Chandra’s image reveals an hourglass-shaped region of X-ray emission centered on the previously known central radio source (seen in this image as the blue central object) that extends outward for 60,000 light-years. The vast clouds of this hot gas that surround such galaxies in clusters are thought to be heated by collapse toward the center of the cluster. | ||||||||
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Sylvia wrote: Each and every one of us has to write. Every time something is published. When we agree. When we disagree. If one of us is published, that’s great. But even if not, the newspaper staff reads the letters, begins to be educated, perhaps slants the stories differently, explores our issues, .. Obviously this is important, but I don’t think it is the key that will make a difference. It kind of comes with what has to be done, with the ‘territory’.
We have been doing politics on an emergency basis to STOP Helen Thomson’s IOC agenda. That’s only a little bit of what politics is about. We have NOT been doing politics consistently by arguing in public about what madness is about. At the Forum I had the opportunity to talk with some of the leaders of OISC, Howie the Harp’s old Self-Help Center in Oakland, about why things were stuck there. They were not a happy lot, I gathered. But I remembered when the Alameda County Network was formed in the late 80s due to receiving a grant from the Feds for esp. OISC and the Berkeley Drop-In Center, and that the function of the ACNMHC was to manage the grants in re different self-help operations. Then, I saw, after looking at it all these years. What never happened in Alameda County was a genuine struggle in the body politic about the nature of madness. Instead the MHA/NAMI wormed their way into the public consciousness, bought Perata who is my Assemblyperson :-( and put the NAMI agenda as we read in the Sunday Chronicle editorial on the front burner. Because of this fundamental political lapse on the part of the clients movement, things are now in a bad pass, or so I judge from what I hear tell. This is an example of NOT DOING POLITICS as it should be done. Merely writing letters even ‘neato’ ones like thank you people say I wrote is not the vehicle of change. Much more it’s sitting down with legislators and winning them to our ways. In Humboldt County Sara Turner the founder of NAMI-Humboldt sat down with Wes Chesbro, whom she’d known since he was a student at HSU, and advised him on how to proceed on the moderate NAMI track, etc. [Source: personal conversation w. Ms. Turner.] That’s politics. And there are some people out there e.g. John Burton who think ‘forced treatment’ is the issue. To whom an advocacy of ‘Unified for Choice and Freedom’ seems right on. But I don’t particularly see things that way. And many people who are upset with the way madness is dealt with in this society and who don’t think more force & control is going to do much in a constructive way also don’t think the ‘patients rights’ agenda is broad enough to encompass the problem of change. The Network has a strong vested interest in ‘playing ball’ with DMH, yet DMH is in a conservative role where they are looking out for the interests of themselves and their job bank, more than working for the best possible service provision arrangement. The Network leadership should be very thankful that there are many strong clients ‘out there’ who aren’t beholden to DMH as they are, who want to do stuff. The Network legally has problems lobbying but they don’t have problems working in coalition with other clients who can lobby. The Network so far wants to have everybody do things THEIR WAY and follow the Public Policy agenda it has worked out, even though many of us have NO USE for that agenda. The Network should participate in a broad coalition, but they should not lead it. This is how INDEPENDENCE of action can come to us. Sally can work on her passion about ‘forced treatment’ in the context of a lot of us working on different aspects of the ‘reform’ issue.
If the Network leadership really wants something good rather than something shameful or half-a-loaf to come out of this politics, they will (1) embrace the idea of a coalition of the clients struggling for reform and they will (2) step back and not try to control it. We won’t get messages like. “What the clients should do is write such-and-such a letter.” Because the Network has NO IDEA of what should be done, outside of confronting hardcore agendas in re psychiatric intervention and outpatient commitment. Well, I’m enough experienced/wounded around all this so that I have my doubts about the Network leadership ever doing much beyond being the de facto agents of Steve Mayberg. The same limited politics that created the Alameda County Network in a vacuum relative to the County’s way of dealing with madness, is what runs the Network today. There is not the insight into how to stand up to NAMI’s ‘moderate’ agenda that is needed.
Respectfully Andrew Phelps | ||||||||
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What’s actually
needed is radically different from the
Public Policy vision of the Network. The issue is ‘reform’,
which means really doing politics, and the clients movement
has precious little collective experience in this. Joe Rogers
has some background in Democratic party politics, in
Philadelphia. Can’t say that’s
my cup of tea but anyway it’s
part of why he is grounded and successful.
The
question is, who cares enough to learn/change? Right now
the best we can hope for if we follow the leadership of the
Network IN MY OPINION is
that when NAMI gets its deal signed
by Gov. Davis, when the shape of Mental Health for the next
decade or more is set, that we have compromised down the
‘forced treatment’ stuff at
least to some extent. In terms of
‘treatment paradigm’, it will still be the same old
trauma-producing behavior-modification bully & control agenda,
the same old COMPLIANCE
agenda, as heretofore. We will not
have reform, we will have blown the opportunity to be
involved in reform for a decade anyway, and it will be
a shame.