The budget reconciliation megabill signed by Trump on July 4 is among the latest in a series of federal and state policy choices this year that will have devastating impacts on poor people, disabled people, and people who use drugs across the US. These decisions have in some instances forced voluntary community-based services and peer respites to reduce hours or shutter altogether, as they simultaneously threaten existing disability rights protections like the 1999 Supreme Court Olmstead vs. LC decision that requires states to eliminate the unnecessary segregation of disabled people in institutions.
This year, activists have had to respond to a dizzying array of upheavals and losses—from sudden, arbitrary funding cuts that threw state public health systems into disarray, to the announced dismantling of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), to the proposed defunding of Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) program, to a new attempted repeal of the Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion that was created as part of Medicaid in 1965 to disincentivize institutional care. Taken together, these decisions funnel public dollars away from community support and rights protection, and accelerate the drumbeat towards reinstitutionalization.
And on July 24, President Trump issued an executive order that seeks to put “homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings” with those seen as mentally ill candidates for this long-term lockup. Given that state laws govern forced treatment standards, this executive order would need to rely on bullying tactics from the President and his administration, related to the withdrawing of federal funds to states that failed to comply with this call for long-term incarceration of the mentally ill, to enforce this executive order. Even so, it serves, at the moment, as evidence of the hostile political landscape today toward policies and initiatives that people with lived experience have fought for in the past decades.
And already, that political hostility is being translated into legislative actions.
The Potential Mental Healthcare Impacts of the Megabill
President Reagan invented the term “social safety net” to defend proposed cuts to New Deal and other programs in the 1980s by asserting a now-familiar promise: That such cuts would not impact the “social safety net” for Americans “truly in need.” Since then, the term has been adopted as a metaphor in legal and public discourse, often said to be “frayed” or even “ripped to shreds.” Legal scholars now argue that the concept itself has become essentially meaningless.
Health analysts widely view the budget reconciliation megabill as accelerating the deterioration of what little public assistance remained available in America, over five years after the Covid-19 pandemic began. The megabill will result in the poorest Americans losing access to healthcare and food assistance, beginning in December 2026. It will also usher in the “largest transfer of wealth in American history,” as stated by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI). According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill’s healthcare-related cuts would increase the country’s uninsured population by nearly 17 million by 2034. “If all of this comes to pass, it would represent the biggest roll back of health insurance coverage ever due to federal policy changes,” stated a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The historic slashing of public benefits is predicted to have numerous ripple effects throughout the US healthcare and food systems. “This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place,” Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said in a statement.
One-third of Americans with a psychiatric diagnosis and one-fifth of those with substance use diagnoses currently receive coverage through the Medicaid program. The cuts will likely result in significant disruptions in access to care and support. Mental Health America has taken credit for language in the bill that would exempt people diagnosed with mental health and substance use conditions from new co-pays and work reporting requirements.
“The law also includes MHA’s suggested language that requires states to use existing data on file to verify that individuals qualify as exempt from work requirements, rather than placing the burden on those individuals to verify their eligibility,” according to a July 19 statement.
Currently, 48 states and Washington, D.C. have elected to fund peer-delivered services under Medicaid. While Medicaid-reimbursable peer services have been criticized as a controversial move that threatens the foundations of peer support, the cuts to the program are also likely to result in reduced access to peer support services in many states, particularly in rural areas, leaving untold people without these sources of support.
Peer-Run Programs Struggle, Shutter Under Sudden, Arbitrary Federal Funding Cuts
At the end of March, shockwaves began rippling through systems as the Trump administration announced that it was pulling $11 billion in Covid-era funding from states, because it considered the pandemic to be over. But states had already allocated the funding for public health initiatives that addressed the traumatic effects of the pandemic, including programs like peer respites, a voluntary, non-carceral approach to community support that psychiatric survivors have been advocating for since the 1970s.
While the federal government has never directly funded peer respites, advocates have fought to secure funding for these programs, which now exist in 14 states. A 2024 SAMHSA report on financing peer respites notes that states have leveraged the federal Community Mental Health Services Block Grant (MHBG), along with other funds to support respites. Without dedicated federal discretionary funding, however, peer respites are especially vulnerable to states’ budget disruptions.
Wisconsin, for instance, was set to lose over $225 million in federal funding as a result of the surprise cuts. The state then joined a lawsuit, along 19 other states’ attorneys-general, to compel the government to halt the funding cuts. Despite a judge’s injunction issued in May in favor of the plaintiffs, much damage has already been done.
The funding cuts hit peer support programs in the state particularly hard. The rural La Crosse Lighthouse peer respite had to lay off eight staff members, slash their hours of operation, and rely on donated funds to maintain operations. If the organization does not receive adequate support soon, the doors will have to close by September 2025, according to an ongoing mutual aid campaign. “This reduction in staffing and operating hours has directly impacted the individuals we serve by reducing the availability of crucial support,” La Crosse Lighthouse executive director Abigail Spanjers told Mad in America via email. “The loss of funding also gave many individuals in the area the impression that we were no longer operating. The rumor mill moves faster than our social media updates, and we are finding people don’t realize we are still available.”
“As the Executive Director, it was heartbreaking to lay off the staff and watch everything we have fought to build get dismantled,” Spanjers wrote. “It’s not just about these contracts, it’s about the future of funding for mental health.”
Other programs have been significantly impacted. Nora Hitchcock, whose organization oversees Parachute House, Milwaukee’s peer-run respite program, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she wasn’t sure if there would be sufficient funds to continue operations beyond June. Uplift Wisconsin, the state’s peer warmline, shut down in April and has not resumed operations.
Nze Okoronta, executive Director at SOAR Case Management, overseeing Solstice House Peer Run Respite and Peer Run Warmline in Madison, spoke to Mad in America about the cascading impacts of the funding cuts, straining an already under-resourced system. “[La Crosse] Lighthouse is especially up the creek, because La Crosse is on the map nationally for housing issues and there’s no psychiatric hospitals there,” Okoronta said. “So if you don’t get into a respite, and you don’t get picked up and carted off to [state hospitals] like Winnebago or Mendota or somewhere horrible, you just end up on the street.”
Speaking to The Cap Times, Okoronta elaborated on the impact: “The ARPA cuts mean that we lose essentially 40% of our statewide peer respite capacity in the blink of an eye. This then puts all the labor on all the other sites to compensate for those losses.”
The impact on the community has been devastating, Okoronta said. “We’re seeing a lot more people feeling totally unsupported and abandoned by the systems. It affects everyone, especially people who are at risk of deportation, people with immigrant experience. People are terrified of being criminalized. The increase of surveillance is just so visceral right now. Everyone is afraid of what’s in their medical records, who knows about them.”
Spanjers sees opportunity in “collaborations and advocacy for alternatives” amidst the current crisis. “These cuts shined a light on resources that may not have been well-known to the general population, and this gives us a platform for change,” she told Mad in America. “The more people know about the impact of the work we are doing, the better chance we have at finding financial and government policy support.”
The federal funding cuts caused confusion and disruption of peer specialist-delivered services and respites not just in Wisconsin, but in several other states including Iowa, Mississippi, Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan, Okoronta said.
As Medicaid Cuts Loom Over California, CARE Court Expansion Proceeds
California faces billions in potential Medicaid losses as a result of the megabill, but Governor Gavin Newsom continues to push for an expansion of his CARE Court, with a coalition of California’s Big City Mayors and the state psychiatric association, and family groups.
As previously reported in Mad in America, Newsom’s CARE Court represents the culmination of decades of state and federal efforts to erode psychiatric rights, enacted across the partisan divide. In 2022 the Democratic governor and his champions in Sacramento legislated a system of civil courts that compels people with diagnoses of untreated serious mental illness and/or substance use disorder into mandated care plans.
“There is nothing voluntary about CARE courts: at every stage that is allegedly ‘voluntary,’ refusal to comply defaults to coercion, ultimately resulting in full-on conservatorship,” according to a statement by the Western Regional Advocacy Center, which organizes with unhoused communities directly impacted by CARE Court. “This legislation does not invest a single dime in expanding or improving community based treatment options, and does not guarantee (nor fund) permanent supportive housing. Most egregiously, this policy continues a documented pattern of mental health laws being used as weapons to criminalize Black and Brown communities.”
And in 2024, California voters approved Newsom’s $6 billion bond that is being used at least in part to rebuild locked facilities, and included a last-minute amendment that lifted a prohibition on using the bond money for involuntary interventions. The measure passed only by the narrowest margin, in part due to lived experience opposition putting up a significant fight.
This legislative session has seen an onslaught of what Disability Rights California calls bad mental health bills that have put the disability community and allied organizations on the defensive again. In this session, organizers have had to contend with amendments introduced at the last minute, with little time to review or provide input.
