Bonkersfest for all of us
Posted By admin at Frink
Mention of attending a bonkersfest frightens some of my friends into silence and flight.
FYI, I think their discomfort at the mention of attending a bonkersfest and being seen with real, live, celebrating mad pride advocates is as ignoble as failure to stand up against racial discrimination and as fundamentally irrational as a reluctance to advocate heart-healthy diets.
That's why you see my picture at right, with the "I am human" declaration.
Because I am, as are you.
We all are.
Everyone is.
Eliminating the kind of reflexive irrationality I see in some of my friends was made a national health priority by the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness in 1999. That report and associated studies found that mad prejudice is a both persistent and profoundly destructive:
Stigmatization of people with mental disorders has persisted throughout history. It is manifested by bias, distrust, stereotyping, fear, embarrassment, anger, and/or avoidance. Stigma leads others to avoid living, socializing or working with, renting to, or employing people with mental disorders, especially severe disorders such as schizophrenia (Penn & Martin, 1998; Corrigan & Penn, 1999). It reduces patients? access to resources and opportunities (e.g., housing, jobs) and leads to low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness.
Neither this prejudiced insanity-of-the-so-called-sane nor its consequences have substantially abated in the years since 1999. Instead, public mental health care in North Carolina and other states had deteriorated. Discrimination and even shunning continues.
Thus the afflicted, if that is the right term, have been left with no worthwhile alternative but to confront the prejudice, very much as other groups confront the discrimination they face.
Although it originated in England, the mad pride movement in the United States is, then, a natural and healthy response to our collective national failure to put aside prejudice in favor of reason, humanity and sound public health policy.
The alternative was silence, concealment and being crushed when discovered.
As Molly Sprengelmeyer of the Asheville Radical Mental Health Collective put it to the New York Times:
It used to be you were labeled with your diagnosis and that was it; you were marginalized. If people found out, it was a death sentence, professionally and socially.
We are hoping to change all that by talking.
The "low self-esteem, isolation and hopelessness" which are the fruit or prejudice against mental illness are excruciatingly painful to the already besieged, and are exacerbated by self-enforced, societally encouraged silence. The combination can in fact make the "death sentence" Sprengelmeyer mention more than a metaphor. One such suicide was the genesis of Active Minds. Even absent recourse to other literature or experience, a close reading of the CDC suicide prevention materials shows that the combined effects of prejudice, kill.
It is no surprise then that there are 80 percent more suicides than homicides in this country each year, with more than 32,000 people taking their own lives annually. According to the "The Surgeon General's Call To Action
To Prevent Suicide," this makes suicide the 8th-leading cause of death (third for Americans 15-24).
We can no more prevent every suicide than we can cure every disease, but we can through honorable action driven by the force of individual will mark the beginning of the end of the malevolent prejudice.
Let us all join mad pride and declare together that we are now or without further notice may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and that we will not tolerate anything less than unprejudiced acceptance of those who are given to such altered states.
Because that is the truth.
It means, after all, that each of us has a living, neuroplastic, organic brain which changes with experience, which is prey to illnesses and which is given to the unexpected emergence of gifts. It means we understand the obvious -- that reflexive assignment of stigma to mental illness is illogical and inhumane.
Through your declaration, like mine here, you acknowledge that the emergence of illnesses or gifts does not reduce anyone's humanity and is no more a source of shame for them and those around them than diabetes or, for that matter, red hair.
We can all acknowledge that those who do experience altered states deserve to be treated with unreduced respect.
That they deserved to loved, not shunned.
That they deserve to be cared for, not abandoned.
Absent a real, well-demonstrated, public necessity of confinement or restraint, those given to altered mental states also have a right to freely pursue their lives, like everyone else. They have much to give and we are all deprived by the dark-ages mentality which proclaims them automatically defective and unable to contribute.
How we have treated them and how we treat them/you/us in the future is one, true measure of our individual and collective humanity.
Let us make right together that which has for so long been wrong.
