No on Prop 1

https://lwvc.org/ballot-measure/prop-1-2024/no-on-prop-1

Although California has a critical need to resource better mental health and addiction services and to address our crisis of homelessness, the League of Women Voters of California opposes Proposition 1 for a number of important reasons. While the additional housing resources offered through Prop 1 are sorely needed, they do not outweigh its flaws.

Menopause Madness! from AD4E

Wednesday May 22, 2024 04:00AM – 06:30AM PDT

In 2025 there will be an estimated one billion women going through menopause (Hill, 1996). Prescriptions for anti-depressants are being offered before the question is explored as to whether a women is in the peri/menopause phase. This lack of recognition of the true impact can potentially disempower and disadvantage those most in need.

This workshop looks to understand how to manage the ever-expanding demographic of menopause whilst avoiding the marketing of the trojan horse of menopause that is being commodified at an alarming rate.

It will encourage participants to question the ‘why’ in the headlines indicating the rise in suicide rates amongst women in the 45-54 age bracket, higher rates of divorce, depression, anxiety, paranoia and rage and why women are leaving their careers. If peri/menopause is not the direct causation there is certainly room to discuss the correlation between such events – and we will not know until we talk about it openly.

Through discussion and not didactic conditioning from an ever present “McMedia Circus” this workshop will bring in the lived-experience voice/s alongside evidence-based facts. Challenging the seeming bias to treat those in the peri/menopause stage of life as a prescriptive ‘mental health’ tick box – next patient please! (Even NICE guidelines, are clear that HRT and not anti-depressants should be the first line treatment for low mood due to menopause).

Participants will be able to consider an emerging new paradigm which we believe reflects a human centred approach where the most valuable support for those in peri/menopause is in the recognition of the individual experience. From there we can collectively recognise how a co-produced support network can be built to offer what is needed in the peri/menopause phase – beyond the guaranteed consumers for the pharmaceutical industry.

Annesh de Vos will be presenting this workshop – supported by Dr Helen Douglas.

A CPD certificate for 2.5 hours will be available on request after the workshop.

Register

Found Voices: Art Exhibit, Poetry, Music

Join us where ART and SCIENCE collide with Art, Poetry & Music at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA Art/ Sci + Lab, Gallery, at UCLA CNSI, this coming Tuesday, May 20th, at 6.30-9.00 p.m.

The CNSI UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab is dedicated to pursuing and promoting the evolving “Third Culture” by facilitating the infinite potential of collaborations between (media) arts and (bio/nano) sciences.

 The center’s affiliation with the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) offers access to cutting edge researchers and their laboratories and a dedicated gallery for exhibitions. The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is a research center at UCLA whose mission is to encourage university collaboration with industry and to enable the rapid commercialization of discoveries in nanosystems. CNSI members who are on the faculty at UCLA represent a multi-disciplinary team of some of the world’s preeminent scientists. The work conducted at the CNSI represents world-class expertise in four targeted areas of nanosystems-related research including Energy, Environment, Health-Medicine, and Information Technology.

                                                                                                                                                            CNSI NEW DIRECTIONS  are attached… Parking is $12, $5 w “disability” pass. There is meter parking on La Conte Ave. and parking at Ralphs on La Conte – if you decide to shop and/or risk it 🙂

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.”

When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home

This is an incredible project started by Dr. Paula J. Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist, and an Associate at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute and a past Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of:  The Myth of Women’s Masochism, They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, and ten other books. Her articles, essays, and op-eds have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications. 

Thank you for your interest in this work!

Listening is “the art and practice of putting someone else’s speaking, thinking, feeling needs ahead of our own,” wrote Marc Wong in Thank You For Listening.
The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project helps veterans heal – and reduces the too-common chasms between veterans and nonveterans – by having one nonveteran at a time simply listen to a veteran from any war. You can become involved by doing one or more sessions, by helping organize others to get involved, or both. Listeners are not therapists, and – except for speaking two sentences – they truly do nothing but listen. However, they do so with 100% of their attention and their whole hearts. Harvard University research has shown that veterans describe this as helpful, and the listeners say it is wonderfully transformative for them.

This is about human connection through the often overlooked but astonishing power of listening. Regardless of the veteran’s politics and the listener’s politics, the sessions are healing.

The three main steps you need to take are becoming familiar with the purpose and guidelines, finding a place to do the session, and finding a veteran who wants to do a session. For more information about how to get involved with the project, click here.

