It was December 8th, 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.
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
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.
“People are just as happy as they make their minds out to be.” -Abraham Lincoln
I remember, just four years ago, when I was wrapped up in the grips of depression, that this quote made me very angry. I thought it was so absurd that I was in control of my thinking, that happiness was my choice. At the time, I believed I was my diagnosis— which actually was a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder— and that I had no control over it. Doctors told me that I was “sick”, that I had a “brain disease”, and that it was just the way it was for me, and the way it always would be. I also endured severe anxiety that was so intense I wouldn’t leave the house most days and fantasized about death as a way to relieve my suffering.
I believed those doctors and suffered tremendously and silently for the next twelve years, wrapped up in my many addictions and a lifetime of negative thinking. As chance would have it, I started to feel that something was seriously wrong with me, and consulted a naturopathic physician for help. Blood work revealed that I was unhealthy in every way possible and that I had about six months to live before my liver failed completely. It was overloaded with chemicals and toxins from medications and my addictions. Miraculously, my intuition hadn’t been completely silenced after all.
With nothing left to lose, I’d reached the point at which I had to make a choice: to fight, or to give up. Though things seemed to not be going my way, I decided to take back control and make drastic changes in hopes to survive. That’s when yoga, meditation and nutrition came into my life, but first, I had to find a doctor to help me get off the medication I was currently on. The doctor I’d been seeing had refused to help, so I printed out a list of doctors covered by insurance and made some calls. Each nurse I spoke with wanted to help but doubted the doctor would take my case on. Weeks and thirty-seven “Nos” later, doctor thirty-eight finally said “Yes”. This doctor was not covered by insurance but had a sliding scale payment plan available, which made it possible for me to see him. The painful journey of detox began and so did my intense study of meditation, yoga and nutrition.
Up until this point in my life, I was searching for balance, peace and happiness outside of myself rather than looking inside, where I know today that it really resides. Yoga and meditation allowed me to journey inward and take a look at my internal world. Through daily yoga and meditation practices, I began to get to know myself better and discovered the way my brain worked. I uncovered a stream of negative thinking about myself, others, and the world around me. I began to see that these thoughts made me feel terrible and would often spark more negative thoughts and depressed or anxious feelings. With what I learned from meditation, I began to notice and be aware of my thinking, and then my moods. I learned to become the observer of not only my thoughts, but also my emotions.
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.
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.
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.”
What is mental illness? Schizophrenia? Autism? Bipolar disorder? Depression? Since the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry has attempted to provide definitive answers to these questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Often called The Bible of psychiatry, the DSM serves as the ultimate authority for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage of mental illness.
Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes:
“While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”
In Dr. Mercola’s article, the New England Journal of Medicine exposes the new DSM for making “Grief” a Psychiatric Illness. Dr. Mercola writes-
Do you shop too much? You might have Compulsive Shopping Disorder.
Do you have a difficult time with multiplication? You could be suffering from Dyscalculia.
Spending too much time surfing the Web? It might be Internet Addiction Disorder.
Spending too much time at the gym? You’d better see someone for your Bigorexia or Muscle Dysmorphia.
It’s almost impossible to see a psychiatrist today without being diagnosed with a mental disorder because so many behavior variations are described as pathology. And you have very high chance – approaching 100% — of emerging from your psychiatrist’s office with a prescription in hand. Writing a prescription is, of course, much faster than engaging in behavioral or lifestyle strategies, but it’s also a far more lucrative approach for the conventional model. Additionally, most practitioners have yet to accept the far more effective energetic psychological approaches.
The branding of various forms of normal human emotions as “mental illness” has been a Big Pharma cash cow for years. According to marketing professional Vince Parry in a 2003 commentary called “The Art of Branding a Condition“:
“Watching the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) balloon in size over the decades to its current phonebook dimensions would have us believe that the world is a more unstable place today than ever.”… Not surprisingly, many of these newly coined conditions were brought to light through direct funding by pharmaceutical companies, in research, in publicity or both.”
And if that’s not damning enough, a former chief of the American Psychiatric Association admitted that some of the “mistakes” the APA made in its diagnostic manual have had “terrible consequences,” which have mislabeled millions of children and adults, and facilitated epidemics of mental illness that don’t exist.
As a peer mentor, peer advocate and educator, I’ve worked with people aspiring to erase the stigma involved in mental health and realize their full potential. During the process, I have learned that to truly realize our highest potentials, we need to engage in transformative interactions with other people who share our aspiration to evolve. One way to do this is through mutual support groups and peer mentoring.
Peer support, including mutual support groups and peer mentoring, is a way to bring down the walls that isolate us. Mutual aid means we listen to and support each other as a community of equals, without any professional trying to define who we are. Each of us is an expert on our own experience, and each of us is the center for our decisions – and we are not alone.
In today’s “modern” world independence has become almost a religion and the idea that we need other people for anything seems like a “weakness”. The reality is that we are social creatures and our ability to co-exist with one another depends on our willingness to abide within a matrix of shared values and agreements about what is important, and most importantly, what is acceptable behavior. As individuals, we resemble the meadow flower. Though we are distinct as people, we are not separate. Though our expressions of life fluctuate, we can still become a part of the lustrous whole by recognizing our interconnectedness and inner beauty through self-awareness and community building.
Self-awareness is having a clear perception of our personalities, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. It allows us to understand other people, to be aware of how they perceive us, to understand our attitude and our responses to other people in the moment. It is through sharing our insights and understandings that we come to strengthen our community amid potentially alienating environments and circumstances, that we positively build on the self in the manner of spiritual alchemists who turn the lead of experience into the gold of realization and awareness.
Today is World Mental Health Day, but also the commencement of the 26th annual Alternatives Conference, in Portland, Oregon. Each Alternatives Conference offers technical assistance on peer-delivered services and self-help/recover methods. Since the conference is organized by consumers and survivors, it is a form of mutual aid and peer support/mentoring. Peerlink is a consumer-run national technical assistance center funded by the Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and is also helping to sponsor the conference.
The alternative approaches to mental health, with peer support groups and peer mentoring, are growing today more than ever, with Vet to Vet, Alcoholics Anonymous, Recovery International, Wildflowers’ Movement, The Icarus Project, other 12-step groups, etc. These groups transcend accepted notions of normality in favor of the wild color that is diversity grown from compassion. In vast meadows thriving with life, flowers bloom as a natural consequence of the environment. While perhaps of the same species, each blossom retains its own nature, and opens its colors to the sky as if offering to the great cycle of existence. Let us embrace our diversity.
Denise Maratos is a Peer Mentor & Advocate, and an Educator & Trainer. She is a graduate of Harvard University and UCSC. She has taught and lived around the world. Denise owns My Mind Mentor, an organization that incorporates mindfulness in discovering one’s potential. Three years ago she founded the Wildflowersʼ Movement, a peer support group and peer-mentoring network, which promotes the value of self-awareness and the attainment of a healthy lifestyle. She is also the representative for MindFreedom International, So. California.
It was December 8th, 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. 
Wildflowers' Movement 