Therapeutically yours, and wishing Clubhouse members much better than they’re getting.”  Yes, you can recover!  Each of you can improve your situation!  Just have the gumption to try!  Keep in mind always the old Chinese saying:  “Don’t fear going slow, fear standing still.”  Yes, even a little bit of progress can be a lot.  Don’t forget it.

 

That is all I have to say, and I wish you all well.  I give all of you, members and staff alike, my love:  tough love, to be sure, but tough love is sometimes the best kind of love one can give—or get.

Mental Health Writings: This Too Is “Spirituality”

 (This is a long post, nearly 6, 250 words, but if I may say so, an eminently worthwhile read, with much autobiographical detail about my upbringing, my mental health struggles and recovery, and who I am, that will be revealing to many who think they "know" me--GF)

Like so many other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, national NAMI’s Chief Psychiatrist, notably in the book he recently wrote for NAMI, You Are Not Alone, praises “spirituality” and its close cousin, “positive thinking,” as coping mechanisms for those recovering from mental illness.  Like so many other mental health professionals, Dr. Duckworth sees “spirituality,” and its organized form, “religion,” as “warm fuzzies” (to use Transactional Analysis terminology) that impart “values” “sense of morality,” and “belongingness” to people.  This bias goes all the way back to arguably one of most important first books of modern psychology (along with Freud’s writings of the 1890s), William James’s 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, which is very pro-religion, if only implicitly so—giving a very sentimental gloss to a wide variety of so-called “religious experiences” and their popularizations, and being thus a psychology book much beloved among the religious who’ve read it.  “Spirituality” and “religious experience” (unless obviously psychotic, i.e., hearing God actually talking to oneself, thinking of oneself as Jesus Christ, etc.) are looked upon by psychology and psychiatry as essentially positive, while atheism is not.  This bias extends to NAMI itself, an organization that, while having a large part of its membership and leadership actual mental health professionals, is formally a lay organization advocating on behalf of psychiatry and psychiatric treatment.  This bias also boils down to a very treacly, simplistic, definition of “spirituality” as a warm emotional feeling of being loved, protected, and looked out for by a divine figure of benevolence.  An Indulgent, Forgiving Sugar Daddy in the Sky, if you will. 

 

Sometimes psychiatry will distinguish between “spirituality” and religion itself as being separate, because, of course, mental health professionals often see a variety of patients who’ve been wounded by religion, i.e., live in morbid fear of a God[1] who sentences them to hell, viewing their mental disturbance as a just God’s punishment, deathly afraid of excommunication from their church, etc.  However, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “spirituality” itself as “sensitivity or attachment to religious values,” so the spirituality/religion link is always present.  And truth is, many cruel things have been done by humans to other humans in the name of religion.  From inculcating into young children a deathly fear of God and spending an eternity in hell to engaging in human sacrifice to appease a god or gods, to the auto-da-fe and burning alive of alleged witches, heretics, and homosexuals by the medieval Catholic Church, to the Inquisition, which was both Catholic and Protestant, to the burning alive of Giordano Bruno and the persecution of Galileo for the “heresy” of teaching modern science, to Catholics gleefully killing Protestants and vice versa during the Reformation, to Christianity’s and Islam’s open animus against the Jews, and much more, the crimes committed by religion, and in the name of religion, are myriad and nefarious.  That’s simply a fact of history, and impossible to reconcile with a “good” religious value system or “spirituality,” which either overlooks, tolerates, or engages in them.  And how, pray tell, does a “spiritual” person believe a benevolent God is specially looking after him/her when so often, both in history and the present, such a benevolent God is clearly not looking after such as Giordano Bruno, Galileo, all those burned alive and otherwise brutally killed during the Inquisition, the Reformation, and the other 900-some wars over religion in the West itself?  Not to mention today’s homeless, the mentally and physically ill, the poverty-stricken, and those subject to bullying and abuse?  Where is the God looking after them?  And why can’t he be found, even though all this misery supposedly has a “bright side,” because it’s all part of “his plan,” which is “loving” by definition?  The “spiritual,” the religious, can’t answer that!  In fact, the only logical explanation is that of the reprehensible Calvinist doctrine of predestination, that a “loving” God deliberately created some humans to suffer while he also created others to prosper, and that he deliberately created some to suffer eternal torment in hell.  Islam believes much the same thing, as it is stated in the Quran that Allah deliberately causes misery to those on earth that he has also willed will suffer eternity in hell for their alleged “evils,” “evils” he has willed upon them.  For that, according to the Quran, is Allah’s Will!