“A lot of people in our community feel like we’re getting hit from every angle,” Eric Harris, associate executive director of external affairs for Disability Rights California (DRC), told Mad in America.
DRC hosted a virtual town hall on June 30 to discuss the bills with the community. Lex Steppling, a panelist and organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network and All People’s Health Collective said that California’s reputation as a “liberal and progressive” state has “ironically allowed [it] to lead the way … on criminalization of unhoused people.”
Steppling noted that while California presents itself as progressive, conservatives are enacting very similar legislation. “When you compare the plans of [Florida governor] Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom to address the crisis, the policies are nearly identical” while the “language used to present them is different.”
Steppling also called out the promises of housing in Newsom’s policies. “We know that you’re not going to build housing and [voluntary] treatment infrastructure. What you’re doing is enabling the state to kidnap people, using their mental health.”
“What we’re going to see is people snatched out of their lives,” Steppling said. “We’re creating the infrastructure today to snatch people off the streets.”
Preliminary CARE Court implementation data show that judges had to dismiss as many as 40% of petitions due to the narrowly-written criteria. In its first year, the program is said to be falling way short of its goals. SB 27 ostensibly chips away at the barriers to implementation by widening the criteria for referral and eligibility.
The bill represents a “significant expansion” of CARE Court, as stated in an opposition letter led by DRC. Currently, only people with schizophrenia spectrum diagnoses are eligible. This bill would expand eligibility and referral to include mood disorders with psychotic features, which are five times more common.
SB 27 was introduced by state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-34). Katherine Wolf, a panelist at the DRC town hall who is a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley and an organizer with the All Peoples’ Health Collective, noted that Umberg has introduced a CARE Court update bill yearly since the law passed in 2021. “Each update increases the coercion and erodes due process,” Wolf said.
At a July 1 Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing for SB 27, Michele Cabrera, executive director for the County Behavioral Health Directors Association of California, representing all 58 counties implementing CARE Court, testified against the expansion. “We’re talking about an order of magnitude really outside of the scope of what we are prepared to do upon enactment of this law, not to mention the lack of housing,” Cabrera said. “CARE Court did not necessarily bring with it resources.”
Harris from DRC opened his testimony with a quote from civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer: “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
“In 2022, my colleagues and I were told by the champions of CARE Court that it would be voluntary and only cover a small portion of the disability community,” he said. “Ever since, every year the champions of CARE Court push for expansion.”
“California remains in a housing crisis and the state still is not providing enough accessible mental health services for those who need it,” he continued. “We warned the community and policymakers then that the champions of CARE Court would not stop, but would expand to cover more unhoused people with mental health disabilities and beyond. This is what SB 27 would do.”
At the DRC town hall, Wolf stated that in drafting these CARE Court bills, Senator Umberg consulted with “zero disabled people” and was “avoiding” them. “Now DRC also has to spend all this time and money to oppose this, whereas if legislators came to disabled people from the beginning, they could create policies that disabled people actually want and support,” she said.
“We could all be working together instead of fighting each other to a standstill while not much changes on the ground.”
“This CARE Act has cost $700,000 per person,” Wolf added. “Not any of that has gone to the person. It’s incredible, what a waste of money this is.”
SB 27 is now halfway through the process of becoming law, and advocates have little doubt that the bill will end up on Newsom’s desk for signature.
“We see the current role of ICE in Los Angeles and across the nation, and the radical redistribution of resources to it in the just-passed Big Beautiful Bill,” DRC said in a statement on the bill. “We must rage in opposition against this same creep in California policy, funneling more and more money toward systems that are cruel, harmful, and only serve to lock up and disappear the most vulnerable in our society … Our message is clear: SB 27 must die.”
The other bills include SB 331, introduced by state Sens. Caroline Menjivar (D-20) and Steve Padilla (D-18), which is sponsored by the California State Association of Psychiatrists, and supported by Families Advocating for the Seriously Mentally Ill. The bill dilutes the criteria for involuntary holds, expanding the definition of eligible mental health disorder to any diagnosis in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Under this massive umbrella, examples include caffeine withdrawal, gender dysphoria, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and prolonged grief disorder.
“This dangerously broadens language that permits those who will enforce this law to further target individuals experiencing homelessness, transgender individuals, people of color, women, and more marginalized groups,” DRC posted on Facebook on July 1. “It gives massive clearance to law enforcement to essentially kidnap anyone off the street based on perceptions alone.”
SB 820, which has already generated significant opposition, was introduced by Sen. Henry Stern (D-12) and allows the state to forcibly administer neuroleptic drugs without informed consent to any person confined in a county jail on misdemeanor charges who is found incompetent to stand trial.
“We believe that this type of policy, to forcibly medicate a person, is one of the most intrusive exercises of government power that there is, and especially for anyone in the criminal legal system,” Harris said at the DRC town hall. “It violates human rights at the United Nations level.”
At the virtual town hall, Steppling emphasized an advocacy strategy that rejects compromise. “We can stop these bills if we all agree there’s no negotiating. The answer is no. The way forward is killing these bills. The way backward is not killing these bills. There is no way around.”
The Dismantling of SAMHSA, the PAIMI Program, and a Renewed Push to Repeal the IMD Exclusion
In March, Health and Human Services (HHS) under RFK Jr. announced a “dramatic restructuring” in which the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) would be dismantled and folded into a new agency called the Administration for Healthy America (AHA).
Proponents of involuntary psychiatric interventions have long called for the abolition of SAMHSA. In 2013, Mental Illness Policy Org executive director DJ Jaffe called for the agency’s elimination. Former Congressman Tim Murphy, who used mass shootings as a pretext to push for involuntary outpatient commitment in the mid-2010s, also put the agency in his crosshairs. And in January, Carolyn Gorman, who worked with Jaffe at Mental Illness Policy Org and advocates for “thoughtful” involuntary civil commitment, wrote an opinion piece in the conservative City Journal entitled “Trump Should Abolish the Federal Mental-Health Agency.” Among SAMHSA’s shortcomings, according to Gorman, is “advocating against involuntary commitment,” even though the agency has dispersed federal funding for so-called Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs since 2016.
It appears that these advocates may soon get their wish, as SAMHSA is now said to be “in crisis itself.” The dismantling of SAMHSA has caused many to fear that community services delivered by peer specialists and harm reduction efforts that have spurred a recent reduction in overdose deaths may lose vital funding. Local programs that survive worry that they will be left without the support of SAMHSA’s regional offices. Rural areas are likely to be hardest hit.
“Readers of Franz Kafka may appreciate that SAMHSA is pronounced ‘Samsa,’ which happens to be the surname of Gregor Samsa, the character in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, who wakes up one morning to find that he has been turned into a giant cockroach,” wrote Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect. “Trump’s infestation of public policy is a plague worthy of Kafka.”
In addition, there is a looming threat to the federal Protection and Advocacy (PAIMI) grant program overseen by SAMHSA. The PAIMI Act was established in 1986 to investigate abuse, neglect, and rights violations in mental health services. While Rob Wipond recently reported for Mad in America on PAIMI programs not adequately fulfilling their mission, the total loss of such programs would be catastrophic. “Without the federal Protection and Advocacy program, there is no federally mandated, independent oversight of abuse, institutional conditions or legal violations in psychiatric settings,” wrote Nev Jones and Jordyn Jensen in The Hill. “Cutting its funding would leave those in the most dangerous environments unprotected.”
Amid these developments, on June 17 Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-CA-24) filed a bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE-02), that would make it easier to rebuild institutions and confine people within them for longer periods of time. HR 4022, the Increasing Behavioral Health Treatment Act, seeks to repeal the Institutes of Mental Disease (IMD) Exclusion, a 1965 Medicaid rule designed to discourage confinement in large psychiatric institutions and incentivize community-based services and supports.
Under Medicaid, IMDs are defined as “facilities of more than 16 beds primarily engaged in providing diagnosis, treatment or care of persons with mental diseases.”
HR 4022 is not a novel effort; organizations including the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the Treatment Advocacy Center, and the Manhattan Institute have been pushing for the repeal for over a decade, calling the IMD exclusion a form of “discrimination.” The move was a cornerstone of Tim Murphy’s mental health policy reforms from 2013-2016, ultimately defeated due to cost. The most recent 2023 nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis puts the cost of a repeal at an estimated $38 billion over 10 years.
The IMD exclusion was also on the radar of the first Trump administration, which sought to dilute it through implementing a waiver system. In 2020, Jennifer Lav, writing for the National Health Law Program, said: “Weakening the ‘IMD exclusion’ while cutting funding for community-based mental health services would be a stark reversal of decades of progress, undermining the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Integration Mandate articulated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C.”
