To the Social Accountability list:

Sometimes this list must ‘understate’ itself because it lacks the drama of adversarial conversation. But another way to put this is that it tends to be made up of people who work hard and who are busy making real contributions.

Among others I have been trying to figure out how to move the clients movement off of its ‘rights’ center and onto a ‘respect’ center where tokenism and ‘trauma of treatment’ become the focus. These last several years I’ve been working on a strategic approach, and now I’m pleased to report some real movement is happening.

This week, following nine months of direct discussions and five organizing meetings, I’ve been hired for the summer as a consultant for Santa Clara County Mental Health. The purpose (‘deliverable’, in the jargon) is to organize and stage an Educational Retreat for County M.H.

This retreat is to consist of the senior managers of County M.H. plus the top ‘stakeholders’ (including leading non-profit providers, the head of NAMI-S.C., the County PRA, etc.). Also we will invite the head of HHS. The purpose is to change the dialogue level in mental health in the direction of ‘respect’ for the client activists and the clients in general.

A decade ago some people locally formed the United Consumers Movement (UCM) which was an historical forerunner to the present endeavor. They fought for real dialogue. There is a lot of woundedness due to the severity of that struggle, a lot of residual cynicism. Our job is to find a fresh level to re-aquaint the parties so that they can work together to build a client-driven mental health system for the Silicon Valley.

The facilitators for the meeting will be drawn mainly from the Accountability Caucus — veterans from across California. There will also be many veteran client activists from the UCM (there is some overlap of the two client groups). The key activity of the day-long retreat, to be held Friday August 17^th in Los Gatos, will be “2×2” groups where two facilitators (generally, client activists) will talk heart-to-heart with two participants.

Since part of the dialogue reconstruction we envision involves the visionary perspectives of professionals who are working for real paradigm shift, I’m pleased to say that in addition to the 20 or so clients facilitating we will also have Coni Kalinowski, M.D. and Philip Cushman, Ph.D. involved in the facilitation process. Dr. Stephen Blum, the Director of Student Relations at the California School for Professional Psychology (Alameda) has been an active participant in the organizing group.

Santa Clara County M.H. Director Nancy Pena has taken the stance that morality is the key. Thus it is in attending to the moral level of administrative action, the moral level of provider activity, and the moral level of client activity that we obtain the possibility of genuinely transforming the way we do business in mental health. The Silicon Valley which is immersed in the social revolution known as the ‘New Economy’ is a natural and felicitous location to try to work this dynamic.

We have written earlier of Nancy’s ‘union recognition’ model for embracing independent client organizing, where the boundaries of ‘trauma of treatment’ are sanctioned as the issue which must be negotiated. This is on the A.C. website — click on the button ‘Accountability Texts’ and then the link ‘Union recognition’ metaphor. This retreat is the first phase of that program; the second will be to prepare the independent client organizing process for effective operation at this new level.

Whew! Sorry this goes on for so long.  :-(

Finally, it goes w/o saying that the Social Accountability Dialogue Sessions at Alternatives 2001, less than a week after the Educational Retreat, will include a presentation on this work. Barry Fultonberg, co-founder of UCM, Jose Rangel of the A.C., lead South County organizer, myself, and anyone else from the A.C. who might hopefully be there in Philadelphia, will present on this.

Best wishes

Andrew Phelps