 

I myself came to atheism precisely through immersion in “spirituality”—that formal version that is Catholicism.  I attended Catholic schools from first grade through senior in high school, where every school day I was taught the Catholic religion, and again through the priest’s sermon at Mass on Sunday and obligatory holy days.  I went weekly to mass on Sunday, and in high school had to attend mass daily on school days.  I thought of myself as Catholic, and didn’t even question it until I was 16, although I first developed doubts in sixth grade, where it was hard to reconcile my sympathy for Galileo as a scientist with the Church’s then-teaching (during the Pope Pius XII reign) that he was a “heretic,” a teaching still in place though it was embarrassing for the Church.  I was enthusiastic about Vatican II, and thought “religiously” [! My sense of irony comes here to the fore] that it would renew the Church.  I was close to a then-liberal Catholic priest, and thought of myself then (1963-5) as a liberal Catholic, although as a senior I began to skip Sunday mass and go out for coffee instead (needless to say, not telling my parents I was skipping church).  Only when I attended college (fall, 1965) did I first call myself an agnostic, and a little later, an atheist.  My Catholic parents, of course, thought I’d become an atheist because in college I’d been “duped by communists.”  (I’d also simultaneously become an open New Leftist, though as a high school junior I’d first thought of myself as a socialist, telling my classmates but, of course, not my parents.)  I’ve never regretted my atheism since, and regard Dr. Duckworth’s positive view of “spirituality” for mental health coping as embracing a reliance on a thoroughly unneeded crutch.  Nothing in my mental health recovery required any form of “spirituality” whatsoever.  Nor did I ever feel unhappy over my atheism.  I was often unhappy, needless to say, while I was fighting my mental illness of borderline personality disorder accompanied by chronic depression, but that was completely independent of my atheism.  Today I proudly sport on my car a bumper sticker from the outstanding nonprofit, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF):  “Unabashed Atheist: Not Afraid of Burning in Hell.”  I deliberately write sardonic irreligious poetry that one of my fellow atheists (also an ex-Catholic) pointedly notes are “theologically correct.”  (As far as I’m concerned, all theology, of any religion, is logical hash.)   My old academic advisor (himself a Jewish atheist) and I used to joke that, if we died and found out afterwards that there was a God, a heaven, and a hell, we hoped “God had a sense of humor”!  In short, I’m completely happy and “normal” as an atheist.

 