Got those PTSD Blues, Mama
Posted By gwfrink3 at Frink
This balladeer sings post-traumatic stress disorder and the associated politics with undeniable clarity:
Having heard the well-sung and ultimately gentle ballad, please listen to the crystal clear Congressional testimony of a Vietnam veteran's widow.
Her words inspired the music.
I believe that if you give them heed, you will understand why:
As Penny Coleman explains, PTSD is an injury, not a defect.
It is an injury in response to which we commonly fail to meet the standards of ordinary ethics and commonplace honor.
Warriors come home from war with that injury, while others among us are injured here at home, sometimes even at the hands of profoundly abusive domestic caregivers (like my mother and father).
What most thus injured have in common is the sweeping neglect of those around them, complicated by a generalized prejudice against the injured.
She goes on to explain that the neither PTSD nor the negligent reponse to it is new:
Our collective neglect to provide appropriate care, and frequent willingness to excuse ourselves from caring when caring becomes difficult, does not cleanse the hands of anyone who walks either path.
That stain on the hands of the negligent is the blood of those they neglected -- often the blood of those who loved and trusted them.
That stain is commonplace and by the very values we claim to espouse, an indictment.
CNN's (as of this writing) unmade correction
Posted By gwfrink3 at Frink
CNN's failure to correct May 6 primary-eve errors led Karoli to indict them with a personal eulogy.
To my eye she has the story and its conclusion exactly right.
You see, Lake County, Indiana, disrupted the stagecraft of horse-race-reporting journalists by being slow to report returns. As an apparent result, Wolf Blitzer, John King and Hammond, Indiana Mayor Tom McDermont ganged up on Gary, Indiana, Mayor Rudy Clay.
That ugliness began as browbeating and moved on to implications that the digital ballot boxes in Gary had somehow been stuffed -- implications that appear to have been and as of this writing appear to remain vacant speculation.
No pussycat of American journalism, the Chicago Tribune told the story straight and without hints of impropriety, thus fulfilling their journalist responsibility to tell the story they had. In fact, even the Lake County GOP chief said there was "no hanky panky" associated with those primary returns.
I have long relied upon CNN. I hate to think of CNN as as full of sound and fury, signifying whatever makes convenient stagecraft, but bashing public officials with speculative allegations which happen to give drama to the sometimes tired business of reporting election returns isn't worthwhile journalism. If I were involved in that primary-eve contretemps, one way or another, I'd issue a correction and apology. Such corrections are both painful to make and among the fundamental obligations of facts-first American journalism.
The earthquake that may turn North Carolina blue
Posted By admin at Frink
The "earthquake" former President Bill Clinton had in mind wasn't Sen. Barack Obama's triumph in a contest that may have aroused Tar Heel pride enough to turn North Carolina electoral blue once more.
The Democratic primary became a war for the Tar Heel soul and an insult to Tar Heel pride when Republicans fired from that well-polished cannon of racist smear, and were answered by withering fire from the generations who have had enough.
That would have been the battle front had Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain not made a failing gesture at forbidding use of the ad, thus telling us all he believes we're too dumb to know a ruse on sight.
You may search from the pine forests, deep swamps and tobacco fields where I was born to the university lecture halls near me as I write and through the mountain tops, gorges and hollows of the west.
You will find Tar Heels in all of their wonderful variety.
What you will not find is one who misunderstood the twin Republican insults.
McCain and his party think we are too weak-minded to understand the strategies of contempt which they tried to use once more during this primary, and too weak-willed to stand up for ourselves and defeat those strategies.
We are neither.
NC Republicans aren't the bounce-ad masters
Posted By gwfrink3 at Frink
Do you recall the ad with which North Carolina Republicans hope to depress the Democratic gubernatorial and presidential primaries by parachuting in old news about Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's minister?
Yes, the unaired "television ad" which tries to bounce a few words from one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons onto the two gubernatorial hopefuls -- State Treasurer Richard Moore and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue. With plenty left over for Democratic presidential hopeful Obama.
