1. Travel.  Yesterday I drove 220 miles to meet with Nancy. Came down from Sharon’s place in Laytonville where I’d been staying, all the way to San Jose, to County M.H. there.
   
   
2. Breakdown.  I’ve been addressing client-system relations in conversations with Nancy this fall, in terms of dialogue breakdown. The clients do not enter the dialogue from an equal position. You could say, “The system doesn’t listen,” or again, “The clients have trouble getting heard.” So I’ve been urging her to make affirmative moves to reach out to the clients and invite dialogue. Plus of course urging people to ‘take a risk’ and reach out to her. This fall, this seems to have had a positive effect.
   
   
3. Battery.  On the other hand, now Nancy is the Director and is starting to implement her program. She has had intense meetings putting in motion plans for
   1. residential crisis project
   2. hiring clients on clinical outreach teams
   3. the construction of an Office of Client Concerns and
   4. support for my client computer course.
   This activity brings into focus another side of this ‘dialogue’ issue — what it is like to work the one-down side of the discussion. So now I’m discussing with her the ‘battering paradigm’, specifically, the painful way that some of us have been holding together the client activist scene these last years.
   
   
4. Rights.  In February, 1998, the County Patients Rights Advocate Kyra Kyzantzis organized a ‘self-help vision’ conference which has framed a lot of the discussion since. This had the positive impact of making ‘self-help’ a current topic and justifying the subsequent self-help organizing program of Allan Rawland. Unfortunately it was also based on the ‘patients rights’ advocacy perspective which we have been calling the ‘old tradition’. And it also gave the Network an opening wedge which enabled them to practice divide-and-rule and keep things from developing as meaningfully as was needed. Thus the consequence was fractiousness and enhanced battering dynamics.
   
   
5. Determination.  Edna Elkins called Allan Rawland a “used car salesman.” Maybe this was unduly harsh but anyway he offered stuff he didn’t intend to deliver on. When he had me good and committed he backed off and left me to the mercy of the ongoing ‘battering’ paradigm. I got hired by way of a deal that made me a kind of ‘universal target’ for the aggressions of other clients: It was take that, or nothing. For me, it’s been three years of helping hold together the movement and keeping it to a minimal civility. Without the support of the ‘accountability movement’, sticking with this would have been unthinkable. Still, in the long run, such a course of action can not be sustained; something must give.
   
   
6. Civility.  What Nancy needed to see, was that implementing the set of plans she is now putting in motion is not a free lunch. If she does it in the absence of attention to independent client organizing, she’s taking advantage of the ‘gift' of my/our woundedness. Like I said, I didn’t sign on to be a ‘battery target’. Fortunately when I explained this to her, she got it. She’s willing also I believe to put out to support the work towards civility in the clients movement. And she is attentive to the problematic of what will represent a dignified and non-battering type of paradigm in dealing with me and with the A.C. in general.
   
   
7. Terms.  What Nancy said was that she was not willing to do business with the Accountability Caucus as an organized entity. However she’s perfectly willing to work with us on an individual basis, in a framework that amounts to much the same thing. This is not dissimilar I grok to the way that Allan in August/September of 1998 was willing to have me organize workshops reflecting topics of accountability, such as Claudia Center's famous workshop on discrimination, following the CAMI conference. I note that, after all, the A.C. is a political entity, not a business concern: It is NOT in that way a parallel entity to Mental Health Consumer Concerns.
   
   
8. Riposte.  I guess I also have my terms. I’m not willing to operate in a climate where the County would want equally to do business with the ‘Old Guard’. Kyra did things this way and it became a debacle; worse than that, the Network heavies have traditionally played a divisive role in County client politics. Battery as usual. Allan washed his hands of this conflict, preferring to hide behind his social relation with Jay Mahler’s supervisor Donna Wigand. What I expect from Nancy though is a more determined recognition that the battle for civility among the clients is in direct conflict with the traditional and current business practices of the clients movement statewide. The point is that we=the A.C. and friends have stuck our necks out on this one, on the basis of advocacy for a new tradition. Thus [1] the battery should stop and [2] stopping it should be framed in terms of the ethics of how clients relate. Work in this direction has merit.

Stichopus sp., sea cucumber

Andrew