That above was my own personal immersion into “spirituality.”   My immersion into the “spirituality” of others, however, was horrendous—decades of abuse, deliberate social ostracism, bullying, backbiting, and deliberate rejection at the hands of the “spiritual,” those professing religion, and wearing their “religious progressivism” on their sleeves.  People with no inkling of Jesus’ “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” even though they went to church and professed Catholicism, various shades of mainstream Protestantism, even Judaism (which attributes the same thought to the rabbi Hillel).  People who were just plain cruel and insensitive, though their formal religious beliefs said otherwise.  Of the 520-710 professed Christians or students at Catholic schools I estimate I’ve personally known over my lifetime, only 60 or so were at all moral toward me; that is, lived up to the moral and ethical codes of their professed religions, especially the “Love thy neighbor” part.  The rest all “conveniently sinned” against me as the pariah, as Buber’s Other, as the one they needn’t give a damn about.  They were the classmates and upper classmen who deliberately physically bullied me, and then, in high school, deliberately socially ostracized me, making my older childhood and adolescence a living hell, and contributing mightily to my social awkwardness and inability to socially interact.  Then there was the nun I had in fifth grade in the Catholic grade school who deliberately picked on me because I had once corrected her when she maintained that salt was “sodium nitrate” and I correctly informed her it was “sodium chloride.”  There were my Catholic parents, who were both abusive and neglectful:  neglectful because they utterly ignored me when they weren’t screaming at me at the top of their lungs, which they did regularly albeit capriciously from late childhood on, through adolescence and even young adulthood.  My Catholic father called me “sissy” and “n****r-lover” regularly, and yet, when I was a young adult, had the temerity to say to me he wished I would at least be a Unitarian, so that I would just believe in God!  However, when I was the victim of a homosexual rape, he showed he cared and expressed consideration of me by—acting utterly indifferently toward me!  Yes, because, if he’d been upset with me (as my mother later was, and showed it by spewing venom at me), he would’ve screamed at me!  That was the way both my parents were toward me (but not toward my five younger sisters): they were silent toward me when they weren’t screaming at me.  They raised me by the “Out of sight, out of mind” manual of childrearing.  I could never talk to them because they were too busy watching TV, and one of us “mere” kids just didn’t interrupt our parents’ TV watching.  So, I had to keep all my pain and hurt from the bullying and ostracism at school inside of me.  My mother would go off on me at a trifle, screaming at me at the top of her lungs, her face red and the veins and tendons in her neck standing out, “All women just hate that”!  That was not putting the toilet seat down, or even “worse,” urinating standing up, thus allegedly “dripping and splashing.”  My mother was obsessed with toilets and toilet cleaning, and when, as an adult in my early 30s I had sent her a long, heartfelt letter on my abuse as a child, she responded only with an indignant “You never had to clean toilets!”  (Even though that had been one of my adolescent household chores, along with mowing the lawn, and that I had also worked as a young adult as a building janitor; both of which she knew, but now conveniently forgot.)  When I was 15 my father, in a rare display of gathering up the family to engage in a whole family activity, took us all bowling.  It was the first time I’d ever bowled, and thus, naturally, I wasn’t very good at it.  So my father took it upon himself to scream at me constantly for my “failure” in the public bowling alley, humiliating me publicly for it.  One of my classmates, who was among my school enemies, worked at the bowling alley that day, witnessed all this, and was doubled up laughing, further adding to my humiliation.  The next day, a Monday, my humiliation was all over school, and I was laughed at constantly for it; this provoked me to get into two fights, both of which I lost.  A couple of decades later, I wrote my father about this incident; he responded back tersely by letter, “I’m sorry you don’t like bowling.”  A few years later, my mother and my father took my baby sister bowling for the first time, and glowingly reported back how good she’d been for a first time—she got a score of 86!  I’d gotten that fateful day a score of—87.

 

I’m sure many a psychiatrist would say, “Your parents obviously also had personality disorders, same as you did.”  After all, personality disorders are 47% heritable.  And one of the major signs of a personality disorder is over-the-top emotional responses, such as my parents constantly yet unpredictably screaming at me.  Yet that hardly absolves them of their atrocious behavior toward me.  To understand is not necessarily to forgive, not by a long shot.  However, to my parents’ “credit,” while they certainly verbally and emotionally abused me, they never physically abused me.  They didn’t have to—they’d already cowed me by forcing me to always walk on eggs around them, lest they suddenly go into a raging fit.

 

Further, new psychiatric research demonstrates that while not all child abuse leads to mental illness, all those with a diagnosed personality disorder did suffer from such abuse!  (And, of course, I have such a diagnosis.)  Moreover, from what little I know of my own parents’ upbringing, they may well have themselves suffered from abuse.  In fact, probably did.  (They were very secretive about their upbringings, never really ever talking about them; however, when I was twelve, I met my father’s father for the first and only time; and was struck by what a cold and unfeeling man he was.  As for my mother, she was raised by very orthodox Catholics, and surrounded by other relatives who were very orthodox Catholics, with all the Church’s misogyny—and my maternal grandfather, when he became the undisputed patriarch of the whole extended family, indulged in his favorite pastime, which was giving morality lectures to the young!)  As for me, growing up Catholic, I got the triple whammy of abuse—from parents, from classmates, from teachers.  A couple of years ago I confronted the three Catholic dioceses where I had been abused by their Catholic school systems, and two them, where the office handling such matters were run by lay persons, apologized for what I’d endured.  The third, which did not, and where I had talked to a priest, gave me a very telling reply by that priest on why that diocese would not apologize:  “If we apologized, we’d be admitting our guilt, and you might sue us.”  Yes, at bottom it's all about Mammon!

