Advocacy for the caring of survivors of trauma and difference began much, much earlier than before 1963 when Kennedy passed the Community Mental Health Act. However, at that time, the vision was that training and housing be provided in communities by communities.
If I had been in the Movement at that time, my goals would have been:
1. Respect for those who “survived the camps.” The full acknowledgement of the intelligence and personal responsibility shown by anyone who has lived through violence, cultural oppression, psychological gaslighting and the economic shutdown of those who choose not to comply. Eurocentric education established in Washington D.C. insists on assimilation to masculine logic to the exclusion of feminine principles of loving observation, patient wait for progress and the collaboration of independent groups.
2. Integration of the body with the Mind. Particularly for those who have experienced only radical insanity between what is said and what is practiced, it is not possible to engineer “Recovery” by sitting around with a Google printout on how to have a relationship or how to build a resume. When Norman Sartorius, the president of the APA stated in 1984 that psychiatry cannot cure the mentally ill, he was making an understatement. People need minds and bodies to find our way through the terrible suffering that does not end, but is a challenge and opportunity for strength, resilience and blessing. Cognition is not brainwork; it must be moved to the muscle.
3. Finding mercy for others must be a lifelong process of finding forgiveness and mercy for ourselves. If we do not see our own arrogance and ethnocentrism, we will never see the first step needed to heal our families of choice, which is acceptance of our own mental illness and the probability of our own healing the moment we are born again to the awareness that we are still alive.
4. Understanding that brains work in many ways; competent survivors of individual differences are desperately needed as expert guides on these trails. We can work together. Had Steven Hawking or Temple Grandin or Maya Angelou been in this System without some physical support or teaching, they would not have survived high school. Why are our children, 17 and 18 and 19 and 20, going off to the freedom of college, only to gas themselves in a car in the parking lot on campus, jumping off any bridge not chained off, or using illegal drugs to wipe their minds clear of our established insanity?
5. Establishment of families. Most of our survivors have never seen a family, never had a family who did not either beat or neglect them. Some of our survivors have kept body and soul together in families of extreme wealth, and complete neglect and the poverty of the soul. They have never seen a gun, and have never been hugged. Some have been simple victims of simple ignorance which do not require scalpels, but a comedy show and a roadmap. Surgery can do so much damage when all that was needed was a massage and a week in a hot tub. Some of our colleagues are so different they struggle everyday just for the privilege to breathe. I hope we can establish a community where hugging and laughter and diversity are the norm.
6. The development of personal competent compassion. There is a wisdom in knowing what kind of tool will be most helpful in a given individual situation. There can be an education over time in the difference between enabling, sharing, torturing, isolating, drugging, coaching, rewarding and training. Part of that is finding a way to get competent long-term depth psychotherapy for our students without having to sacrifice their dignity to papers and an investment firm. This must be provided in the original language of the student.
7. Professional career, whether or not it complies to current EuroAmerican educational outlines. Since our fingerprints and documents and diagnoses have been smeared all over our records, there seems currently in L.A. County only one career path suggested for survivors, that is “Peer Support” in the System that created this mess in the first place. Survivors of even the worst violence and neglect can find our own niche, to be our own medicine. The coping skills we choose to use are the gifts we bring to the community. The clubhouse must have a clear survivor bridge to community colleges with dorms.
8. Development of professional careers through portfolio and project. Neither Steve Jobs and or Annie Dodge Wauneka had a B.A. when they began their careers. People born into trauma, who have become completely dysregulated emotionally, CANNOT work 9-5 for five days in a row. We must begin to train. We can coach collage and voice and dance at the beginning, matriculating to the Dodgers, Mars, a family or the Taj Mahal. In time. If we so choose.
9. Openness to the idea that if you do not hear voices, it may simply be that you are not connected. Perhaps before Tesla and Einstein, we could assume that if electromagnetic energy could not be seen, quantified or accessed outside material wires and telescopes, they must not exist and that the experience of them must be a “disorder.” But since 1984, this psychiatric “fact” can no longer be assumed.