When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home

“He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.”
                                                                                                                                                   – Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

The DSM-5: A Dystopian Novel

March/April 2014, By Sam Kriss, from The New Inquiry

The best dystopian literature, or at least the most effective, manages to show us a hideous and contorted future while resisting the temptation to point fingers and invent villains. This is one of the major flaws in George Orwell’s 1984: When O’Brien laughingly expounds on his vision of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever” he starts to acquire the ludicrousness of a Bond villain; he may as well be a cartoon—one of the Krusty Kamp counselors in The Simpsons, raising a glass “to Evil.” Orwell’s satire of Stalinism, or Margaret Atwood’s on the religious right in The Handmaid’s Tale tend to let our present world off the hook a little by comparison. More subtle works, like Huxley’s Brave New World, are far more effective. His Controller, when interrogated, doesn’t burst out in maniacal laughter and start twiddling his moustache. He explains, in quite reasonable terms, why the dystopia he lives in is the best way to ensure the happiness of all—and he means it. Everything’s broken, but it’s not anyone’s fault; it’s terrifying because it’s so familiar.

by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Great dystopia isn’t so much fantasy as a kind of estrangement or dislocation from the present; the ability to stand outside time and see the situation in its full hideousness. The dystopian novel doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel. Maybe the greatest piece of dystopian literature ever written is Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a collection of observations and aphorisms penned by the philosopher while in exile in America during and after the Second World War. Even if, like I do, you disagree enthusiastically with his blanket condemnation of all “degenerated” popular culture, it’s hard not to be convinced that what we are living is “damaged life.” It’s not an argument so much as revelation. In Adorno’s bitterly lucid critique everything we take for granted is suddenly revealed in all its hideousness. The world Adorno lives in isn’t quite the same as ours; he’s coming at his subjects from a reflex angle—they’re a bunch of average Joes and Janes, he’s a misanthropic German cultural theorist with a preternaturally spherical head—but his insights are all the more relevant because of this. Something has gone terribly wrong in the world; we are living the wrong life, a life without any real fulfillment. The newly published DSM-5 is a classic dystopian novel in this mold.

It’s also not exactly a conventional novel. Its full title is an unwieldy mouthful: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. The author (or authors) writes under the ungainly nom de plume of The American Psychiatric Association—although a list of enjoyably silly pseudonyms is provided inside (including Maritza Rubio-Stipec, Dan Blazer, and the superbly alliterative Susan Swedo). The thing itself is on the cumbersome side. Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it’s unlikely to find its way to many beaches. Not that this should deter anyone; within is a brilliantly realized satire, at turns luridly absurd, chillingly perceptive, and profoundly disturbing.

If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it’s undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. Perhaps as an attempt to ward off the uncommitted reader, the novel begins with a lengthy account of the system of classifications used—one with an obvious debt to the Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are exhaustively classified according to such sets as “those belonging to the Emperor,” “those that, at a distance, resemble flies,” and “those that are included in this classification.”

Just as Borges’ system groups animals by seemingly aleatory characteristics entirely divorced from their actual biological attributes, DSM-5 arranges its various strains of madness solely in terms of the behaviors exhibited. This is a recurring theme in the novel, while any consideration of the mind itself is entirely absent. In its place we’re given diagnoses such as “frotteurism,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and “caffeine intoxication disorder.” That said, these classifications aren’t arranged at random; rather, they follow a stately progression comparable to that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, rising from the infernal pit of the body and its weaknesses (intellectual disabilities, motor tics) through our purgatorial interactions with the outside world (tobacco use, erectile dysfunction, kleptomania) and finally arriving in the limpid-blue heavens of our libidinal selves (delirium, personality disorders, sexual fetishism). It’s unusual, and at times frustrating in its postmodern knowingness, but what is being told is first and foremost a story.

This is a story without any of the elements that are traditionally held to constitute a setting or a plot. A few characters make an appearance, but they are nameless, spectral shapes, ones that wander in and out of view as the story progresses, briefly embodying their various illnesses before vanishing as quickly as they came—figures comparable to the cacophony of voices in The Waste Land or the anonymously universal figures of Jose Saramago’s Blindness. A sufferer of major depression and of hyperchondriasis might eventually be revealed to be the same person, but for the most part the boundaries between diagnoses keep the characters apart from one another, and there are only flashes. On one page we meet a hoarder, on the next a trichotillomaniac; he builds enormous “stacks of worthless objects,” she idly pulls out her pubic hairs while watching television. But the two are never allowed to meet and see if they can work through their problems together.

This is not to say that there is no setting, no plot, and no characterization. These elements are woven into the encyclopedia-form with extraordinary subtlety. The setting of the novel isn’t a physical landscape but a conceptual one. Unusually for what purports to be a dictionary of madness, the story proper begins with a discussion of neurological impairments: autism, Rett’s disorder, “intellectual disability”. The scene this prologue sets is one of a profoundly bleak view of human beings; one in which we hobble across an empty field, crippled by blind and mechanical forces whose workings are entirely beyond any understanding. This vision of humanity’s predicament has echoes of Samuel Beckett at some of his more nihilistic moments—except that Beckett allows his tramps to speak for themselves, and when they do they’re often quite cheerful. The sufferers of DSM-5, meanwhile, have no voice; they’re only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back. As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.

Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM-5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: “repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.” Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted. References to compulsive behavior throughout the book repeatedly refer to the “fear of dirt in someone with an obsession about contamination.” The tragic clincher comes when we’re told, “the individual does not recognize that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable.” This mad project is so overwhelming that its originator can’t even tell that they’ve subsumed themselves within its matrix. We’re dealing with a truly unreliable narrator here, not one that misleads us about the course of events (the narrator is compulsive, they do have poor insight), but one whose entire conceptual framework is radically off-kilter. As such, the entire story is a portrait of the narrator’s own particular madness. With this realization, DSM-5 starts to enter the realm of the properly dystopian.

