The Shrink’s Links: Mad in America

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

Chain4

Not everyone connected with the treatment of and recovery from mental illness goes along with the medical view that it is a chemical problem that has a chemical solution. Anyone interested in rethinking psychiatric care would want to read Mad in America.

Click here to go to the page

The Shrink’s Links: Old Man Gloom

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

If you were amused by the post I wrote on Keith’s Crock of Shit, then wait till you get a load of what they do in Santa Fe.

Every year, the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, New Mexico constructs a huge effigy of Zozobra (the Spanish word for Old Man Gloom, I’m told.) People are encouraged to fill it with scraps of paper representing their gloom. Divorced wives have been known to donate their wedding dresses. Then, in a night-time ceremony, once a year, they set it on fire.

Guess, what? The gloom disappears.

 

The Shrink’s Links: A Consequential, Niggling Detail

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

redtape

Today I’m going to write about something that should be irrelevant and of no concern to you, but may affect you, nonetheless: the licensing of people who perform psychotherapy.

Licenses exist so the consumer can know who to trust and who has the necessary training and experience to do what they say they are doing. Professions usually welcome licensure for the same reason that restaurant might welcome a critic’s review. It endorses and affirms their work and guides customers to their doorstep.

Licensing laws also serve to shut out the competition. New York City releases a limited number of taxi medallions, for instance, so that taxi operators can be assured plenty of business. This, of course, drives up prices and makes it hard to get a cab. Consumers complain and often find undesirable alternatives.

We often hear about how it is difficult to access mental health care. It’s expensive. It can take months to get an appointment at a community clinic. Our prisons are filled with the mentally ill. When people can’t get mental health care, they chose alternatives: alcohol and drugs, violence, anything that gives them short term relief, and it ain’t pretty. Remember that the next time you hear about a school shooting, an overdose, a suicide, a fatal DWI, domestic violence, or pass homeless people on the street. Clearly, there are not enough people providing mental health care. Obama Care and other laws will not help if there are not enough therapists to see all those who need help.

A few years ago, the New York State legislature overhauled the laws concerning licensing of psychotherapy. Licenses had been very hard to come by. You had to go through a social work school, get a doctorate in psychology, or complete medical school and a residency. There weren’t too many of these opportunities in Western New York. Folks, like myself, learned the same material in other settings and got plenty of experience working in non-profit clinics where licenses had not been necessary. The legislature recognized that there were alternative paths to the same level of competency and created several new licenses with rigorous requirements: the LMHC, or Licensed Mental Health Counselor, for one. The legislature got all that right. The trouble is, they screwed up one little detail.

They wrote in the law that we would be doing “assessments”, not making “diagnoses”. There is absolutely no practical difference between making an assessment versus a diagnoses; they both result in the same thing: a brief summary of the problem. However, when insurance contracts are written that patients require a diagnosis, all the lawyers and bean counters in the insurance company (and there are quite a few) insist that diagnosis is what they need to have.
The result of this gaff is that today we have more competent people in the profession, but many of the insurance companies will not pay them. This limits the availability of mental health care.

I’ve been told that the other professions that had previously been licensed: the doctors and social workers, lobbied against using the word “diagnosis” in the language, thus inserting a poison pill into the legislation and ensuring they would get plenty of business. However, I would like to not believe doctors and social workers could be so evil.

I’ve been told that it’s going to take another act of congress (the New York State legislature, to be precise) to correct the problem. We all know what that’s like. Try to get a politician interested in this.

If you are still reading at the end of this post, you must still be interested. So, do one more thing. Contact your state senator or member of the legislature and ask him or her to support A.7608 and S.4977.

The links:
http://assembly.state.ny.us

http://www.nysenate.gov

 

 

The Shrink’s Links: The Human Libary

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

human library

Go to the Rochester Public Library  on Saturday, September 27, from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm and you’ll be able to check out a human.

That’s because it will be a human library as well as a library of books.

Started in Denmark in the 1990s as a response to hate crimes, the Human Library is an opportunity for area residents to connect one-on-one with someone who has life experiences, stories and belief systems very different from their own. Just like borrowing a book from the library, participants can ‘check out’ a Human Book for a 30-minute conversation. Human Books are people who are willing to share their experiences, perspectives, values and beliefs in conversation. The human books are open to any kind of question on their chosen topic that is posed in a respectful and non-judgmental way. The Human Library is an innovative method designed to promote dialogue, reduce prejudices and encourage understanding. The Human Library enables groups to break stereotypes by challenging the most common prejudices in a positive and safe environment. It is a concrete, easily transferable and affordable way of promoting tolerance and understanding.

The event will be hosted at three area Monroe County libraries:Central Library, Rundel Memorial Building, Harold Hacker Hall, 115 South Avenue; Henrietta Public Library, 455 Calkins Road (585-359-7092); Penfield Public Library, 1985 Baird Road (585-340-8720).

See all the humans in their catalog. Click here to go to the page.

Of course, if you can’t get to that particular library that day, when the humans are there, you can go to any library any day and check out a book. It’s pretty much the same thing.

The Shrink’s Links: Labor Day at Ludlow

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

Colorado_nat_guard_arrive_ludlow_strike

On vacation in Colorado a few weeks ago, I noticed a ghost town indicated on my AAA map. I always like a good ghost town, especially if it’s only a mile or so out of my way. Wanting a break from some monotonous driving through the Great Plains, I went to see. What I found was not a ghost town at all, it was a memorial to the victims of the Ludlow Massacre. Never heard of the Ludlow Massacre? Neither had I.

In 1913, coal miners went on strike. They had been digging coal all over southern Colorado, living in company houses in remote company towns, paid in script that could only be used at company stores and charged exorbitant fees for goods at those stores. When they went on strike, they were evicted. They gathered in a tent city near Ludlow, Colorado and held out through a brutal winter.

When the strike continued into the spring, the Colorado National Guard, its wages paid by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, opened up on the strikers and their families. They set up a Gatling gun that raked fire on the tents. A ten day war ensued. Many died. The nation paid attention, the strikers won their demands, and Congress limited the power of the companies. Rockefeller, to change his image, became a philanthropist.

This is why we have Labor Day: to remember the sacrifices of those who stand up to Power.

Power is getting the advantage again; that’s what Power does. Ludlow and the struggles of the labor movement are forgotten. There was no mention of the site in the AAA book and little about it in the nearby Trinidad, Colorado Visitor’s Center. There is noting at the Massacre site other than a neglected memorial set up by the United Mine Workers. Labor Day is a day of picnics and blowout back-to-school sales.

Today’s shrink’s link is a recent New Yorker article about the Massacre. Click here to read it.

Why is this a shrink’s link? What does this have to do with mental health?

I conceive of every therapy session as a fifty-minute, two-person revolt against the way things are, the way they seem to have to be. Sometimes it takes more than two people, though. Sometimes it takes more people banding together and standing up to Power before changes are made. This is my small acknowledgement to the sacrifices of those miners. They did far more therapy of this broken, exploited world that winter than I ever have done in all my years of sitting with people, talking about change.