“The first and most important step toward public mental health reform … is to eliminate the IMD Exclusion,” according to a 2021 Manhattan Institute report. The report takes on the Olmstead Decision, emphasizing that it does not “outlaw institutional-based care.” Citing that Olmstead protects the right of disabled people to receive services “in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs,” the report states, “For some people, that will mean IMDs.”
In its current iteration, the bill includes no mention of rights protections. It stipulates that states are required to submit plans for “increased access to outpatient and community-based behavioral health care.” But there is also no enforcement mechanism to ensure that “increased access” to community-based care occurs. Further, HR 4022 does not put a cap on the length of stay in an IMD. This represents a significant departure from the past, where even under temporary Section 1115 waivers, hospital stays were usually capped at 15 or 30 days to disincentivize states’ historic overreliance on institutions.
The bill is endorsed overwhelmingly by various law enforcement organizations, as well as NAMI, the National Association of Counties, and the National Association of County Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Directors.
Resisting Medical Fascism and the “Indefensible” Status Quo
“We cannot simply defend the status quo in healthcare and the Affordable Care Act,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) in The Guardian, announcing his April 29 re-introduction of the Medicare for All Act into the Senate, along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) in the House. “The time is NOW to declare that healthcare in our country is a right and not a privilege.” A 2020 Pew Research Center poll reported that a majority (63%) of Americans said that it is the responsibility of the government to provide health coverage for all. The bill was referred to committee, and is unlikely to move in the current political environment.
Writing in The Nation, political anthropologist, social psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician Eric Reinhardt notes that today’s health and immigration policies drive the latest iteration of medical fascism, which he defines as the “integration of healthcare institutions and professionals into autocratic systems of control, coercion, and repression.” This rise in medical fascism, Reinhardt writes, “didn’t start with Donald Trump” but is “a well-established pattern that goes back to the origins of the [medical] profession in this country.”
“We have every reason to anticipate that the Trump regime will intensify these efforts to wrap health agencies and institutions into the war on immigrants and dissidents, to expand restrictions on reproductive and transgender healthcare, and to use medical institutions to surveil and punish marginalized communities,” Reinhardt wrote.
For Reinhardt, “Resistance alone is not enough … We must also fight for more effective, equitable, and democratic national health systems rather than simply try to defend an indefensible status quo.”
In STAT News, Reinhardt used the example of medical professionals who went underground and risked their lives rather than collaborate with the Nazi regime as a reminder that “organized resistance is always possible no matter how grave the danger or how cruel government or collaborationist hospital administrators may become.”
“While critique [of the bill] is necessary, it is not sufficient,” write the authors of “The Big Beautiful Bill: A Declaration of War on the People.” “This moment demands both clarity and action—not just an understanding of what is happening, but a commitment to confront it together through collective effort and radical imagination.”
“We fight this by refusing their logic. We fight this by organizing mutual aid, building solidarity economies, resisting evictions, defending land and water, and refusing to let each other go hungry or disappear in a cage,” they write.
“The future isn’t handed down from Congress. It is built in kitchens, in streets, in community centers, and on stolen land returned to collective stewardship.”
***
MIA Reports are supported by a grant from Open Excellence and by donations from MIA readers. To donate, visit: https://www.
Organized resistance is always possible. However, not very liikely when most of the people who need to resist are taking money from the makers of the genocide and living on the stolen lands they whine about at their ineffectual gatherings.
Report comment
To even summarize the impacts is beyond the prevailing knowledge levels of all parties. An ethical and moral question needs to be answered, when the answer if given, can be the rock on which to build. Many of the articles often voiced in this site are essentially about raw power, not the sort that affords one the authentic choice to realize a dream, even collaborative with others inside and outside mental health culture. Essentially, there seems to be an absence of working knowledge as an accoutant would know to bond and invest the level of entreprenurial activity. But then, Who will buy? If the mantra is to erase history, then at what point will this new legislation be used to commit involuntarily titular leaders? The law(s) being prescribed seemingly never wanted to know and those who purport to know what is best are on the outside of the experience on the floor of the institutions. Being I was able to hear Justin Dart at the Alternatives Conference while beginning to meet people just like me, afforded degrees of empowement that were shared with others (but not monetized or understood in the nature of governance of social and monetary currency. Thus, how in your reporting are you able to realize an emergent policy language against the accepted ways of understanding realities against the crossfire of politcal interests? (When people are saying we must fight for….. where are the numbers showing the functional costs coupled with sharing the richness of what it means to be a Human and not a machine?)
Report comment
Thank you
I don’t think the mental health system ever really embraced the peer movement. It was only small reforms
Report comment
The idea that “peers” have as much or more knowledge as “professionals” is not acceptable in the “mental health” culture. Peers have generally been seen by the system more as lackeys to ensure compliance with the orders of the professionals. Those who truly do advocate for the voice of the client to be heard tend to be seen as dangerous, in my observation. While of course there are exceptions (I was certainly one), the system as a whole can’t embrace the peer model, as it undermines some of the basic concepts it is built on, most notably, that clients might have something to teach THEM and deserve the right to make their own decisions!
Report comment
My feelings for sure. I have been labeled a trouble maker
Report comment
Yup. Because speaking the truth and seeking actual answers threatens the power structure! Been there, done that!
Report comment
Steve, I applaud you on your use of that expression, “been there, done that!”
Report comment
I think I/We The People have a serious problem in levels of governance being advanced by AI which can not and does not have feeling. If this Executive Order empowers to commit at State Levels of Governance, what happens at the Federal Level of Governance when the business of Govenance becomes more enamoured with advancing their private business on the Golf Course whose land can only speak to the famed Scot, Eric Liddell! Seems as if many of us need only to be freed up to run our race! Dutifully note also how Liddell would give his Life in Missionary work in China… Perhaps i/We can create history, too and not accept an imposed Fate in a flawed belief system! As in, we are being challenged to create fresh, better knowledge as the answer!
Report comment
I have been aware of this and history is rife throughout time with those who live in the margins.
When I was young and innocent I had thought we can solve this problem. I had no idea of the complexity and the corruption and the issues inherent in funding of services.
I also didn’t realize the voices of those in the margins was left out.
Matthew Desmond in his Evicted a book based on his field study in Wisconsin and Barbara Enrich in her Nickeled and Dimed present some of the issues. And they were always not in the margins. So their perspective so helpful but not the needed real voice.
There are so many bubbles like a piece of bubble wrap.
In the Psychiatric world even Bessel van der Klerk says they have completely lost their way. Not new to anyone here.
Psychiatriy is glued to the medication wheel. They do not do field studies they do not work with other researchers like Mr. Desmond. They do not work with other professionals and certainly are not aware of their clients lives.
Many of those in the margins are vets and many have experienced other traumas so help is needed not force.
Dr Patch Adams , Mitch Snyder,,Rev. William Barber and his political campaign , Dr Connelly written about by Tracy Kidder flawed humans but they tried and try .They knew all kinds of people regardless of in or out the margins. I would think new ways of protesting and pulling and weaving areas and people not connected might be helpful.
Report comment
Dr Bhui of Oxford in an NIMH article written the need for medical ethnography in psychiatry.
Report comment
I know these oppressive measures are not really aimed at helping people with “mental health issues, but it is pretended they are and the Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, https://psychrights.org/ReportOnImprovingMentalHealthOutcomes.pdf, may be of some use in resisting these moves.
Report comment
Thank you for the link / links, Jim and psych rights. Thank you for your research, Leah.
Report comment
Hey Jim: I don’t know if this is something you can help with. Thanks to the Lithium that was prescribed to me, I met with the kidney transplant team at our local hospital. I was honest with the social worker about the fact that I was titrating from Zyprexa. As a result, the social worker has suggested that I would have to meet with a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I agreed to meet with a psychologist, but I balked at meeting with a psychiatrist since they caused the damage to my kidneys in the first place. I’m waiting to hear back from the transplant team.
Report comment
What is it you’re wanting help with? Legal action? Good luck… it’s tremendously difficult, apparently, to find legal help against the evils of the psych system.
Report comment
Hello I have a story to tell
Report comment
Well, we are listening! Tell away if you want to!
Report comment
If there was ever a perfect storm comprised of text, this is it!! This article carefully puts us advocates in a position to create a unified response worthy of rights protection and freedom – fighting for survival and a victory for independence! Leah Harris places at the feet of the dispossessed a sense of vigor and strength to push back on the current Administration’s attempts to control the lives of the disabled. Instead, we – the disabled – are energized to go forward, protecting our peer led services and programs. What we do is deliver recovery and health and wellbeing – the things that cannot be categorically defunded. Our programs and services are models that keep people alive. That’s the result of a perfect storm. Viva ADA, on July 26, 2025. The 35th Anniversary is as brightly lit as ever.