Generational, like geographical, sound frequencies travel through time and space. These have been seen and experienced by millions. Scientists have been largely focused only on the bits in front of their eyes. Yet physicists, mothers, shamans and gurus speak with unseen “beings” and intuition as a matter of course. How can any voice not become violent when oppressed, drugged, dismissed, disrespected, when they have vital warnings and histories to guide us? Alchemy, witchcraft, government, snake oil and Christianity have not been discredited because they contained no truth or medicine, but because organizations chose to counterfeit them for profit.
10. We do not care only because patients have potential of full sufficiency, but because we all die on pallets. There is now a crisis of suffering of the neglect of the maintenance of our individual and collective souls. I have no answer to “Laura’s Law” or to a debate as to whether or not to provide 3800 beds in a prison for the mentally oppressed, except for a great quote from a fellow survivor: “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”
11. Appreciation and respect for the nomads and the gypsies. Why have we no respect for those who choose not to pay rent on occupied land? Why like Hitler, have we chosen constant harrying and disruption of any community that is established. When will we come back to the place where birds know how to nest, restored to natural habitats in the patience of time and with the mutual accompaniment of loving learners?
12. The archiving of the DSM as a relic of the racist past.
A Mission Statement Guideline
Do not focus on “getting more beds” or “providing better treatment.” Focus on homes with windows and giant gardens where survivors can be coached to rebel, the weak can be strengthened, and performers can be trained to dance with wild abandon. Human independence and contribution is most fecund outside the walls of forced democracy and assimilation to what you think. Parents and coaches are parents and coaches forever with the clear and agonizing relief of knowing that one day healthy babies will graduate and the disabled accepted and cared for by teams of mothers.
Like fractals, we cannot know what tiny pattern, replicated, will emerge. It is infinite. Focus on the light at the edge of the universe. Then focus your love of yourself and your own body infinitely. Replicate the mercy and forgiveness you find for yourself. Know yourself. Know what you need. Know who you love. Know yourself as a daughter of a mother with a grandmother from East Africa. The fractal will emerge, emerge, emerge in living color from the focus.
Focus on building a home. Once that home is established, others will follow, not by force or cop or economic policy, but by drumbeat and fresh produce, sport and play and sheltering. Focus on the living room, however that comes to look.
What did I just read? Overall it sounds great, & I’m 100% on board, in agreement. But, BUT, there are many verbal “landmines” here, when I stop to think deeply & reflect about what I read here. We start with a citation mention of Kennedy’s “Community Mental Health Center Act”, but then nothing more about that. Next, LOOK OUT!, here comes “the movement”! Another manifesto of impotent rage expressed as polemic. A list of demands. Conditions of “treatment” for “those people”, or “these people”, or something, or I’m confused here. Some of these bullet points seem to refer to current L.A. County practice & programs for homeless people. Screw that “persons-experiencing-homelessness” virtue signaling crap. I was a HOMELESS PERSON. I experience my entire life, – it’s only my body that is homeless. Temporarily. Eventually, in the far future after I die, I won’t care where I don’t live. Why should I care now? Nobody else does. Except a surplus of teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing “progressive” “liberals”, and Social Justice Warriors, who bemoan the fact that they can’t solve all of all of the worlds problems for every body every where all the time….too bad….
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Bradford, I hope we can build an independent center where “conditions of treatment” are chosen by clubhouse members, that it will be a small enterprise and that it will eventually be self-sustained by members ourselves. And I hope that it will spark a network of free, independent, intentional, inclusive communities in Los Angeles. Our history has brought us here. We cannot change either history or the future. We can only build a home for ourselves. If you live in Los Angeles, would you be willing to talk to me about your experiences?
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I once lived in Costa Mesa, and later, Westlake Village, out the freeway near 1,000 Oaks, in Ventura County…. I’d be glad to share any or all of my story, and answer any questions. I’m back in my small New Hampshire hometown of Keene 35 years. A local homeless camp just got cleaned out & cleared out this week. I see the drug zombies of the local CMHC every day. Literally. I don’t mince words.
