Celebration Festival

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, April 26th at SHARE!  (we will attend this Festival instead of our regular 3rd Sunday meeting on April 20th, since many members will be celebrating Easter)

Please come by our booth and/or call 951.638.WELL or email us at:  wildflowersmovement@gmail.com for more information!!! We will also have a group meeting on this day and lunch will be served.

We look forward to seeing you there!!!

 

 

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. CONDEMN FORCED TREATMENT

March 30, 2014

PLEASE email now or CALL TOMORROW EARLY:         SENATORS information HERE

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES DO NOT WANT ANY FORCED “INVOLUNTARY OUTPATIENT COMMITMENT”! IT IS AGAINST HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS AND WE WILL FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS UNTIL CONGRESS LISTENS!

Please make these calls TOMORROW, MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2014, AT 4-7AM PACIFIC TIME OR 7-10AM EASTERN TIME. MEETING WILL START AT 10AM IN DC!

FOR CALIFORNIA PLEASE CALL:

Boxer, Barbara – (D – CA), 112 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510, (202) 224-3553,  email DIRECTLY HERE: http://www.boxer.senate.gov/en/contact/policycomments.cfm

Feinstein, Dianne – (D – CA), 331 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510, (202) 224-3553, email DIRECTLY HERE: https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me

FOR ALL OTHER STATES PLEASE CALL HERE

Leave a short message:

“I am (name, city). My Senator should NOT vote for a Doc Fix that includes Section 224 of the House bill (HR 4302). Section 224 has nothing to do with Medicare. It would use Federal dollars to pay for forced psychiatric treatment in our communities. Forced treatment is traumatizing. It criminalizes people in crisis. It scares people away from seeking help. It is costly but not effective. Keep Section 224 out of the Doc Fix bill.  (Leave your phone number if you want a return call.) Please make these calls TOMORROW, MONDAY AT 5-7AM PACIFIC TIME OR 8-10AM EASTERN TIME. MEETING WILL START AT 10AM IN DC!

Your voice counts if you make the calls.

From MAD IN AMERICA

March 28, 2014

An array of national mental health and disability advocacy groups joined together today, urging people to contact their senators in protest of a section of a bill rushed through the House of Representatives by voice vote yesterday. Section 224 of HR4302, up for a vote in the Senate on Monday, would subject people in crisis to forced treatment. “In its rush to fix a problem with Medicare, the House passed a bill including a highly controversial program, involuntary outpatient commitment, with no debate and no roll call vote,” said Raymond Bridge, public policy director of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, “And it seems that the Senate may pass a version of the House bill including this troublesome provision on Monday.” “This legislation would eliminate initiatives that use evidence-based, voluntary, peer-run services and family supports to help people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses to recover,” said Daniel Fisher, M.D., Ph.D. “It would bring America back to the dark ages before de-institutionalization, when people with mental health conditions languished in institutions, sometimes for life.”

Of further interest:
List of phone numbers for DC offices of U.S. Senators
Research on Outpatient Commitment (Psychrights)
Compulsory community and involuntary outpatient treatment for people with severe mental disorders (Cochrane Review)

Contact: Dr. Daniel Fisher, info@ncmhr.org, 877-246-9058, cell: 617-504-0832 (press only) Raymond Bridge, 703-883-7710, raymond.bridge@ncmhr.org

BUT PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SENATORS IN EACH STATE: 

DR. DANIEL FISHER ON MENTAL HEALTH

Dr. Fisher has an M.D., Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the National Empowerment Center and a member of the President’s Commission on “Mental Illness”.  He is one of the few psychiatrists in the country who openly discusses his recovery from mental illness.  He is a role model for others who are struggling to recover and his life dispels the myth that people do not recover from mental issues.

LET US REMEMBER MARTIN L. KING JR. “I call upon you to be maladjusted, maladjusted as the prophet Amos who in the midst of the tragic inequalities of injustice in his day cried out in words that echoes across the generations: ”Let judgment run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

As maladjusted as Lincoln who confronted a nation divided against itself and had the vision to see that the nation could not exist half free, and half slave.

Maladjusted as the — hundreds and thousands — of Negroes, North and South who are determined now to stand up for freedom, willing to face possible violence and possible death, who are willing to stand up and sacrifice and struggle until segregation is a dead reality and until integration is a fact.

Maladjusted as Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery cried out in words of cosmic proportions: ”All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I call upon you to follow this maladjustment. It is through such a maladjustment that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom, equality and justice.”

Martin Luther King Jr.,     Excerpt:

“There are certain words in the technical vocabulary of every academic discipline that tend after a while to become stereotype and cliches, there is a word in modern psychology which is now probably more familiar than any other words in psychology. It is the word the maladjusted; it is the ringing cry of the new child, psychology — maladjusted.”

Quantum Physics & The Unified Field

The Unified Field or Superstring Field… this is it.

The TRUTH is we are all ONE. We are all interconnected.

       Is it not time we START ACTING LIKE WE REALLY ARE????

What the Bleep Do We Know???

 

Martin Luther King Jr., Jan. 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

from MindFreedom International, MLK on the International Association for the Advancement of the Creative Maladjustment (IAACM)

In one of his earliest references to creative maladjustment, MLK addressed the 27 June 1956 annual convention of the NAACP in San Francisco to describe the historic victory of the ”Montgomery Story” bus boycott in 1955.

Excerpt:

“There are certain words in the technical vocabulary of every academic discipline that tend after a while to become stereotype and cliches, there is a word in modern psychology which is now probably more familiar than any other words in psychology. It is the word the maladjusted; it is the ringing cry of the new child, psychology — maladjusted.