Report comment
All right Fanny farmers book will there be a morning. That’s the name of it the question will there be a morning. I’ve also visited people in the asylum and there’s virtually no reality involved with those Harper’s [harboring] ideas that they are maintaining any kind of resource for the people there whatsoever. Two friends of mine because psychiatric drugs were forced on them both had a blood clot that went through their heart they [that] should have killed them and both had 2% chance of survival. True completely true. Is this going to add up to then it’s 4% and if like 50 more of my friends have such an ordeal that then it’s 104% chance of survival? Furthermore, I had called the hospital because I was a little bit well sort of held back from continuing with this gay homosexual people channel I’m up with their as m i r c. Probably Prince William and his annoying self-righteous friends came through there all the time, he still is talking harassing me, he is not even truly the crown Prince either his father, with who he’s now married to, his child before they got married or he even started bothering princess Diana. (Charles Dorante Day is his name HE is the real crown prince0 So if you’re wondering about why something is called despair well now you know or this beer. The spare there. Now I was little hesitant 9from going on THAT channel again0 so I called the hospital and ask them if they had pregnancy tests for males. No, I was told. YEars pass. come to see that a friend of mine years later needed somebody to talk to since she was a young girl and having gotten together with a guy she was talking about marrying and the guy called her father and there would be a hole or a deal [whole ordeal]she actually had to sell foot in the asylum for treatment I can’t tell you [what kind] https://oelte.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/waking-up-to-the-remaining-dream/ because this confidential but there she said [sat] and there was a guy standing there upon entering and he was just standing there looking like a forlorn statue I told him just to follow the rules. Come to find out here going to the same hospital that didn’t have pregnancy tests for males according to whoever talked to me on the phone that I didn’t record and he ended up in a silent [anasylum after tgoing to same hors’a-pittle] they’ve been there for 3 months $1,000 a day at least for these people deciding whether he can leave there or not whether he thought he was female and pregnant but they thought he was male and pregnant or whether it was something else which apparently they couldn’t see if they had actually talked with him they might have found something out, I don’t think that’s right to detain him because they don’t have a f****** clue about what their professional standing is. He did get out. I hugged him, thenI ended up feeding the seagulls, as they were there at the park I ran into him, by means of tossing them whatever was there a whole loaf of bread somebody had discarded in an area where I later teleported to the other side of the building I picked up not the building the bread lasted for some data is moment [kept for whatever dadaist moment] and made pellets in a whole lot [a whole flock of seagulls] caught single file one by one every single pallet without fighting about it or any kind of problem. Sometimes they just disappear there, as if I lost them, which I don’t believe, even hearing such thoughts inside my head I don’t. The same area where that lion named Elsa came out of nowhere to have The adolescents she never had, and had to be taught how to hunt because before making up stories about her apparently there’s no to silence [asylums] for Lions either. These are just a couple stories….. Another friend ended up having to talk to a man through the screen of a television and simply had been trying to act out whatever she was trying to discover about religious prophecies tell me this case A thousand years, and this involved heavy the create a big disturbance for some people, the judge asked her whether she knew she was creating a big disturbance when she said she was [he did not] even ask her what kind of disturbance or why she did it, and again all she was doing was walking around really bothering no one but people wanted insecticide for her or something or some disease to put her over. Before this she actually had to talk to a judge I think this was one and [in] Cold blood rather than through a screen and when he mispronounce her name she had enough of it she was already in a bad mood and others that probably never in the Life had been allowed to take on such temerity had expressed extreme empathy with her so in this stupid judge didn’t even know how to pronounce her name she told him how to pronounce her name before or after asking whether she needed to put him back into kindergarten and teaching the English language. He doesn’t like it then she ended up in in asylum for criminal people that are insane. This goes on and on and on one girl ended up in the Siloam [asylum] put there by of all people The reincarnation of unpopular among others Anna pavlova we’re currently has the name Kym Bazzey, sending her youth when her mother didn’t want to be poisoned (her mother was listed as mentally ill and Kym had a problem that her mother would never try poisoning for it, although Kym would have, and told me Lilly also wasn’t taking hers] listed as such and said that she was in danger came through [Kym threw] something at her and had to go in custody of her father. Stuff I found out because I thought she was going to be dancing but she married the janitor of Saint Cecilia music society in Grand rapids then. I was in their office(Irecognized her and she does porno saying it was too much like a first date would I tell her such, no I didn’t suggest we fuck so she knows and never once thought of it but to stay away from such). No w, they managed to put this friend of mine in the asylum after scaring her to such a degree that’s been trying to get away she had broken her Achilles ankle which they didn’t tend to in this medicinal place called an asylum and it was swollen up to the knee and it was ruined but they did Jack her up with drugs so much she [continue in next post editing time allotment almost up]
Report comment
[continued] didn’t know what time of the day of horses and then she could whether she know what time of the day it was her mother told me who actually thought she should be there so who knows if that’s truth regarding horses so and then she ends up in there and gets out knows how to talk herself out and just [gets] put in there again after being ready for saying wouldn’t believe [getting “them to believe I think I said, not sure] and having stuff stolen out of the house because the only people she could hang out with had been staking out what they could get from her. She committed suicide was pronounced that and I can’t tell you anymore of that. I had told all of them I thought they would lose her including her mother and she said all of them thought….. https://www.lifestorynet.com/obituaries/lisbeth-lilly-lipke.29513#memories. They had told the police he’d [she had they said but wasn’t true] been running out naked [and said she’d taken her cloths off in public which again she hadn’t, which was the first thing “Anna’s” friend said that she was doing what she wasn’t, and THOSE are the people knowing how to get her committed so that she committed suicide) and she hadn’t at all when I called not emergency police after not calling them earlier because they supposed to friend of hers [hersupposed friends trespassed] trespass into her house and called her case manager to get her incarcerated after they scared her to such a degree that she broke her Achilles ankle after lying to both of us to get here [her] across the street and corner her in such a manner because she said something Jesus would completely agree with if you read A course in miracles ever all [everyone is, we all are] the second coming so she said she was and they’re supposed to religious person who had gotten an award that I managed to get taken away from him he was going to have her committed and then threatened me because I told him that was clear she didn’t want them in her house and that they were harassing her when they trespass into her house and I actually neglected calling the police because when I called there and said I would have been get out of her house I got such a sarcastic reply with somebody who continue to harass me for years at other medicinal places like the dentist, that I didn’t call and then later found out the the police have been lied to. And so when it came by when they were arresting her in a police was there and she was just trying to be kind and say I was a nice person to the police the police had to ask me to leave her ]or] be arrested for interfering with investigation, which then what was it? I heard this numerous times every time there’s lies going on. Are you talk to people who have been involved with all of this and the best you get out of them is that they don’t want to talk about it it’s that kind of investigation they feel free to lie and act like to some kind of danger because somebody is a [the person they decide is a danger and crazy isn’t controlled by fear] controlled by fear. The sound [friend] of mine now isn’t dead because I’ve talked with her I don’t even know if she’s an angel among Us like my love Jesus, who also appears here and there in different forms from other times that are not locked up with [but] liberated from forever, I don’t even know. There was a very wonderful soprano I had just wish actually about so is a mess so not a soprano I meant so or you think this mezzo is what it’s supposed to be with all of that. I had just heard her and so she was in a place for me to get acquainted with her and then this Angel among Us appeared and I don’t even know if there was an extra day and there you go it’s supposed to be my loss I didn’t have her committed.? Another friend of me the one that argued with the judge called me that she had committed soon and said she’s not dead she’s just three [free] of the mental health system I took my wallet [wand] out waved it for a holographic image and there she wasn’t [was] wanted to know how I did that I just demured and dimpled I want to have a life too I’ve never been so in love as I am now with Jesus and we’ve been married since June 9th you can take a blade of grass which is [“his”] friend John told me to [they stalk for a flower to grow, it’s like a piece of wire] become it stalks so there might be a flower but those are easily flown into commission to composting sorry often might grab one and pick it and make a circle then wind the remainder around that for a ring and there was laying there so the second day when I had smoking nothing had let go so much pain I don’t know. I don’t know where this friend of mine somehow was retrieves and is part of a different society whether she’s part of heaven and just as they are, guess I just don’t know sometimes I see her and then realize that voice a spirit image. And there are a lot of us…. Just like Jesus when he saw so many people broken, so many live seemingly lost, so many people discarded, an knew that’s just not true, they have another part; and so he said that the flowers, in the field, they are finer then Soloman’s robe (couldn’t say that, that’s idolotry, supposedly only Soloman’s robe is of God, also couldn’t draw his love of a teacher, the landscape of his face, and THAT also was made out such), but it’s all thrown on the compost heap, burned even. so….. having seen the value that’s ruined, discarded, thrown away, tossed, beaten to death, robbed from those who would value it, sold to keep others more decent from interfering with such evil… all of that, and knowing that’s just not right, and can’t be real, he said HEaven has something even greater…….So why waste what you’re give I ask!?