As much as I appreciate & support your efforts to build this “independent center”/”clubhouse”, anybody who goes there COULD be under some Court, or other Governmental restrictions/control…. The local “homeless shelter”/501(c)3, has for years suffered & struggled due to their embracing of pedophiles & sex offenders….
If you are as “inclusive” as I suspect you might like to be, you’re only inviting problems & trouble down the road…. And, this I must argue most strongly. YES, you CAN “change the future”. Each of us in fact CREATES the future, one day at a time. I’m living in the future that I created for myself.
On Social Security Disability, HUD-subsidized housing, & FoodStamps….. The local hospital monopoly refuses me any medical care, so I may as well not have the MediCaid & MediCare I supposedly have….
So how can I help you “build” that “home for (our)yourselves”….?….
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I volunteered with Painted Brain for a year before it became “funded.” It was free, inviting, inclusive. An expressive arts drop-in. No fingerprinting, diagnostics or billing codes.
I grew up on the Navajo Checkerboard. Some friends found their way back to their personal and cultural centers long after the Long Walk and the near catastrophe of missionary “charity.” In my family, religion without personal reflection or listening to greater perspectives was simply a “digging at the splinters in your eye because I have a beam in my own.”
But families become self-sustaining again when they were connected to the larger network, to our tribes and to the caring and technologies curated from global cultures. If we live wild, free, in chosen groups, we can move toward healthy villages. There is no need for foodstamps in garden villages. This is a virtual bloody war of quiet mercy.
You can help us in Los Angeles by continuing to write about how you see things from your part of the world, by seeking medicine that works. I have found partial healing in shamans, crystals, frijoles, parrots and even a bit at Keck USC. My true healers take neither the dole from an investment company disguised as medical insurance or cash. They simply ask that I share our Soul sometimes dressed as a sticky bun and a coffee.
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The Mental Health Myth and the Autism/Aspergers/Neurological Difference Hoax are the greatest threats we now face to civil liberties, and to life itself.
And this is always targeted either at children, or at marginalized groups.
We should be alarmed at the way local governments team up with religious groups to try and subdue the poor and the homeless by attacking their political consciousness and their attempts to build community.
After the youngest son of Rick and Kay Warren shot himself in the head at the age of 27, Rick said that Matthew, “had the finest psychiatrists, the finest psychologists, and the finest prayer warriors in the world”.
Well if that isn’t homicide by voodoo, then I don’t know what is. Very few people could survive that.
And people should be highly alarmed by Warren’s Hope For Mental Health Ministry and the study and prayer circles they are forming, and the counseling hours they are donating to the public, and by their close relationship with the new 8 story Integrative Psychiatry building at UC Irvine.
https://hope4mentalhealth.com/
And if this were not enough, we now have CA Governor Gavin Newsom trying to pass legislation which would create Mental Health Courts in each country and subject the homeless to compulsory mental health treatment.
He first started to talk about this in response to Donald Trump’s visit to San Francisco, where Trump wanted to set up internment camps. What Newsom is trying to do is no different, it is just more politically tenable.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Gavin-Newsom-Care-Court-mental-health-16973070.php
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gov-gavin-newsom-proposes-court-ordered-mental-health-treatment-for-homeless-people#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Legislature%20approved,and%20other%20behavioral%20health%20disorders
https://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/2385961/newsom-proposes-mental-health-courts-to-aid-homelessness.html/amp
Very few could survive what Matthew Warren was subjected to. But very few abuse survivors could persevere in their fight for self-awareness and political-consciousness after a session with a state provided counselor, or after a dose of psychiatric neurotoxins.
Great Article!
Joshua
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I believed that the pandemic had stopped the rush to violence against the mentally ill. I thought that people would come to Heart Forward LA for assistance after Kerry Morrison spent time and thought to find the best practical, physical alternatives to incarceration and pharmaceutical restraint. https://www.heartforwardla.org
In the past year, Los Angeles has spent millions on “research projects,” “grants,” “conferences,” “tiny house villages,” and “sanitation.” In the past year, Governor Newsom seems to be pushing forward “Care Courts.” Wow. The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
I cannot do much with the years I have left; but maybe I can work to build one pilot clubhouse for sanity in Los Angeles. We were given this planet, with our bodies in them. We were given adobe, sticks and food to sustain us for the time we are here. Thank you for the links. And I hope you are writing continuously about your experiences and the projects you are doing to restore independent communities in the United States.