 

On Pearl Harbor Day 1979 I left Fort Wayne, Indiana, to move to Indianapolis to take up a job as statistician with the State of Indiana—my first full move away from my parents since moving back with them in January 1971, although I did live independently from them for a while in Fort Wayne.  I lost my job in Indianapolis six months later, due especially to my heavy drinking (but as a later excellent psychotherapist later informed me, my drinking was not that of the typical alcoholic, but was instead a form of “self-medication” for my psychic pain as a now-seemingly-perpetual consumer of psychiatric services, without which I couldn’t seem to cope).  When I had started the new job, my addled thought to myself, “Oh boy.  Now with my new job, and the substantially more income, I can drink the way I want,” without constraint.  Now, in June 1980, I was once again without a job, without hope or prospects for another one, and feeling like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs as I contemplated moving back to my parents.  But I vigorously rejected this last option, as it would’ve utterly defeated me for the rest of my life, and would’ve also been disastrous for my mental health.  So, even though I had only poverty to look forward to in the immediate future, I toughed it out and stayed in Indianapolis—where I’ve been ever since.  That definitely turned out to be the right decision.  In September, in a rare bout of complete sobriety brought on by lack of money, I wrote my first short story, submitted it to a local literary magazine for possible publication, and had it accepted in December.  At last, I was the writer I’d for so long wanted to be, but had been too busy drinking to actually write.  By spring of 1981 I was writing for publication regularly in local publications, in 1984 I published my first national article, in 1992 I was included in Who’s Who in the Midwest, in 2004 I branched out into writing poetry as well, and in 2019 and 2020 I was further included in Who’s Who, with long biographical entries about me and my writing in both the 2019 and 2020 editions of Who’s Who in America.  I had achieved at the very least my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame!  (“in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol had said notably.)

 

I’d been a left activist since 1965, and so, once in Indianapolis, tried to connect with the left here.  The Indianapolis left was dominated by self-proclaimed “religious progressives,” overwhelmingly Christian, mainstream Protestants with a smattering of Catholics and a handful of Jews; but although I agreed a good 90% with them politically it was not to be, as I was shunned because of my atheism, my Marxism, and my alleged “mental instability” for even seeking psychiatric help.  I had opened up to one of Indianapolis’s leading “progressives” (that’s how they referred to themselves back from 1980 on.  Never as “leftists” or “socialists”), a prominent local Quaker, telling her of my atheism, my Marxist background prior, and how I’d suffered what I termed “psychiatric oppression,” none, absolutely none, of which she liked at all.  Atheism was taboo, for it violated the local “religious progressive” mantra:  “Karl Marx bad, Jesus Christ good;” Marxism, ditto; and as for “psychiatric oppression,” this person, Jane H., drew the following “false ‘Aha’”:  “George has seen a psychiatrist.  He’s one of Those People.  Therefore, he’s too mentally unstable for us, regardless.”  However, I was intelligent, and as I proved later, could write, so I was more or less tolerated, but never, ever, fully accepted.  Jane H. slammed me behind my back, groused about my writing, “George uses too many big words” (Jane would’ve considered “prolix” a “big word,” but not “granddaughter,” even though, by letter count, it’s twice as “big”!  Yes, despite having a Master’s degree), used the alleged defects in my writing to impugn my moral character, and did this for twenty-six years, from March 1980 until around January or February 2006.  She also busily recruited, from her ample circle of cronies and admirers, others to also shun and demean me.  One such example was a certain ordained Presbyterian minister who worked as a computer programmer for a private insurance company, had a Master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in comparative religion and was a part-time adjunct college professor to boot, so should’ve known better, who said to me, “I avoided making your acquaintance because I heard you had ‘mental problems’.”  Sheesh!  This was the bigotry among the “religious progressives” I was up against!  Almost 100% from every Indianapolis “progressive” man or woman!  However, in her later days, after 2006 but before her death from liver cancer in 2009, Jane H. did once offer me an “apology” that my best friend and closest political comrade sneered as being “an apology not an apology” when she wrote me:  “My comments were wrong to say that your writing was confusing. The comments were made when I was reading them as a part of the Journal [the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, monthly newspaper of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, 1986-2006, for which I wrote regularly] and the complexity of detail that you included probably is why I was left with the impression of confusion.”  A classic, even textbook, case of psychological projection:  she was confused by a self-evident strength of my writing, my “complexity of detail,” so I became—“confusing”!