Report comment
This is what Americans have voted for & a lot support.
It’s also the result of the total failure of care of the community & denial of the realities of the 5% of people who suffer severe mental illnesses.
Probably not a bad thing to bring back Asylums.
Report comment
Since you evidently endorse asylums for those whom you regard as seriously mentally ill, may I ask you to ponder the far-reaching implications of that idea?
Who will be tasked with determining the degree of severity of mental incapacitation? Would they be the same “professionals” who base their diagnoses and treatments on the scientifically bogus DSM, administer potent drug cocktails and ECT to elderly, infirm, recalcitrant nursing home residents, and routinely prescribe brain-disabling neurotoxins to millions of schoolchildren supposedly afflicted with ADHD and other learning disabilities?
Aren’t you worried that various socially marginalized groups (racial minorities, people with non-traditional sexual orientation, the homeless and unemployed, etc.) are more likely to be institutionalized and subjected to psychiatric torture in the guise of therapy?
Report comment
Psychiatry needs major reform – But again no argument negates the facts that a percentage of people suffer severe & enduring mental illnesses & need proper care & support from society
Report comment
Very true. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has led to more suffering for a lot of people.
Report comment
“The failure of the community and denial of reality.”
Birdsong, you just don’t understand that when a community fails, putting people into a system that has created a spike in what the community fails as it continues in such trends, that THIS is the only resort for these “5%,” now do you? So, just take a deep breath, inhale some nice perfume, and think about it huh!?
note to the uninitiated: I’m being maliciously sarcastic.
Report comment
Nijinsky, I don’t think psychiatric incarceration the is the answer. But neither is ignoring the large numbers of undeniably incoherent people now living on the streets, a situation that’s become a public health issue.
Report comment
You’ve sidestepped my questions: Who exactly will be tasked with determining what constitutes enduring and incapacitating mental illness? And who are the unfortunates most likely to be diagnosed with the hypothetical disorders listed in the hodgepodge of billing codes known as the DSM? A cursory study of the history of psychiatric abuse and an analysis of pertinent sociological data ought to provide some pertinent answers here.
As for your claim that supposedly highly disturbed people need social support and care, no doubt affordable housing, meaningful secure employment, and other benefits would go a long way toward ameliorating their urgent problems..Why do you believe that the mental health industry in general–a compliant enforcer of the profit-driven neoliberal system–is going to offer viable solutions to those in greatest need?
Report comment
We are on a very vocal, fringe American anti psychiatry / mental illness denial site, which is not reflective of the wider society / civilization.
Throughout the whole of human history science, medicine & psychiatry in one form or another has always existed, as has mental illnesses. & science, medicine & psychiatry always will exist for as long as there is humanity on this planet.
The only thing that changes is the paradigm of how mental illnesses are viewed & treated – focuses & treatments on & variations on biological, psychological, sociological & spiritual models & approaches.
My solution to it all – have a genuinely individualized person centered model & approaches that seeks to understand & address every element of the individual across interrelated biological, psychological, environmental & spiritual areas – integrated mind, body, soul, spirit & environment.
I would also like to see an end to Capitalism / money, religions, & the current form of politics.
Here is my own project & plan –
https://healingsanctuary.proboards.com/board/52/project-plan-associated-documents
https://healingsanctuary.proboards.com/thread/17237/forum-project-source-documents
Report comment
You say that psychiatry needs major reform. A discipline based on a fallacious premise–that mental disorders are real and can be objectively diagnosed and treated just like illnesses with a verifiable physical etiology–is impossible to reform . It should be consigned to the dustbin of history, just like other nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific concoctions such as phrenology and Lombroso’s theory of degeneracy.
Report comment
I would liken the current psychiatric paradigm to eugenics. Some people just have bad genes, society has nothing to do with it. How do you “reform” something that has such a wrong-headed, biased and discriminatory basis?
Report comment
Of course mental illness is real & they do fit the main diagnostic criteria. Can argue causes & best treatment, however to deny mental illness is real i think is not right.
Report comment
Sorry, but the “diagnostic criteria” are mere descriptions of unpleasant behavior or emotions which tend to occur together. It is certain that mental distress is real, and that mental aberrations do occur, but to call these DSM categories “illnesses” gives them a scientific legitimacy that they certainly do not deserve. I’ve already proven in an earlier post that two people having a particular “diagnosis” can have as little as one or zero “symptoms” in common with someone else with the same “diagnosis.” Such subjective categorization is anything but scientific.
Report comment
To Marc Cheminas:
The fact that you’ve deliberately evaded the two very simple questions I asked in my previous replies to you clearly shows me that you are unable to present a strong argument to the contrary.
And yes, I certainly do deny the existence of mental illness and the legitimacy of psychiatry as a scientific discipline or branch of medicine, just as I deny the validity of discredited pseudo-sciences like phrenology, orgone therapy, and eugenics.
Lastly, instead of attempting to rebut in detail the various assertions in your latest post (the most far-fetched one being the odd notion that psychiatry has existed throughout history and will continue to exist as long as humanity is on this planet), I refer you to Dr. Thomas Szasz’s magisterial study, “Psychiatry: The Science of Lies.”
Report comment
Case of agreeing to disagree – there is ample evidence for the psychopathology & biological aetiology of SMI.
Report comment
Please present it. Choose any “diagnosis” and prove to me there is a reliably biological cause. I am quite certain you cannot, because these “disorders” were not chosen because of anything except a superficial similarity of “symptoms.”
Report comment
You are free to look at the scientific & medical evidence same as i am & reach your own conclusions.
Report comment
I have done so, and your conclusions are without scientific merit. If you can’t defend them, you shouldn’t make the claim. There is plenty of evidence that the DSM-III was part of an intentional effort to “medicalize” mental health care due to competition from therapists and support groups cutting into psychiatry’s margins. They did not even pretend that this was not true. Moreover, the “criteria” you value so much are VOTED ON by committees and their inclusion/exclusion is highly affected by political lobbying. What other scientific realities are decided by vote? See “homosexuality” as a perfect example. It was a mental disorder, then they voted, and it wasn’t. Or Asperger’s Syndrome. It was a disorder, but then it was voted out. Child bipolar disorder was not an allowable “diagnosis” until the DSM-IV (I think), at which point it became acceptable by voting it in, and suddenly millions of children were diagnosed with it, when no one “had it” before. And fascinatingly, the majority of those so “diagnosed” never developed ADULT “bipolar disorder” according to the existing “criteria.”
I will add Moncrieff’s recent review of the literature showing NO convincing evidence that “depression” has anything at all to do with low serotonin, though of course, this theory had already been convincingly disproven prior to Prozac even coming to market in the late 80s. The believe in the “serotonin theory” is 90% pharmaceutical company marketing. There is no known “chemical imbalance” that is associated with depression diagnoses.
That’s just me getting warmed up. The DSM is a book of fiction. There is NO evidence that any of these “disorders” are even legitimately considered illness categories, let alone have a proven biological cause. The head of the NIMH said as much out loud, though he was attacked politically for saying so and quickly backpedaled under pressure from the psychiatric “thought leaders,” who continued to need a justification for their pseudoscientific bullshit. And I use the term “thought” very loosely here.
Again, it’s your job to provide evidence of your claims, otherwise, they are your opinion, and as you know, everyone has an opinion, as well as certain biological organs… well, you know what I’m talking about.
Report comment
Thank you, Leah Harris, for this most helpful overview of this sickening “policy” with some reference to its myriad of potential amplified exploitations. We all may roll our eyes at the term “Tr derangement syndrome,” but we shouldn’t fail to minimize this administration’s very clear investment in casting dissidence as “mental illness” and mental illness as criminality, demanding a punishment-based — NOT a care-based — carceral response.
Eugenics as a fantasy and as a reality has never gone away, and at this point, the entwinement of financial and political power interests with a widespread undercurrent of “eugenic delusion” is terrifying.
And thank you, Steve McCrea, for your cogent thoughts. As far as the DSM goes, a horrifying-but-engaging in-the-room look at how these categories are massaged into creation by various interests can be found in the book, “CBT: The Cognitive Behavioral Tsunami,” and the last word on the DSM, which you’ve no doubt seen, can be found here: https://thenewinquiry.com/book-of-lamentations/
Report comment
Nancy B, thank you for sharing this imaginatively astute assessment of psychiatry’s disastrous DSM-5 by Sam Kriss. Reading it made my day.