This madness does lead to some startling moments of humor. One vignette describes in deadpan tones a scene at once touchingly pathos-laden and more than a little creepy: “He rubs his genitals against the victim’s thighs and buttocks. While doing this he fantasizes an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim.” The entry on caffeine intoxication disorder informs us, with every appearance of seriousness, that the diagnostic criteria include “recent consumption of caffeine” along with “1) restlessness 2) nervousness 3) excitement.” There are, occasionally, what seem to be surreal parodies of religious dietary regulations: “Infants and younger children […] eat paint, plaster, string, hair, or cloth. Older children may eat animal droppings, sand, insects, leaves, or pebbles.” What the levity of these moments masks, though, is the sense of loneliness that saturates the work.

The narrative voice of the book affects a tone of clinical detachment, one in which drinking coffee and paranoid-type schizophrenia can be discussed with the same flat tone. Under the pretense of dispassion this voice embodies a whole raft of terrifying preconceptions. Just like the neurological disorders that appear at the start of the book, mental illnesses appear like lightning bolts, with all their aura of divine randomness. Even when etiologies are mentioned they’re invariably held to be either genetic or refer to other illnesses such as substance abuse disorders. At no point is there any sense that madness might be socially informed, that the forms it takes might be a reflection of the influences and pressures of the world that surrounds us.

The idea emerges that every person’s illness is somehow their own fault, that it comes from nowhere but themselves: their genes, their addictions, and their inherent human insufficiency. We enter a strange shadow-world where for someone to engage in prostitution isn’t the result of intersecting environmental factors (gender relations, economic class, family and social relationships) but a symptom of “conduct disorder,” along with “lying, truancy, [and] running away.” A mad person is like a faulty machine. The pseudo-objective gaze only sees what they do, rather than what they think or how they feel. A person who shits on the kitchen floor because it gives them erotic pleasure and a person who shits on the kitchen floor to ward off the demons living in the cupboard are both shunted into the diagnostic category of encopresis. It’s not just that their thought-processes don’t matter, it’s as if they don’t exist. The human being is a web of flesh spun over a void.

With this radical misreading, the American Psychiatric Association is following something of a precedent in the actual psychological professions. Sigmund Freud himself performs a similar feat of ostranenie in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he appears to take the position of an alien observer of everyday affairs, noting that “the kiss […] is held in high sexual esteem among many nations in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.” If you’re going to make a properly objective study of human behavior, to some extent you have to disavow your own humanity. You have to ask, why kissing? Why do people press their mouths up against each other? In DSM-5 we can see a perverse mirror image of this kind of estrangement. Freud retreats to a position of inhuman detachment to ask questions. Here, the narrator does it to issue instructions.

The word “disorder” occurs so many times that it almost detaches itself from any real signification, so that the implied existence of an ordered state against which a disorder can be measured nearly vanishes and is almost forgotten. Throughout the novel, this ordered normality never appears except as an inference; it is the object of a subdued, hopeless yearning. With normality as a negatively defined and nebulously perfect ideal, anything and everything can then be condemned as a deviation from it. Even an outburst of happiness can be diagnosed as a manic episode. And then there are the “not otherwise specified” personality disorder categories. Here all pretensions to objectivity fall apart and the novel’s carefully warped imitation of scientific categories fades into an examination of petty viciousness. A personality disorder not otherwise specified is the diagnosis for anyone whose behaviors “do not meet the full criteria for any one Personality Disorder, but that together cause clinically significant distress […] e.g. social or occupational.” It’s hard not to be reminded of a few people who’ve historically caused social or occupational distress. If you don’t believe that people really exist, any radical call for their emancipation is just sickness at its most annoying.

If there is a normality here, it’s a state of near-catatonia. DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it. The vast absurd excesses of passion that form the raw matter of art, literature, love, and humanity are too distressing; it’s easier to stop being human altogether, to simply plod on as a heaped collection of diagnoses with a body vaguely attached.

For all the subtlety of its characterization, the book doesn’t just provide a chilling psychological portrait, it conjures up an entire world. The clue is in the name: On some level we’re to imagine that the American Psychiatric Association is a body with real powers, that the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” is something that might actually be used, and that its caricature of our inner lives could have serious consequences. Sections like those on the personality disorders offer a terrifying glimpse of a futuristic system of repression, one in which deviance isn’t furiously stamped out like it is in Orwell’s unsubtle Oceania, but pathologized instead. Here there’s no need for any rats, and the diagnostician can honestly believe she’s doing the right thing; it’s all in the name of restoring the sick to health. DSM-5 describes a nightmare society in which human beings are individuated, sick, and alone. For much of the novel, what the narrator of this story is describing is its own solitude, its own inability to appreciate other people, and its own overpowering desire for death—but the real horror lies in the world that could produce such a voice.

Read: http://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/dystopian-novel-dsm-5-zm0z14mazros.aspx

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.