And as a minister seeing and counseling with people very day concerning their problems and their maladjustment’s, I’m certainly concerned with those who are maladjusted, concerned to see everybody as adjusted as possible.

But I want to leave this evening saying to you that there are some things in our social system that I’m proud to be maladjusted to, and I call upon you to be maladjusted to. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of lynch mobs; I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and discrimination; I never intend to become adjusted to the tragic inequalities of the economic system which will take necessity from the masses to give luxury to the classes; I never intend to become adjusted to the insanity’s of militarism, the self-defeating method of physical violence.

There are some things that I never intend to become adjusted to, and I call upon you to continue to be maladjusted. History still has a choice place for the maladjusted. There is still a call for individuals to be maladjusted. The salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

I call upon you to be maladjusted, maladjusted as the prophet Amos who in the midst of the tragic inequalities of injustice in his day cried out in words that echoes across the generations: ”Let judgment run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

As maladjusted as Lincoln who confronted a nation divided against itself and had the vision to see that the nation could not exist half free, and half slave.

Maladjusted as the — hundreds and thousands — of Negroes, North and South who are determined now to stand up for freedom, willing to face possible violence and possible death, who are willing to stand up and sacrifice and struggle until segregation is a dead reality and until integration is a fact.

Maladjusted as Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery cried out in words of cosmic proportions: ”All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I call upon you to follow this maladjustment. It is through such a maladjustment that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom, equality and justice.”

Just Imagine…

It was December 8^th, 1980, 33 years ago today. John and Yoko were just returning to their home in The Dakota, the posh apartment building that looms at 1 West 72nd St., in Manhattan. John turned when he heard someone call, “Mr. Lennon!” Mark David Chapman, 25, fired five shots from a .38, into John Lennon’s back. John staggered into the building saying; “I’m shot!” Yoko called for help.

This post is DEDICATED to John Lennon and Nelson Mandela for imagining a world of PEACE and EQUALITY and fighting for this cause until their death. As we continue to fight for HUMAN RIGHTS, let’s always remember and honor our comrades who proceeded us.

MADNESS AND MINDFULNESS: 4 FILMS

Thursday, October 24 – 8 PM at the ECHO PARK FILM CENTER  1200 N Alvarado St. (@ Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026 |      (213) 484 – 8846 | info@echoparkfilmcenter.org
The recent films of filmmaker/activist Ken Paul Rosenthal are provocative and beautiful works of conscious cinema that re-envision the way we think, speak and feel about mental distress and wellness in today’s chaotic world. These transformative films weave personal and political narratives through natural and urban landscapes, home movies, and archival social hygiene films. Mad Dance: A Mental Health Film Trilogy, consisting of For Shadows (2013, 26 minutes), a contemplative, multi-layered memoir that unravels the tangled roots of self-harm while coming to terms with one’s shadow; In Light In! (2013, 12 minutes) a haunting, visual essay about the awkward and angry junctures where our culture struggles to manage its emotional distress; and Crooked Beauty (2002, 30 minutes), the much-lauded poetic documentary on artist/activist Jacks McNamara and the foundation of the Icarus Project. Program also includes Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002, 5 minutes), a cine-poetic work traces the conflict between urban space and the body.

Ken Paul Rosenthal in person! www.maddancementalhealthfilmtrilogy.com

Shocking Failure in U.S. To Prohibit Sex-Based Discrimination

by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., Published on October 12, 2013 by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. in Science Isn’t Golden, Matters of the Heart and Mind

People in the United States talk a lot about rights. Nothing wrong with caring about rights, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of caring about fairness.

I was born and raised in the U.S. but lived and worked in Canada for 19 years, and I have both U.S. and Canadian citizenship. Since my return to the U.S., people have often asked me how Canada has long had the equivalent of what in the U.S. is called the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination  on the basis of one’s sex, when the U.S. has never managed to adopt the ERA. My explanation is that Canadians have a long tradition of caring about fairness as well as about rights and do not see the two as mutually exclusive.

Last month, I had the privilege of attending the educational and inspiring event about women and media that Veteran Feminists of America held in Los Angeles, and I want to tell you what I saw onscreen there. I urge you to have a look at this one-minute video right now, before reading the rest of this essay, because no attempt to describe it could match the powerful impact of watching it. It is at

It is shocking but sadly unsurprising, given the rollbacks in race-based civil rights and the upsurge in racism in recent years in the U.S., that we are also far behind many other countries, even some that Americans regard as less civilized than our own, in eradicating bias against and mistreatment of girls and women. Our Voices of Diversity project — funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation revealed a tendency for sexism, including violence against women, to be taken less seriously than racism. As long as we have no federal Equal Rights Amendment, it will continue to be harder to eradicate the significant and appalling discrimination in hiring and wages, in the prosecution of sex-and-gender-based crimes, in the military, and in education, as well as in many other arenas.

It is unconscionable that the country that touts itself as the exemplar of freedom has not managed to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. Happily, there is organizing aimed to revive the ERA and get enough states to vote their approval to make it finally the law of the land. To learn more about why it is so sorely needed, I urge you to have a look at

ERA EDUCATION PROJECT

to learn about the film-in-progress called “Equal Means Equal.” I heard the smart and impassioned filmmaker, Kamala Lopez, speak at the women and media conference, and as you will see in the above link to her 1 1/2-minute video, she is driven partly by the fact that between 75 and 90% of Americans mistakenly believe that our Constitution already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. As she says in the video, “235 years is a long time to wait for equal rights.” Her website is full of detailed information about the scope and manifestations of sexism.

After you watch these videos, please post the links, and urge everyone you know to watch them.