“A new dystopian novel in the classic mode takes the form of a dictionary of madness.
For all the subtlety of its characterizations, the book doesn’t just provide a chilling psychological portrait, it conjures up an entire world. The clue is in its name: On some level we’re to imagine that the American Psychiatric Association is a body of real powers, that the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel” is something that might actually be used, and that its caricature of our inner lives could have serious consequences. Sections like those on 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 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.”
Disturbing the way art imitates life.
Or is it the way life imitates art?
Report comment
“Probably not a bad thing to bring back asylums.”
You could be right.
I’m not in favor of involuntary “treatment”, but what’s happening now clearly isn’t working—with or without so-called “peers”.
The truth is, not everyone has the resources or emotional wherewithal to live in a relentlessly competitive world. That may be why so many are living on the streets.
FWIW: I think access to affordable housing would make a lot of so-called “mental illness” magically disappear.
Report comment
I believe that an educational system tailored to the abilities, interests, and unique learning styles of individual students would make a lot of ADHD cases disappear. A more healthful diet could also make a significant contribution to this end.
Report comment
It is already proven that an “open classroom” environment where kids get to decide which “station” they explore and how long they stay on that task makes the “ADHD” children virtually indistinguishable from the “normal” ones. It would appear that much of the “ADHD” phenomenon is an artifact of our school system expecting things from children that are not developmentally appropriate. I speak from experience, having had two “ADHD”-style boys and using alternative schools and homeschooling to educate them for at least their elementary years. Both graduated HS with honors, neither ever had a milligram of any stimulant drug.
There is also excellent research, replicated many times, that shows admitting kids to school a year later resolves about a third of “ADHD” cases.
Report comment
A lot of parents now hold their kids back a year before kindergarten or first grade. They know that school starts too early in the morning and lets out too late and that the neurotic over-focus on “academic skills” isn’t what a lot of kids need at that age for crying out loud.
I know of someone who was so bored and “inattentive” his parents put him in an experimental school that allowed him to read his HAM radio magazine to his heart’s content. He grew up to be an eye surgeon after training at of some of the world’s most competitive institutions.
Good thing this happened before the ADHD craze.
Report comment
This is heartening and inspiring to hear.
Report comment
Psych drugging our children should completely end. For God’s sake, how is it that our society has multiple industries, which think grown adults should be defaming innocent young children, with scientifically “invalid” DSM disorders / “life long, incurable, genetic mental illnesses” … for life? That is disgusting.
In relation to discussing the education system … I as one, who attended one of NY’s best public school systems, back in the early 1970’s; and has experience with both the public and private school systems; and has run art and S.T.E.A.M. programs … I most certainly want to be a part of how to improve the schools.
And, there’s a lot of changes that need to be made, but I’m pretty certain we’ve all already dreamt up how to best fix them. Let’s hope and pray.
Report comment
Kindergarten also requires things these days (like learning to read) that were not requirements when I went to school. Some even report kindergarteners being given HOMEWORK. There are a lot of inappropriate expectations built into schooling, and I see the so-called “ADHD” kids as the “canaries in the coal mine,” telling us with their behavior that you are asking too much of kids their age.
Report comment
When I was in kindergarten, my mom ran a math lab at my school. I can’t really say she taught me about “sacred geometry,” since I taught her about that … but in a way she did.
But when we taught a bunch of underprivileged children, who initially “hated math,” about “sacred geometry” in a fun and creative manner, in the S.T.E.A.M. program we were running. I will say those children learned to utilize the creative side of their brains, and did come back telling us they now loved math.
Every elementary school should be teaching training into love of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, via the arts initially. Since children love learning, by making and creating … and should the love of learning, making, and creating ever really end, for any of us?
Report comment
They didn’t “hate math,” they hated having to do math the way the teachers taught it! I was very good at math but found the math instruction to be dull and inapplicable. I only did well because I already understood number concepts before they started “teaching” me about it. This is true for lots of kids. How we teach math is sure to make it seem dull and irrelevant to our daily lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as your Mom proved!
Report comment
Not so fast, you two. Romanticizing creativity often just adds more confusion.
I attended an elementary school where teachers were recruited to indulge their “creativity”, which just so happened to fail a lot of kids just trying to grasp the basic concept of numbers—which turns out is only as complicated as the teacher wants it to seem, all in the name of so-called “creativity”.
To make matters worse, the school didn’t issue grades so parents HAD NO CLUE their kids could barely do basic math. The only thing offered were “parent-teacher conferences” where the teachers bullshitted the parents. It never occurred to them that their focus as teachers belonged on whether or not the kid could actually do the work they were expected to more or less know how to do at a certain age.
It turned out these teachers were using us a “test subjects”, e.g. guinea pigs to test their oh-so avant-garde “teaching methods” that were long on theory and short on actual teaching to be used as “data” for the bullshit dissertations they were writing for their bullshit Ph.D.’s.
So much for “creativity” in math instruction for youngsters.
But this did teach me one thing: that very often teachers and therapists have something in common: BIG EGOS THAT NEED AN AUDIENCE.
P.S. True innovation doesn’t confuse, and the Kahn Academy has “data” that not only proves this, it’s rescued many young minds from the nightmare of math teacher’s idea of “creativity”.
Report comment
My kids all were either homeschooled or attended child-centered schools in elementary school, and the youngest did all the way through high school. They’re all very competent at reading and math, two of them obviously gifted in the math/science area. The adults do have to have a focus on making sure they are learning the basics, but having kids pursue their own interests gives PLENTY of opportunities to teach reading, math and science, history, or whatever. It just requires the ADULTS to alter their approach to the needs of the kids rather than the other way around!
Report comment
We were children being used as test subjects. Not unlike adults in so-called “psychotherapy”.
Need I say more???
Report comment
Sounds pretty messed up. They obviously didn’t know what they were doing!
Report comment
BTW, I do consider schools inherently dangerous, whether “standard” or “alternatives.” The biggest problem is the kids have zero power and have to put up with whatever is thrown at them. Very similar to “mental health clients” on the whole. Adults for the most part think they know best, just like the “professionals” in the psych system. In both cases, the key is to recognize the needs of the person being served and empowering them to get those needs met, rather than forcing them to adapt to whatever the “professionals” think is right. True professionals recognize this. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many out there, in teaching or in “mental health!”
Report comment
Which just proves what I already said:
Teachers and therapists often have big egos that need a captive audience—something that says they’re the nuts running the asylum.
Report comment
I simplistically think the solution for people without housing is housing.
Report comment
Nah, come on, how would THAT help? Actually directly addressing the problem? Silly idea!
But seriously, “Housing First” programs have proven quite effective, even from psychiatry’s limited view of “symptom reduction.” It seems like we have some answers, but don’t want to actually implement them!
Report comment
Well, there are the genes one lives in and from whose perspective are they considered bad? And are Housing Programs experiencing only a call for efficiency, now? To the lack of effectiveness, where the design with access being ignored by finance and architects, if not having the skills to sustain innovation where value and values can be discovered from participating in Nature’s Design. Who knows the implementation costs for restorative and justice housing?
Report comment
That would be far too logical.
Report comment
Gosh, the psych industries are now telling the Harvard trained lawyers, who speak common sense, that they are the insane ones. How insane can our, shouldn’t be controlled by the psych industries’, society get?
I agree, Jim, “the solution for people without housing is housing.” It breaks my heart when I meet homeless people. I try to help them. There was a homeless woman who was dropped off in a park I frequent recently, by a church that was claiming to help her. She was sweet as pie.
But, the park rangers weren’t going to let her stay there, and both she and I knew it. And it was a park not near to anyone she knew was trying to help her, nor even close to an air conditioned place she could go to escape the extreme heat we’ve been experiencing this summer.
And I think both she and I knew she was possibly on the verge of heat stroke, and I’ve seen what heat stroke can do to a person, and I certainly didn’t want to see that happen to her.
So I drove her to the local library for the day, to cool off, then drove her back to the neighborhood she knew, and had churches that were supposedly trying to help her. Since I’m currently largely without a church or religion, who should have helped her, in my current suburb.
Sometimes, you have to do the best you can, given your current circumstances. I hope Bridget has found a home, and is okay. Let’s please pray to just house the homeless, without the psych industry’s BS.
Much to my claims to Bridget that no financial reparations were expected, nor needed. Bridget insisted on buying me a new pair of flip flops, as a thank you.
Report comment
Clarification: SAFE, affordable housing.