 

I was to find no welcoming place on the Indianapolis left, or what passed for it, until 2001, when a group of feisty anarchist youth founded Solidarity Books, a local non-sectarian left bookstore.  They were verbally militant, though, in practice, nonviolent and democratic; most considered themselves atheists, and were openly anarchist and friendly toward punk rock.  So, from the beginning they drew the ire of the Indianapolis “religious progressives,” who, above all, were “respectable,” while these youth in their eyes, were anything but.  (Affectionately called “The Kids;” they ranged in the original group from 17-25, and welcomed me heartily.)  All but one or two ended up leaving Indianapolis in frustration, disgust, and anger in 2005, and I wrote an affectionate blog about them here in “Politically Incorrect Leftist” that was posted  October 15, 2021. 

 

In 1996 I was asked to join a resuscitated DSA (Democratic Socialists of America, the local affiliate), which I did and in which I was active, despite being red-baited and mental health-baited (an opponent of my joining characterized me as an “ex-Maoist [never, ever true; I was a Trotskyist, but never a Maoist] with a long history of mental problems”).  But there was never anything of consequence to local DSA.  Same as with the inconsequential local here of the Socialist Party, we met regularly, much fewer always than even a dozen of us, and discussed matters of which we had no influence on anyone outside our own very tiny circles.  Always.  However, in 2010 I did conduct classes on Marxism and the Communist Manifesto that drew a small but appreciative student body from both the Socialist Party and DSA, and both the classes, and I, were well received.  We who met regularly, both Socialist Party and DSA, met together as the Socialist Coalition. However, when I criticized the website for the group created by one of its members as inadequate, these “comrades” of the Coalition (who were also students in the classes I taught on Marxism and the Communist Manifesto) turned against me and plotted against me behind my back, and vindictively drove me out.  This whole sordid matter is the subject of two blogposts on “Politically Incorrect Leftist” by me, August 4, 2010’s “Dregs,” and February 17, 2011’s “Dregs Aftermath1; Letter from ‘One of the Masses’,” which quotes a letter to the Coalition  from a friend and supporter of mine which pointedly comments and asks: 

 

At the outset, I’m amazed that, considering my 65 years of Indiana residency, I’ve never even heard of your organization! You’re who, and you do what?

If your group were a major force in the political arena, perhaps making major contributions to American society, I’d like your club a lot more.

 