Although Republican Party Chairman Linda Daves defends that beast as though it were her own political offspring, tactically identical ads have been trotted out in at least three other states -- Louisana, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. The thing clearly isn't Tar Heel born. She's just reciting her lines, as are her peers in the other states which bought into this ploy.
All of four ads try to both McGovern the Democratic forces by making them wary of supporting one another, and to drive up Democratic negatives with some rank appeal to emotion.
Yet to see a moment of paid air time, the "made to be aired on news shows" North Carolina version has been a triumph of effective misdirection.
Republican presidential hopeful John McCain got to look noble and above it all by asking North Carolina Republicans not to air the palpably racist ad.
McCain's request helped revive flagging North Carolina Republican Party spirits, because party leaders got to look semi-tough and sort of independent by refusing to do any such thing.
Ms. Daves even got a free ride on national television news out of it, and while the ad's content is second rate, it is sure to have some stimulative effect on the old JesseCrats.
What a fine farce. Whoever planned this really knows how to orchestrate a campaign melodrama.
Best of all, if you missed this episode, you don't have to bring yourself up to date.
There are new, self-contained episodes in the pipe and scheduled to hit the stage shortly.
I'd try not to let any of it get on my shoes if I were you, though.
Frink
bonkers bonkersfest crazy human icarus mad_pride mental_illness schozophrenia | healthcare | Friday May 16, 2008 | By admin
Mention of attending a bonkersfest frightens some of my friends into silence and flight. FYI, I think their discomfort at the mention of attending a bonkersfest and being seen with real, live, celebrating mad pride advocates is as ignoble as failure...
Frink
balladeer injury mental_health post_traumatic_stress_disorder ptsd suicide | healthcare | Sunday May 11, 2008 | By gwfrink3
This balladeer sings post-traumatic stress disorder and the associated politics with undeniable clarity: Having heard the well-sung and ultimately gentle ballad, please listen to the crystal clear Congressional testimony of a Vietnam veteran's...
Frink
clinton cnn gary indiana lake_county obama rudy_clay wolf_blitzer | Politics | Thursday May 08, 2008 | By gwfrink3
CNN's failure to correct May 6 primary-eve errors led Karoli to indict them with a personal eulogy . To my eye she has the story and its conclusion exactly right. You see, Lake County, Indiana, disrupted the stagecraft of horse-race-reporting journalists...
Frink
blue clinton democratic mccain obama racist republican | Politics | Tuesday May 06, 2008 | By admin
The "earthquake" former President Bill Clinton had in mind wasn't Sen. Barack Obama's triumph in a contest that may have aroused Tar Heel pride enough to turn North Carolina electoral blue once more. The Democratic primary became a war for the...
Frink
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Do you recall the ad with which North Carolina Republicans hope to depress the Democratic gubernatorial and presidential primaries by parachuting in old news about Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's minister? Yes, the unaired "television ad" which...
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North Carolina Republican leaders demean the campaign heritage of Jesse Helms with that thin, inebriated wander of a television ad they plainly presume will volley his lightning. The ad , which Republican presidential hopeful John McCain has asked them...
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Like you , I either am now or may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and if you're a member of Active Minds you're with me. Those terms mean only that each of us has a living, organic brain which is prey to illnesses to which misguided ...
Frink
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Frink
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If you notice that your child is somehow distressingly different, all of the available scientific data says act on what you notice. Do so immediately and constructively. Whether you're seeing an Autism Spectrum Disorder , or something else, is a matter for...
Frink
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Tiger, Tiger ... I'm Burning Now
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Under Republican Sen. John McCain's health plan , he and Elizabeth Edwards have something in common, Ms. Edwards has explained in several contexts. The text of McCain's proposals suggests that neither his melanoma nor her breast cancer would be covered,...
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Frink
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Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said today in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that "she would have left her church" if her pastor made inflammatory remarks like those made the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. She tried to wrap it in a politically...
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