A New Year’s Letter to Our Readers: The Past, Present, and Future of MIA

” if you have any local community philanthrophic/charity group that might contribute them, please try to get them to give something (I suggest to Robert and the MIA that perhaps a stock document stating MIA’s missions/what it delivers in value, usable as a presentation to potential donor entities, might be useful to have accessible somewhere on the site).”

Yes, I agree. And I would imagine most communities have a fund similar to the one my family took a tax right off, to contribute to years ago. And given the scope of the psychiatric industry’s harm of so many people, no longer just the poor and those with low IQ’s, but now also their attacks on those whose children and they test in the top 1% on standardized testing – since everyone outside the norm has a “mental illness,” according to today’s US psychiatrists.

I do recommend people, who don’t have family trusts, also consider researching into their local Community Funds, and giving information regarding MiA’s mission to as many of these small local investment funds as we can. As mentioned, these funds will try to match donors’ investment fund concerns / interests with requests for money, and it’s my understanding they will do this from anyone who requests donations for any non-profit cause.

I know a lot of the middle and upper middle class families, like mine, are being, or have been, destroyed by the 1%, their corporations, and their psychiatric minion. But there is potentially money in these local investment funds across the country from these ethical and once prosperous American families. And I actually recommend MiA send information to as many of these as possible, as well.

I’ve heard multiple people mention this type of problem; it’s not good. When people are reluctant to donate already in tough economic times, MIA simply has to make it easy and straightforward to donate. Perhaps a significant minority of what could have been donated last year was lost due to issues like this.

Here’s my story… a few months ago I changed to a new bank card and so needed to update my information on MIA to keep donating. But then when I tried to do so, for some reason MIA wants a “Issue Date” for the new card as well as the normal Expiry Date. I didn’t understand this – no other site requests a start and end date for a card – and then when I emailed the support person nobody responded. So for several months I gave up and donated nothing. Finally now I figured out that I needed to cancel the current account/card data entirely. And then just restart from the beginning. Then I could enter a new card without being asked the start date as I would have if I had had to update the card. Which makes little sense, but at least it worked now, and I just got the email that I my first new payment was processed.

As Robert Kiyosaki said, “Money flows to those who make things easy.”

Hi, Eric. I’ve just sent you an email about how to update your ongoing donation. Briefly, you can either cancel your current subscription and start a new one, or else you can communicate your new donation amount to [email protected] and we can update your current subscription on your behalf. In the future, we’re hoping to set things up so that people can update the amount of their donation directly from their account page.

Thanks very much — both for your financial support and for your kind words.

sadsack50,

Truth needed to come from a medical journalist, Robert Whitaker is not actually a doctor. Unfortunately, that’s how truly pharmaceutically misinformed, and greed inspired, our current mainstream medical industry today actually is.

My best wishes to you in your efforts to “get clean.” And I’m so very sorry today’s medical community met you with “unbelievable resistance.” But I also met with a similar problem, when trying to wean off drugs that made me ungodly sick, so I could once again gain control my own life. Rather than having psychiatrists, with delusions of grandeur it was their right to rewrite my life’s story, “manage,” ad infinitum, their iatrogenically induced “mental illness.”

How embarrassing I used to believe doctors had promised to “first and foremost do no harm,” and used to trust in them. It’s such a shame medical journalists must point out today’s current psychiatric industry crimes against humanity, since the entire mainstream medical community has also lost their historic understanding that the psychiatrists are nothing but quacks.

We have looked at doing things like AdSense, and repeatedly found that we could not in good conscience capitalize on our constituency by giving our space over to a flow of ads that we could not really control. Ultimately, the monied interests would find a way to dominate and MIA, if anything, exists to serve the people and the approaches who do not have that kind of backing. So, as tempting as it was to cash in on the traffic flow, at every point that we’ve considered it, we felt that doing so would have compromised the clean space for thought and dialogue we have tried to hard to cultivate. It would have taken the joy out of what we started out to do.