In December 2001 I’d also joined the nationwide socialist group Solidarity, which had no presence in Indianapolis other than me, an At-Large Member.  However, I was active in the group, regularly writing for its bimonthly national magazine Against the Current, as well as its internal discussion bulletin, and tried to sell Solidarity literature (with poor to middling success) in Indianapolis and the college town to the south, Bloomington (home of the main campus of Indiana University, my Alma Mater).  But, despite this positive activity for the organization, the national leadership of Solidarity drew up charges for expulsion against me, on the grounds that, in writing "Dregs,” I’d insulted other socialists.  My “trial” was held by phone conference in October 2010.  However, as my witness commented afterward, the whole thing was a “kangaroo court” in which I could not possibly get a fair hearing.  The vote to expel me was unanimous, save for one “No” and one abstention, and I was out.  I can’t say at all regretfully.  My expulsion proceedings made me see forcibly the fraud behind Marxist-Leninist or Leninist-Trotskyist (which Solidarity was) organizations, with their rigid internal discipline that allows no real freedom of thought or action whatsoever.  Well, today Solidarity is an irrelevant left sect, same as it was in 2010.   However, back to Indianapolis (as Solidarity was based in Detroit), the Socialist Coalition dissolved, the Socialist Party part of it essentially dissolved into nothing, and the old leadership of DSA, the leadership that had railroaded and ostracized me, was replaced by a new body of activists who’d come to DSA following Bernie Sanders’s two runs for the Presidency, 2016 and 2020, and who held the old leadership in contempt—which was fine with the old leadership, as it had become tired of DSA, and no longer wanted anything to do with it.  Today, October 2023, DSA in Indianapolis is a vibrant organization with a core of a good thirty or so activists, is on the verge as I write of electing one of its members to the Indianapolis City-County Council, and actively participates in tenant and labor organizing, electoral politics, and strike support.  And I am a member in good standing of that DSA.

 

This above does tie into Indianapolis “religious progressivism” in the following ways:  Jane H. and her husband were members of the Socialist Party (though inactive by the time I was railroaded; Jane had died the year before, and thus her husband, without her to drive, didn’t attend meetings), and the head of DSA locally from 2010 onward was someone who, while calling himself an “agnostic,” nonetheless had a theology degree from Indianapolis’s Christian Theological Seminary, and like everyone else on the left (save for the Solidarity Books youth, who’d been driven out in disgust five years earlier) kowtowed to the “religious progressives” and made sure their “progressivism” was “religious” in nature.  No room for secularists here!

 

But that is no longer the case here in Indianapolis as I write, September-October 2023, as all the old “religious progressives” who were such banes to me are either dead, incapacitated, or retired, while I myself am 76 going on 77.  A new crop of youth, to whom I relate well, has taken over the helm.

 

I also joined the local freethought/atheist group, the Indianapolis chapter of the national Center for Inquiry.  Unfortunately, same as with the “progressives,” I wasn’t really accepted, due, I think, mostly to my rather plebian employment.  I found out the hard way that my “fellow” Center for Inquiry members were a bunch of well-off, upscale snobs, many with terribly bad politics.  It got even worse when I attended Center for Inquiry’s showing of the Irish film Magdalene, on Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, where “wayward” young women were sent for “rehabilitation;” the open Catholic-aegis sadism depicted in Magdalene really caused an intense emotional reaction in me, as personally this wasn’t just a film, this was a mirror held up to my own life as an abused Catholic.  Well, in discussion on the film that night, my emotional upset came out, as did four-letter words when I spoke, much to the consternation of the Center’s Executive Director, who was primly self-righteous herself (not only would she have made a very good Catholic, she would’ve made even an excellent Carmelite Catholic nun!  That is, cloistered, removed from reality, and self-righteously sanctimonious).   So she banned me permanently from the Center for Inquiry in  Indianapolis, and that ban was upheld knee-jerk by the national leadership.  Further, no matter how I tried, I could never apologize or explain myself “adequately” to this sanctimoniously prim “freethinker/atheist.”  Just another way in which everyone, it seemed, kowtowed to the “religious progressives” in smug, cliquish IndiaNOPLACE (as it was also ruefully known), even supposedly “bold freethinkers.”

 