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All around us, bodies are lying on the street. And I am an old, old woman. I became very old and suicidal when I was five, continually, but never lost hope until I was subjected to the billing codes that allowed Elavil, Stelazine, Haldol, Lithium, Depakote and Seroquel to numb, divide and destroy my ability to struggle in safety.
Since the unnecessary deaths of Devin Liang, Stewart Lupton, Darren Liess, and Heather Wilcox, I have choices every day. I can allow Keck’s cold dismissal of me as a candidate for liver transplant (psycho-social issues) to tie me up in court or endless testing in other hospitals, or I can use the minutes I have left to live in a clean room, eat vegetables and black beans from the foodbank, design poetry and art, dream about what intentional community means, and teach what I know to be true from my limited perspective.
What I know to be true is that I am in love with my life and dance with the universe. I found hope at Project Return and Painted Brain, and I pass it along through Sims Library of Poetry, UU Fellowship and Heart Forward LA. https://www.hearforwardla.org
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re: “… Do not focus on “getting more beds” or “providing better treatment.”
This is just one ‘place’ that deeply bothers me, as my little corner of the world (near Sequim, WA) is adding in a 16 bed “E & T” psychiatric hospital, where there will be 16 safe rooms with 24/7 video monitoring. I ache for the folks who – in their deepest despair – contact our region’s Crisis Line (I was on the committee that selected the organization). I fear that people in need of support – will, instead, find a “crisis team” (or just law enforcement or paramedics) coming to their ‘rescue’ – most likely the very thing that caller hoped to avoid while reaching out for support. I ache for these folks in that their freedom can be taken away on the whim of others, and a system of faces they do not know will decide what they can wear or eat and watch them in their deepest despair from a “safe” distance. I fear that the local community benignly assumes the mental health care “works” – without actually seeing any “customer satisfaction survey”. No one has heard the stories of local folks who’ve been discharged as ‘depressed’ (then wander off in the middle of the night) while in active psychosis or threatened with refusal for much-needed medical care when answering that – yes, they had been deeply depressed (but spoke with trusted therapist) because, first, they need to go get a psychiatric exam. These true stories come from community volunteers with deep commitments to wellness.
Nowhere in this… nowhere at all – NOWHERE – is a scintilla of understanding re: peer respites. Nowhere. Read that about a million times.
I ache for the upcoming anger from the local very NIMBY “Save Our Sequim” people, who utterly lambasted those seeking treatment for opioid use (2018-2021) at the soon-to-open MAT center – characterizing all who seek treatment as villains, robbers, violence-prone and coming on one-way Greyhound free bus passes from Seattle to rid Seattle of its homeless so that these homeless “addicts” can live in the fields around Wal-Mart and Costco and rape/pillage nearby seniors. They raised money and filed lawsuits. The Washington Post carried the story of ‘Save Our Sequim”s NIMBY mindset because our county also has a very high rate of opioid use.
I ache because I have sat on multiple councils and boards re: mental health and disability and see how it is so much easier to maintain the status quo than to put it to the side and consider what we don’t know we don’t know. We hear/see/do what the Powers want us to hear/see/do.
It’s like we talk, discuss, chat, write, listen, report, read, think… and all the while “mental health” grows increasingly convoluted – tied up. And whatever ‘should’ underpin our thinking about how we care about our fellow sentient beings… is repeatedly thrown under the bus because of bureaucracy.
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I love being a poet in rooms where artists/audiences understand that we must define our roles and companies and the view from above if we are going to hold back the massive destruction of wordrage from the disabled and the elders, both from whom we obtain the wisdom to sustain.
Since painting my room a beautiful turquoise months ago, I have not yet unraveled my jewelry. I love color, metal and shiny beads. Every time I have an important meeting, I waste time untangling chains from ropes from intricate leaves. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to ride the bus. I don’t want to be seen. And I don’t want to make a grave mistake by opening my mouth.