So, we’ve had to hope that the people who benefit from MIA, whose experiences were affirmed and validated by Robert Whitaker’s research and writing, and whose outpouring of energy in the quest for meaningful change brought MIA into existence, would be moved to help it survive. At every point that we looked for ways to capitalize on our traffic, we felt we couldn’t do it in a way that wouldn’t betray our readers’ faith. It would mean shutting out money from those who could afford to pay, and asking for money from those we wish to benefit – but who really didn’t have it. Hence the need to be nonprofit.

Bob has, in the creation of this website, consistently made choices – whenever they were there to be made – that benefitted others over himself or the website. Hence, again, the need to become a nonprofit – and hope that those we aim to serve will be moved to help us continue. If not, and we cannot survive, at least we’ll know that we did the right thing when we had the chance to do it, and we benefitted those we wished to in an unsullied way. We came into existence in large part to provide a forum for voices that had gone unheard, and we could not have then cluttered up that space with anything that diminished the voices that we should be heard the loudest and clearest.

But in answer to Pat Risser, below, we also exist to be a forum for discussion and debate. In order to do that we have to keep the door open to those who speak to a range of perspectives. We exist to make sure that people and perspectives that hadn’t been given a meaningful seat at the table in these discussions would get that seat and be heard. We do not exist to shut out people and perspectives. We exist to foster a dialogue and to keep it going, because it is – as the Open Dialogue experience has shown – exactly keeping the dialogue going that helps to resolve the madness. Any point at which a voice is summarily dismissed or shut out is the point at which madness begins. I think the big lesson from all this is that we can’t move forward by throwing anybody overboard, even if it’s in retaliation for those who have been thrown overboard in the past. We need everyone on board.

However, for those who have no interest in reconciliation, I offer this; MIA is a place to sharpen your arguments. We are a dialogue space in which to track and develop the evolving language within which this debate takes place, and by which it is shaped. We bring in viewpoints that are relevant. That doesn’t mean that they pass a litmus test for ideological consistency and purity; it means they have something to add to the conversation, or sometimes something to which an argument should be developed. To ask for a space in which no divergent viewpoints exist would be like asking for a gym that doesn’t have a lot of inconvenient weights lying around that need to be picked up. The point is to engage with them. (And, ideally, pay your gym membership, so we don’t have to blast you with advertising while you work out.)

In answer to one of Pat’s specific questions; the problem of what to do about people who may harm themselves or others has been a part of this conversation from the beginning, stretching back long before any of the terms currently used for it even existed. Thomas Szasz didn’t really solve the problem. Nobody has. It’s a perennial, ongoing problem, that probably can’t be dealt with in any global or permanent way. Dealing with it involves an engaged, vigilant citizenry, well-armed with the information, philosophy and rhetoric needed to make sense out of these problems if and when they arise. There is no perfect solution to the fact that life is inherently risky and dangerous, and people sometimes make choices – as they sometimes must – that run the risk of harming themselves or others. I think that Szasz’s argument to leave it to law enforcement leaves out an awareness of the fact that people come from, and are in, circumstances beyond their control that shape them and their behavior. How do we address that fact in a way that doesn’t run the risk of somehow being called “treatment”? Short of reshaping our society fundamentally (which I’m certainly all for) how do we address the current needs of people whose lives have been stolen from them by trauma and injustice?

I think that over the short time MIA has existed we’ve seen meaningful evolution in the public awareness of the ways that stress and trauma contribute to what has been called “psychosis” and “mental illness.” We have done all we can to promulgate this awareness on MIA. We can’t end the conversation, but we can help to make sure that that part of it gets heard.

I agree that lines will need to be collectively drawn as history progresses, but without a basic means of communication there will be no collective to draw upon. So step one is establishing and preserving our ideological infrastructure which at the moment is headquartered at MIA.