Report comment
Birdsong, in one of your recent comments you expressed apprehension that the increasing presence of incoherently babbling homeless people on city streets is fast becoming a public health issue.
Though I sympathize with the plight of those unfortunates, I frankly don’t know if a feasible, humane solution to this problem can be found. A large number of them may be so physically and mentally impaired after years of substance abuse and untreated severe illness that they are unemployable and incapable of supporting themselves, even if they were to be provided with low-cost or free housing.
However, I personally believe that corporation-engendered pollution of air, water, and soil, the production of addictive fattening junk food, and the administering of psychiatric neurotoxins–especially to children and the vulnerable elderly–pose a far greater danger to public health. To me, that should be the major focus of our attention. But given the cruel corporatist policies of the current administration, this would seem a vain hope on my part.
Report comment
Joel, I understand there are some people who have gotten to the point they can’t be expected to adequately maintain or provide for themselves.
But how does that justify not providing them enough food to eat and a safe place to sleep?
I believe in relieving as much human suffering as humanly possible in the here and now.
Ignoring the cold and starving in your own backyard is as morally reprehensible as any socially irresponsible corporate policy.
And there’s no denying the fact that large numbers of people living on the street without proper sanitation facilitates transmission of communicable diseases.
Report comment
Very interesting and beautiful landscape Birdsong (no I’m not being sarcastic). I agree with you completely. However, having gone today to a place that is so well kept, I thought that no one in such an area really needs a house. Millions might buy one there, but…..
Now, maybe you’ll join me sometimes, and we might just try this out. Sort of like when, as I was told, a class in being a social worker was allowed access to an elevator at a mall for the whole day, so that they could go up and down it, and have anyone else using it more than once notice, and see how people react. I don’t know what ELSE was an assignment; but yeah… Stand on a street corner and behave in the way the Mayor of New York has stated is cause to allow anyone to have the possibility or being put into an asylum (at least the police would have to be informed of this, or even better the asylums, although that already wouldnt work). No, such has been done before, and the asylum said they knew how many others had done the same. It should be possible to simply sleep somewhere as natural as the other wildlife, and have this be okayed by the police, or not!?
I also met the very person Anne Lucas in her book: “A Quest for Love” said she murdered, and had to because those forcing her would have tortured the girl more, and thus it was a mercy killing. THAT, is just one account of such behavior from Anneke. But yeah, the girl came walking down the beach, with some others, and an old friend from somewhere else spent time talking with her. I don’t know if she then is an angel amongst us, whether she reincarnated, or whether she had a near death experience and revived while even Anneke (having told her she could die and still be herself) thinks or thought or will think, but yeah…..There are homeless people that would more out of the attempt at their condition most of “modern” art is about. I supposed one could play all of this gloriously “romantic” or “post romantic” music sort of the same. Or “primitive.” It would be nice would it not be too late, which is it for the people we lost, while others felt it free to go on as if they “understood,” had “empathy” and we building a bridge by their “creative depiction” of “the times.”
This is what my friend meant, I think, when he said the flowers in the field are finer than Soloman’s robe, and yet they are thrown on the compost heap (in that time it meant burnt) so God must have something finer for them. And no one got it, in the “Urantia” papers the insult to the Universe that got an abusive following THEN already says he decided he was the son of man, after reading about THAT title. I don’t think so. Do you think man painted the flowers? Maybe women did…..
“You could have stayed around longer….” “You say the flowers are finer than Soloman’s robe, and they are thrown on the compost Heep, you could have stayed around and smelled the roses….”
Whether he could have or not, he is….
But I guess that was solved a long time ago. There’s a book called: “The Romance of the Rose.” I’ll continue to read that now. Thanks for your friendship and input…..
We love you so much……
Report comment
So, the subtext of this article is an anti MAGA rant. This site is so far left. I can’t waste my energy on a cogent argument as to how you are giving biased information on this issue. It saddens me that you do not care about mentally ill people living on the street. Your main concern is politically charged rhetoric to dismiss any plan to help the homeless mentally ill.
Report comment
In many ways I tend to agree with you.
Report comment
Not sure I see it. A large portion of the article was aimed at criticizing Gavin Newsome, the Democratic governor of California, and his pro-incarceration approach to “mental health.” He’s seen by some as the next Democratic candidate for President. Hardly a target for a pro-liberal, anti-Trump rant?
Report comment
My personal concern is to refute the pernicious falsehoods and fallacies of a spurious profession (racket) that over many decades has purveyed the myth of mental illness in order to fill its coffers and gain unwarranted scientific authority at the expense of countless victims. If you have any doubts on that score, I suggest you read, inter alia, the brilliant essays by Dr. Bruce E. Levine, Dr. Peter Breggin, and Dr. Peter Goetzsche on the MIA website.
As for genuinely caring about homeless people on the street who are supposedly mentally disturbed, I do feel great empathy with their emotional distress, which I don’t consider a manifestation of some hypothetical brain disorder at all but rather a justified response to unjust, exploitative social and economic conditions. The label of mental illness that you so facilely apply to such unfortunates would be far more descriptive of the motivations and behavior of sociopathic corporatists and their enablers who create and perpetrate those conditions.
Report comment
Oops, I meant to say “perpetuate those conditions.” But the corporate sociopaths are definitely perpetrators.
Report comment
Birdsong, I did not wish to imply that homeless people living on the street should be ignored and not provided with adequate shelter, food, and healthcare. Perhaps my comment failed to make this clear.
What I do believe is that unless the glaring social and economic inequities generated by profit-driven corporatism are properly addressed, the problem of homelessness can never be fully resolved–if that goal is not a pipe dream.
Report comment
Yes, the wrong “people” (shame on those delusional lawyers, who think people are corporations, and corporations are people) are in charge.
Report comment
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
If those purposing to strip the vulnerable of their autonomy, enslaving them in psychiatric institutions, medicating them until their brains turn to porridge, were instead, themselves, categorized by the DSM – I’m sure an illness could be found among the multitude- and their autonomy stripped- incarcerated in soft- jails with no civil rights-their story unheard, and their every sentence uttered only solid proof and justification of their diagnosis – for their “own good “ , of course, well, I bet after just a few short months, these “do-gooders” would find the creativity to come up with a humane and civil solution.
AnnieOakley
Report comment
My heart breaks for, every time I see a disabled person, sleeping outside, on the ground, beside their wheelchair. I have seen this personally from Hawaii to Colorado. They are not sleeping on the ground surrounded by their “loved ones”. They are sleeping on the ground, alone, in the middle of the day. One guy was sleeping in the median, between 2 streams of traffic on either side. Won’t someone, do something, to help this human?
Personally, I’ve put in 12 years, volunteering at food banks / soup kitchens.
Mistakes will be made. Mistakes are always made when one human judges another human.
My baby brother has been a beneficiary of “housing first” with supportive services (Montgomery County, Maryland). I don’t know what is wrong with his brain, and apparently neither does anyone else. He often makes no sense, at all – but sometimes, my brother is actually “in there”. And then, whatever is wrong, snatches him away from reality, again. He has been psycho actively drugged for decades. Probably a surprise to readers here, but his drug of choice is Tegretol (anti seizure medication). There are others, of course (which make him fat and sleepy). After this many decades, it could be brain damage?
Within the past 2 months, I went and got the leasing lady and she called the ambulance. It was the middle of the day and the man was sleeping on the ground, in the sun. He had been in the shade, but the sun moves. The ambulance took the man away. My leasing lady (from California) called the man “ a passed out druggie”. I had never heard the term before. I just knew that I was not armed, in approaching this human (we were unable to wake him). Did I save this human’s life? Or condemn him to a flawed system? Unknown.
Where I see the vast opportunity for mistakes to be made are with people like me. I am not my brother and the genetic story, that makes me the same, is hogwash! They will not catch me. I am housed. I am not afraid. I am more afraid of an abusive guardianship, after I get too old to think (defend myself).
Why is this comment thread debating the validity of “mental illness” when the question, it seems to me to be, is how do we care for humans, that are unable to care for themselves? For whatever reason.
What do you feel, in your human heart, when you see an unwashed human, long in the tooth (grey haired), dragging a bum foot, pushing their shopping cart? Do you think “that person is free” or do you think “where are the people who are supposed to love that human?”
I think this entire country is aging, in a hurry, and if no one does anything – we will see the aged and infirm, dying – sitting on the curb. Maybe some here, have already seen this? I know, post pandemic, I ran into far too many elderly, who could not access medical care (backed up system). People who could not sit or stand, due to physical pain in aging bodies.
That’s what I think (not that anyone cares what I think).
Report comment
The current system isn’t set up to accommodate an aging population. The only people who don’t have to worry are the super wealthy.