But as human divine, I have come to notice the mistake is not in “doing” too much or not enough, but in not being fully maintained and charged. I think the tangles and encephalopathy stop me cold. I have to unknot. I cannot knot.
I am all things, and must glorify All. I am knot and unknot. We are so priveleged to be particles massaged in waves of matter and light. And for matter, only matter matters. For the poet, the syllable; the designer, the line; the activist, the action; the mother, the family connected to community Spirit; the gardener, the hothouse tomato.
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….So….”greenhouses”?….we need more greenhouses, you say?….lol, thnx!,lol
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Is there anything we need?
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The Community Mental Health Act sounded good in practice, but it did come into being before the major dependence on psychiatric drugs in treatment. There were some psychiatric drugs available that time, but it was not until “Prozac” and into the 90s’ that these drugs became the first line of care. This proved to the detriment of all, but particularly the “patient.” And it was at that time, I think, that many, such as clergy and others who had been providing counseling and care were more likely to refer their clients to these psychiatrists or to others who could dispense these drugs and also deliver diagnoses as based on the DSM. Additionally, the insurance companies became heavily involved with their “managed care concept” in which to them psychiatric drugs are considered as the quickest, easiest and most financially feasible way to get results. Now, what do we have is a heavily drugged society getting more heavily drugged. In the process, the issues and problems that need to be addressed are not addressed. In my opinion, this includes learning disorders or difficulties which, if not careful get hidden under a mental health diagnosis and the subsequent drugging which causes further issues. There are other things impacting these like toxic substances in the air, water and earth, including even these drugs in our groundwater. I believe all this contributes to higher rates of issues like “autism” and related disorders. One might also consider “Alzheimer’s” which is rising amongst older adults as another aspect of this. I do not know if we have an adequate answer to these issues at present. We must consider that these psychiatric drugs actually do cause or contribute to any alleged symptoms of alleged mental illness. Right now, we are not in a position to completely get rid of all these psychiatric drugs, even if there was a community and legal consensus as to their danger, which there is not, yet. So, the best thing we can do at the moment is assist those impacted and their families in any manner possible. It would also behoove us to not consider diagnoses such as “autism” as hoaxes, because they do affect the family structure in all kinds of ways. Each person, each family needs assistance, not always financially, to help them with the circumstances of which have been wrought upon them. Thank you.
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The detriment of all except those profiting from the creation of a permanent underclass of “mentally ill” enforced “customers.”
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I don’t know if psychiatry is viable or unviable. It damaged me. I have found some truth in the writings of Hebrew and Christian writers. Snake oil works. Counterfeit, petroleum products and laudenum with Snake Oil on the labels, like DSM diagnoses or the substitution of Christ for white monuments, have damaged me.
I started viewing a business webinar on diversity, inclusion and equity yesterday. I think business enterprise, in connection to Flow, has some possibility for healing, like politics, and even, perhaps science. Like mothers and bees. The question I ask is: What is counterfeit?
Where is Concert A? Tuning, balance, are intuitive, based on practice: the phrase and the rest, the start up and shut down, the dance. If I find mercy for myself, take it into my mouth, I exude mercy. The customer in the old clock shop is myself, the proprietor who loves cuckoos and watches and loves the health and success of little boys. And the customer is the little boys’ father.
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Psychiatry is a pseudoscience, a drug racket, and a mechanism of social control. It’s 21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins. Psychiatry has done, and continues to do, FAR MORE HARM, than good…. In other words, it’s on life support, and therefore, neither truly viable, nor sustainable…. Long past time to PULL THE PLUG on the quackery of psychiatry, IMHO….
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If you find any, any medicine, program or person that is saving lives – anything you do to stimulate vitality in the persons, places or the planet closest to you – please write to Mad in American, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Supreme Court , your local paper, your third cousin.
It is not that we write, but that we document what we find to be true in our own work. Tatters with stitches make quilts. Neurons that find resources – and then remanufacture and redesign the nutrition/data – are moved to spark the vitality forward. This is how eyes wiggle toes.