In September 2001, in good Indianapolis news for me for a change, my thirty-eight years of unemployment, underemployment, fitful employment and unemployability finally came to an end, as I landed, at age 54, a job scoring the standard achievement tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, a job that required my college degree.  I worked it for the next ten-and-a-half years, even though it was only a seasonal, albeit regularly recuring, job.  This job was a tremendous breakthrough for me.  Not only was I making decent money while I worked, and qualifying for unemployment when work wasn’t available, I also loved the work I did as a test scorer, especially scoring math tests.  And my immediate supervisors were quite pleased with me.  Moreover, I was surrounded by appreciative co-workers who were not only bright college grads such as myself, they were also folks who had never even heard of the Indianapolis “religious progressives,” a closed, cliquish, incestuous lot—so I no longer faced the invidious discrimination I’d faced at the hands of the "progressives”!  This employment really enhanced my life, and was made even more rewarding when even the anxiety caused by my case worker’s dereliction in my applying for SSDI did not remove me permanently from this job I loved!  My supervisors all came to bat for me, and enabled me to keep my employment.  As a final coda on this, though, let it be pointedly noted that in 2006, when I’d confronted my case worker about his malfeasance and he conceded the point, he had the chutzpah to tell me, “If I hadn’t have messed up, would it have made any difference?”  “Only” several thousand dollars’ worth of income, my continued employment, and my self-esteem and mental health, that’s all the “difference” it would’ve made!  (From my many rueful experiences with “mental health professionals,” I often wonder which rock or rocks they crawl out from under.)  But even after I no longer had test scoring I had other temp employment, and was fairly regularly employed for a total of fourteen years, 2001-2015, after which I landed my current job, grocery stocker at Kroger, a job which not only is full-time and permanent, but one in which I also have union protection.  (I’m proud to say I’m a member of UFCW Local 700, the Indiana mega-local of the United Food and Commercial Workers, AFL-CIO.)

 

In March 1980 I sought psychiatric help again, now in Indianapolis, same as I’d sought it since 1965 off and on at university clinics and CMHCs while at Michigan State University, Indiana University, and living in Fort Wayne.  This time, though, I was pretty much continually involved with it weekly, with regular psychotherapy—psychotherapy that turned out, although with some notable exceptions (especially with a psychotherapist I had from 1983-1996), just as ineffective and wretched as it had been at Michigan State, Indiana University, and in Fort Wayne.  (By the way, I’m presently working on a complete account of my experiences with psychiatry; I’m currently up to the spring of 1971, when I was finally successfully, permanently, treated for my Tourette’s Syndrome, which, somehow, had gone unnoticed by psychiatry or indeed by any medical practitioner until 1970.)  Thus, in Indianapolis especially I was reduced to a desperate, dependent psychiatric outpatient until 2012 by the CMHCS in Indianapolis I had to rely on.  But I was a mess as well at Michigan State, Indiana University, and in Fort Wayne, an extremely troubled young man; and though it showed in my behavior and in my inability to successfully cope, all that had been missed by psychiatry almost completely!  That, in a nutshell, was my psychiatric history from 1965-2012—forty-seven years of malfeasant and inept psychiatric treatment!  Substantially cancelling out almost five decades of my life!  I resumed psychotherapy in 2014, only this time successfully.  For  sixty-nine months I received outstanding psychiatric help from practitioners of their own versions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, 2014-2022, and finally completely recovered.  My psychotherapist from 2014-2021 said it was “unconscionable” the way past psychiatry had “allowed [me] to fall through the cracks.”  I couldn’t agree more.

 

Although I consider that my mental health recovery considerably advanced after 2019, it was already advancing earlier, although I didn’t realize it at the time.  The psychotherapist I had from 1983-1996, Allen F., said to me notably in our last session:  “Congratulations.  By rights [by which he meant “by statistical probabilities”] you should’ve been institutionalized, incarcerated, a hopeless alcoholic or drug addict, a suicide, or otherwise prematurely dead, but you turned out to be None of the Above.”  This same psychotherapist had a ten-minute long-distance phone conversation with my father in the early 1990s, and relayed his impressions of my father to me.  He said that, after talking ten minutes with my father, he’d concluded that my father “was just an asshole out to vindicate himself,” “an ignorant fascist,” and “a tyrant and a bully”—all of which I found tremendously vindicating!  For this was the first time ever a therapist had realized the true nature of the father I had known so ruefully all my life since at least the age of eleven.  This was also the first time my father had been seen by others as quite other than what the relatives lectured me constantly on what my father was:  somehow, a “good parent,” though obviously I had experienced otherwise.  For the first time in psychotherapy, I felt tremendously vindicated!  I wasn’t so “crazy” after all.  I also felt much vindicated—and thus much recovered—when my last psychotherapist, Max, noting I was angry, said simply, “Your anger is justified.”  When the patient is made to feel properly and appropriately vindicated, when the patient is no longer dismissed as simply “crazy,” then recovery can ensue—a most valuable lesson from therapy I pass on especially to “mental health professionals.”  Yes, accept that ofttimes your patient is grounded in ugly reality, even though his or her responses to it may not always be the most “appropriate.”  If this is “Freudian,” so be it!