Report comment
There is one theme that holds true across all of these changes that are occurring: Money Flow! On the surface is doesn’t make any sense. Why does America spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on psychiatry and fraudulent psychiatric drugs which are less effective than dozens of other things such as various herbs, vitamins and foods? The answer is that science has nothing at all to do with psychiatry and in fact it is all about corrupt institutions trying to justify their existence in this corrupt economic and social system! It is pointless to place all of the blame on one political party or the other! We live in a socioeconomic system in which lies and made up things that don’t work such as psychiatry have more value to people than real things! No one cares about the truth! All anyone cares about is money flow! That said, I believe Trump is being unfairly blamed for everything when the fact is that Kamala Harris wanted to bring back large mental institutions!
Report comment
I couldn’t on the phone make out what one is to do with replying to anything, or WHICH string of responses ANY reply would be going to, so I’m just bottoming out here, with ANOTHER one (sorry)
Birdsong said: not so fast you two
“Sown in dishonor”!
Ah! Indeed!
May this “dishonor” be?
If I were half so fine myself
I’d notice nobody!
“Sown in corruption”!
Not so fast!
Apostle is askew!
Corinthians 1. 15. narrates
A circumstance or two!
https://bloggingdickinson.blogspot.com/2011/12/f153-1860-62.html
Report comment
In a country with more guns than people, none of these fascist policies can succeed. At least 30 million Americans are or could be labeled as “seriously mentally ill”. All of them are desperate, underresourced, and desensitized to violence. “American Carnage” for them would soon become “American Carnage” for everyone.
Report comment
Violent resistance is not really an option. If someone fights back violently they will just be sent to prison. Furthermore people with mental illness are not allowed to own guns due to laws supported by Obama. There are only 2 things that will prevent people being sent to asylums: 1. People will wise up and realize that the psychiatrists are fascists, and then they will lie to the fascist psychiatrists as needed. 2. Asylums are very expensive and the government cannot really afford them. Eventually, people need to realize that psychiatry is just a fraud that cannot really help most cases of mental illness. But how are people going to realize anything if they are being brainwashed by big money?
Report comment
“How are people going to realize anything if they are being brainwashed by big money?”
The slow, painful passage of time will probably have to be what it takes for people to fully realize how much and how badly they’ve been taken to the cleaners by biological psychiatry.
Report comment
Taken to the cleaners by biologically oriented psychiatry in profitable collusion with Big Pharma and its venal enablers in the media, academia, and toothless regulatory agencies. This network of greed and deceit has spread its tentacles far and wide.
Report comment
True, but human beings have repeatedly shown a remarkable capacity for eventually seeing the truth.
Report comment
“Violent resistance is not really an option. If someone fights back violently they will just be sent to prison.”
Institutions ARE prisons. It’s easier to be paroled for murder than it is to leave inpatient psychiatric “care”. If our government condemns 30 million Mad Americans to life imprisonment in psychiatric institutions, those folks will have nothing left to lose. They’ll make everyone pay for the government’s policies. Many of them own guns and all of them have alternatives to guns (e.g. fire, bombs, etc.). It is within their power to “Make Siege Great Again”.
Report comment
Acting “crazy” is more criminal than being a criminal with significantly less rights.
Report comment
What I mean, of course, is that by acting “crazy” one has significantly less rights than a real criminal.
Report comment
In reality we need more people capable of being lit up into the psychiatric system like we need, or was needed, to have (1) the people calling themselves whatever religion, because it was safe for them, to start misrepresenting what Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu (and no NONE of them are white men)…what they said. And start this movement of that’s their territory, (2) or people in the ghetto who sell drugs, crank up the music, or both, or more that like to dowse down their taste: loud music, unhealthy food, cheap stimulants, gratuitous everything with what’s convenient, so no one can find their peace and anyone that feels what it does isn’t cool, is being unsocial; or the next class moving in on what’s available because of what was just mentioned and then you get (3) the social workers, the psychiatrists, the bleeding hearts liberals like Jesus father Joseph who sat and wept because he knew they were selling stolen livestock that might be murdered when he married Mary, so it says in the bible that he wanted to divorce her, because he made such a ruckus about it of course from number 2 (or does it say he wanted to kill her?) because more of it heard him weeping and wailing. So when Jesus could create landscape for this, and was falling in love with being human, as part of nature, then drawing a teachers face, in charcoal, and having the lips even soft (the other orifice not available in view for a boy who knows what to do from nature at that age) it’s called idolatry, he’s barred from making any drawing, no clay sculptures anymore, and “Joseph” (who now reincarnated and is a social worker where I live, who knows what his name is or who the devil cares!?), won’t let him even express wanting to have a Greek style playhouse in their village, because that’s “Greek stuff.” Jesus already having learned to draw in the sand, thanks to another friend of mine, an angel, so when push came to shove, and Joseph might have spent time or forever doing something more enjoyable with whoever wanted to make a living raising poor animals to be slaughtered as if this appeases God, and one gets paid for it; he might have spared Joseph as well as the lady sold by her husband who bought her just for that, when they tried to corner him knowing if he said that those who legally could put her to death, while the other side wanted such power that was supposedly given to those who wanted it, as they did; it would go wrong either way. Well it didn’t did it, because someone had showed him what art is, DESPITE Mr. bleeding hearts “father.” Further, more when my friend and love was accused of idolatry and there being a whole meeting with such nitwits who believe such nonsense, and his “father” being involved, Jesus then broke into it and announced he had a good father and would do anything that he said. ONE WAY of sparing himself, maybe even in another time, of having Joseph tell him who had a big one, and that he’d like gratification. MY love knowing FULL WELL that was how to avoid such. I encountering the same when this guy stood behind me in line and announced: “You have an excellent ass.”
We don’t need name witheld blasting away, doing so many drugs he also [like Johnny Depp] needs guards to make sure he gets it, doesn’t die from it, if he does they aren’t blamed, and before this then calling the local community media center to ask how to get his fake store bought prod in the right place ; we don’t need some maniac [excuse me, do I mean “psychiatrist”] who thinks that anyone not telepathically looking in their freezer for what he might ignite into their lives with cocktails that involve recipes so bent on his approval, would one try to cook for oneself you might need to telepathically know what he prefers, just to know what to say to him;
We don’t need (4) a bunch of aces concocting ways to sell the cocktails, or the abuse; and housing should be housing, not a place for ALL THREE [no FOUR] to torture others and call it a working system and con those who know better to think ANY war is going to solve ANY of it!
And in the beginning was the word, not the lie; as little as that people do sports in order to win, rather than it might show how something works, or create bonding with those taking part when done properly.
Report comment
It might be actually someone else was Joseph and they were so simple and simple just so that yeah so I get it now that’s so that social worker might not actually have been Joseph. that might be the composer who wrote a song about “lasciate mi morire.”
Report comment
I have SO MUCH had it with this nonsense going on.
“Funding” for asylums, because the amount of “$” doesn’t add up.
People called “healers” having a degree in it: “Psychiatry”,”Medical”; and then you have the “legal” profession that honors “rules”.
They can get together, decide regarding someone’s “behavior” or what comes next from their “treatment.” NOT actually talk with the person regarding their “diagnosis,” not actually LISTEN when the person has something to say about either, the diagnosis or the treatment; NOT…and I’m at a loss: would one say they aren’t cogent enough to see what they are doing, or that they just simply only care about the money, the profits, the social gears, the privilege; or is it that they never were allowed to express pain and so they inflict it in others the same!?
To be able to go on regarding what they don’t really understand regarding human behavior, to not actually listen to those that do understand or those that have understood and might have forgotten and are trying to bridge the gap, to not listen to those that want to understand and WILL NOT be brainwashed to not understand; to have the legal profession allow them to lock people up label ANYONE who wants to actually understand with:
1) fill in “diagnosis,” they don’t talk with the person about, don’t listen would the person try to point out there’s grave error or any other misunderstanding.
And when real help might be available:
2) prevent any avenue that actually shows understanding, call these wonderful expositions of understanding lacking in mainstream support (no, the majority of people on the planet AS YET really aren’t all being forced to believe otherwise), dowse any true love of the human condition that blossoms into the beauty of what it is to be alive and free to express yourself, and free to listen to others without monitoring their “behavior” when you don’t understand it, dowse that with being worthless because it as yet hasn’t needed the “funding” that “supports” them and then they swagger and prance around hoping people gawk at them; perhaps with no understanding would anyone see that they truly think twice about using such words as “retarded”,”backwards”,”crazy”,”insane”,add the rest of the DSM because that REALLY does, and would insult, nature.
And no, I haven’t started ranting yet.
WHAT do they need these “buildings” for!?
Report comment