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Since quarantine, Los Angeles has experienced weather close to divine. It has been not too hot and not too cool. It has been just right.
At the same time, soon after the pandemic started, we had a Massive, rolling earthquake that, had it been placed anywhere but in the mountains east, would have bowled the County under in a mass of metal parts. I woke up to hear the timbers cracking and groaning in the walls and ceilings. My bedroom with 500 books rose up like the bridge of a ship, shuddered across the swell and settled down into the rock of a trough. It was beautiful. People died, as we tend to do.
We live wild and are born for goodness. When we follow an educated nobility buried in plantations with terracotta guardians and gold crowns, we lose the point of play, when trauma is a story we tell in the comedy show with just a teeny, weeny, weeny taste of the whiskey.
For a few months, Los Angeles rested. We played. We meditated. We stopped. Maybe one deer got across a highway somewhere to chew some succulent undergrowth and prevent a spark. When we do not stop and do not listen, Pachemama grabs a broom and gets a little nuts. There is nothing worse than cranky Pachemama. She wants us cared for. She wants us competent and healthy. She gets mad when we’re not.
We have traded in our resources of Soul and soil for cheap knockoffs. We think good is sitting establishment, and evil is upheaval. We’re afraid of the game. We’re afraid to open our eyes to see the giant blank of the wall we are called to swaddle in color and teenagers.
We’re crabbily hunched over the freshly-mowed diamond stuffing ourselves with brautwurst and talking on the cellphone. We miss the violent catch, the tumble, the battering of the pitcher and the homerun. We avoid pain, we avoid the craggy pinnacles, we avoid the freeze and we seem forced to avoid our lives as free.
We can never be free alone. Slaves need Moses, Grandma Moses and Bonhoeffer. I am not interested in spending three months dragging my poundage up Mount Shasta for a photo of a pretty blizzard blowing across the Rocky Mountains. But I love busses, trains, with stinky fat witches with Dorritos, hotdogs with jalapeno mustard, and cackles to share at the top of their lungs. We don’t get paid, we just do it for the love of it. Because of “these” people, a lot of people buy earphones to enjoy new experiences with heavy metal. Crones are gifts.
Somehow waves are connected to particles. As water, as light, I am here and everywhere. So what does it matter what I do? I don’t know; I just like poetry, gradients, details, syllables, wild men and old horses. We are in the current, whether or not we see the flow; we may as well giddily enjoy it as we go. We were made for goodness. We die, as people tend to do. As planets do. Why not paint the room and see what it looks like?
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I am convinced that that our power is in the community of interbeing and compassion. If we live quietly and well, we may provide quiet wells of kindness. I saw a video of a ship in the middle a storm on the North Atlantic. I guess the sailors were seeing the highest waves they had ever seen in their lives. It was terrifying even on camera. They were in imminent danger of death. And laughing. Joking. Loving the adventure.
Keck recently sent me to a geriatric ward for encephalopathy secondary to liver damage. With cirrhosis, poverty, and sensitivity, I live in a funky tugboat on the high seas. Laughing. Joking. Loving the adventure. And often in bed for hours.
But what if we really could get 5.1 million, the cost of a State “tiny house village,” where 240 orphans and widows are invited to live in 177 sheds on the 110 Freeway? What if we could build a clubhouse shared by 177 people from the new apartment buildings finally going up, a pilot which could be replicated in any language and culture in Los Angeles? An architecture of universal design with a garden, service animals, computers and a corridor to colleges, universities and workshops in vocational and entrepreneurial skills? A drop-in center of invitation where those who do not choose to pay rent are free to come and go. Where dinner and hope are valued more than missionary and cavalry coercion? Laughing. Joking. Loving the adventure? Read Mary Watkins, “Toward Psychologies of Liberation.” Read the book of John. Read A.A. Milne, “Winnie the Pooh.”
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P.S. I am not talking about building sheds. The County did that. 5.1 M.
I am hoping we can build an architecture of universal design with a garden and a kitchen.