 

I’d also made substantive progress on my alcohol problem.  In the late 1990s, early 2000s, I became more concerned about my heavy drinking, though I couldn’t seem to overcome it.  Then, one afternoon in October 2004, I noticed that—though my living situation was none too good and my anxiety over it was still high, I wasn’t responding to it in my usual way: by drinking.  In fact, I was spontaneously, unconsciously, refraining from drinking—and feeling good about it!  From then on, my dependence on alcohol noticeably abated, and I became a strictly social drinker, not someone who was half-buzzed all the time (I was rarely fall-down drunk in these later years, the early 1990s on).  That has continued ever since; I’m not an abstainer, but also, don’t feel the need to self-medicate myself with alcohol the way I used to do.  (Allen F. had noted, as mentioned above, that my drinking was not of the usual alcoholic sort—it was more along the lines of psychological self-medication.)  Further, I hadn’t had a major depressive episode since 2003 (I’d been successfully on antidepressants, lithium and Prozac, since 1986), and when my antidepressants became unavailable for me due to my being frozen out of Gallahue Community Mental Health Center in the summer of 2004, I found out that I neither needed them nor missed them.  When I was able to go back to Gallahue in February 2005, I told the staff psychiatrist how I’d been off antidepressants since November 2004 and had experienced no depressive episodes; he agreed to continue monitoring me off them, and then said, in December 2005 I no longer needed them.  And haven’t since. 

 

I’ve also had active Christian friends, even as an atheist—which may surprise some.  I’d become good friends with Roy Bourgeois, the noted former Catholic priest of conscience and determined advocate of women’s ordination, and wrote four articles on him and his work in In These Times, a nationwide socialist news monthly.  (Two of these articles were long ones.)  He continues to be a good friend, and someone I stay in touch with.  My Indianapolis Quaker friend Gilbert apologized to me for mistreating me in the summer of 2015, the only “religious progressive” who’s ever done so!  (Even though my mistreatment at the hands of Indianapolis “religious progressives” goes back to 1980, as noted above.)  Also, my fellow writer friend Cheryl, who’s written books on her childhood and adolescence in Kokomo, Indiana which are well regarded, and even garnered notice in the New York Times, and who believes that she got through her rough growing up because there was a God watching personally over her—she also is a supportive and encouraging friend.  And there are a couple of others.  While I am indeed a militant atheist, and express my atheism pungently in irreligious poetry, I do not act in a bigoted way toward other believers.  I believe in “‘Live and let live;’ but also, ‘Don’t tread on me.’  Don’t proselytize me in your religion, and I won’t proselytize you in atheism.”  That doesn’t prevent me, of course, from sharing my irreligious poetry with those who want to read it, although I don’t force such reading upon anyone against their will and desire.       

 

So thus is the “spiritual journey” of my life to date—without any “spirituality” on my part, but plenty of victimization by the “spirituality” of others!  Yet, I am anything but psychologically unhealthy for rejecting all notions of “spirituality.”  For me, it is but a crutch, a blind spot one is better off leaving behind.  It is not needed, and never will be. Grabbing ahold of reality earnestly and firmly is a far better tonic than any notion of “spirituality” will ever be, or indeed, can ever be—for it is but a chimera.  That, to me, is what “spirituality” really is, and the mental health profession and NAMI are just dead wrong to think otherwise.        

 

 

 

 

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[1] My capitalization of “God” is used to refer to the Judeo-Christian sense of a god, which is what we are de facto referencing here.