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Jane, the problem you have when you are dealing with the homeless, other marginalized groups, and with those being targeted as mentally ill, is that these population groups are already completely colonized by religionists.
So the people have been led to believe in Recovery. Now this is not the same as recuperation. Subjected to trauma. or after an illness, one may well need to recuperate. No, this is Recovery, which has a very specific moral meaning of seeking to correct an innate moral defect.
All of the out reach to these marginalized population groups has first and foremost the objective of making people believe that it is their own immorality which is the cause of their marginalization.
And then this is compounded all the more so when there are talk therapy sessions where the client is being induced into disclosing their affairs, or when there are psychiatric neurotoxins being introduced.
You would think that the people at the bottom of our society, those who have the least to lose, would be the most radical. But very rarely is this true.
I will say this, during the Occupy Protests, you did have those on the margins partaking. And the Occupy Movement was envisioned to be able to include the homeless.
But in the vast majority of situations you find those in such marginalized groups seeking approval from their oppressors by trying to show that they have signed on to the same moral code. So then no one else is ever responsible for your suffering, because the Self-Reliance ethic says so.
And then local government works with the religious groups. They give them defacto exemption from local ordinances for the use of tax payer funded properties. And these are not people who are intending to engage in non-violent civil disobedience, like say Food Not Bombs. Local officials run them out. No, the defacto exemptions are given to the religious groups because of their message of Repentance and Recovery. These groups are not defending the First Amendment, their actions are protests against the First Amendment. They believe that we should be living in a theocracy.
Our county mental health officials hold all day long meetings with the religious groups, and then declare that, “Recovery is built into everything we do.”
So you can’t have community when people have swallowed this innate moral defect idea.
And it is because of this innate moral defect idea being so wide spread that Gavin would believe that he can set up Mental Health Courts which would compel involuntary mental health procedures.
And then coming from the George W. Bush Housing and Urban Development, there was this idea called “Housing First”. And it says that while someone may need mental health treatment and job skills training, you can’t really do that very well until they are housed. So this is somewhat progressive.
But this has been completely coopted by this shelter industry, people like Abode. They present their mission as dealing with the presumed mentally ill and mentally incompetent, and their actions are little more than a funnel to get people into the mental health system.
And then once housing the homeless became about things like Tiny Houses you were already talking about moral defect and mental illness.
Housing First meant housing which could be rented to other people. And to do this it has to be code compliant. Building codes do not allow a bathroom door to open directly on to the kitchen. And there are minimum size requirements for door ways and minimum clearances for bathrooms.
Carefully designed you can get a code compliant studio apartment down to about 400 sq feet, about the size of two adjacent car ports. But this is over the 8’6″ width limit for the public road ways.
These Tiny Houses are usually built to be road transportable. They use the amenities and design modes of travel trailers and recreational vehicles. These are not permanent buildings and so the codes do not apply. And they are also not intended for permanent occupancy.
Some people may chose to live long term in such things, but this is their choice. Once the interest in housing the homeless got shifted to talking about these Tiny Houses, it was already in the realm of internment camps and mental health.
And Abode likes to run these, and they are completely centered on the ideal of mental health and innate moral defect. And just like it is with Gavin Newsom, their talk is always gaslighting.
We need to block all of these things until their is a sufficient economic restructuring to make sure that no one is ever unhoused or without needed medical care. Otherwise these kinds of targeted and needs tested programs will always be designed to make marginalized groups into scapegoats.
Joshua
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Colonialism, the Beast of American Greed, is not only a matter of nationalism, but a matter of your broken heart. Can jelly fish change the PH in the ocean? That, I don’t know. Do bees have any say in colony collapse? Those who fervently believe in the prayers of those in tune with Mercy and kindness hope so. Those who have seen words change lives have faith. Phenomenalists and the Dine’ would say, “Do bees ask for support with intelligence? How do we notice them? In communion with ourselves as bee-ings.”
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Making the homeless targets for psychiatry, and for these new style interment camps in the tiny house movement, has got to be vigorously opposed.
And we already have the new style internment camps as run by Abode.
Joshua
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The tiny house village here offers free psychotropics and no coaching or training by peers in creating projects or products to provide income, no community building in mutual accompaniment, no income of at least $1000 a month for transportation, classes in making material products and work tools.
If you can make anything, you are restricted from selling anything but sex, guns, enforcement, social work, or legal and illegal drugs. The bus system in L.A. has detreriorated to such a degree that if you choose to live without cards and codes and numbers on your forearms, it is impossible. Those who are blind, disabled, sick, or different give up. We are cut off by neurodiversity, religion, color, gender, indigenous culture, appearance and “noncompliant” behavior dictated to us by New England, 3000 miles away, perpetuated by the blind neediness of mercenary middle men.
Mental health “behavioral” treatment has become a mental illness of totalitarian control. Everybody must be white and undisabled. Everyone must be young, independent, and in love with “technology” and car culture. When we dismantle diversity through micromanagement, rather than pausing to allow the elk to migrate across the bridge, we make a metal portculis restricting our own freedom.
We can go back to the intuitive. We can live with technology in the toolshed, and laughter in the kitchen. We CAN live paperless and cookieless; it has been done. It will be done in tiny bubbles of caring and sharing, before or after total apocalypse.
We all make different contributions. The only thing I have to give is what I have seen, and the talent and mercy I nurture daily.
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Plus, Jane, don’t forget, you have compassion, and a natural writing ability that would make J.K.Rowling a $TRillionaire, and not just a $Billionaire. Don’t you sometimes feel that you’re swimming upstream against the tide….????….
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Some salmon are getting up behind the dams now, to spawn and strengthen the bears.
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Tiny Houses are supposed to be cheap. And this is why they are made to comply with 8’6″ public road limits.
But they are not cheap, they are just shanties.
If you wanted cheap you would have to use the land more effectively, and build high rise. This would have to be code compliant and high quality. Code compliant studios can be about 400′ min, but there aren’t road legal subassemblies, The units would be more likely 20′ x 20′
Tiny Houses are just a gimmick. They solve nothing, except to be able to portray the homeless as a public menace.
And we have a shelter industry, Abode, designed to Gaslight people and to funnel them into the mental health system.
The objective of the authorities here is to get the homeless under “case management”. And to this end operatives with San Jose ReDevelopment brought their own pastor into a local church and took over. They brought her all the way from Nebraska, and her background is in Privatization of the Case Management of Government Social Services. And Mayor Sam Liccardo has always been publicly behind this.
Liccardo and the business community, especially the real estate sector, do not like the idea of a visible homeless contingent in the downtown.
And so they raise private money to set up these private programs that give the homeless, not living wage or minimum wage jobs, oh no. They give them Work Readiness Programs. Basically a kind of moral reform and life micromanagement.
No one deserves to be treated like this. But Trump came to San Francisco and wanted internment camps. That was when Gavin started talking about compulsory mental health procedures. His present plan still amounts to Internment / Mental Health Camps.
And the primary mode is to break down people’s privacy and right to silence so that the mental illness case can be made in Gavin’s new courts.
Who else should I be talking to about this.
Thanks,
Joshua
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Joshua, I hesitate to recommend LinkedIn or Facebook (social medias – like marijuana, wilderness camps, the Constitution and the Bible – have been manipulated by greed-blind people). But find me, find the old guard who have been struggling since 1963 or find the new fiery company of free young people leaving SAMHSA in the dust to take back the planet. I have contacts in Disability Rights, UU Mental Health Justice, Heart Forward LA, PRPSN and Sims Library of Poetry. Old spider, bear, mare and a honey bee. Come out to the barn where we can talk without old growley drunk farmers in the living room.
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I don’t deal with LinkedIn or Facebook. If there is somewhere else I can contact you.
Joshua
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Okay, Just for you Jane I have joined facebook. I tried to find you but I can’t.
This is me
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100079652590777
You can under messenger send be a Message. But I’m going to want to transfer the conversation to email.
Otherwise, just send me a link to your profile on something else you use.
MIA should have profiles where people can post the outside contacts they want, and it should have PMs.
Joshua
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