Dear Politicians (regarding the “Murphy Bill” mental health legislation)

I am going to appeal to your human side since I know you are all human.  Many of you are around my age, which will be 58 in a few months. If you are as old as me, you remember the very day JFK was shot. You remember where you were and you remember the reactions of those around you. You probably recall just how you felt at that moment.

Maybe you recall the moon landing. Did you watch it on TV? I did. Do you recall how it felt to see a man on the moon? What did you think?

I remember these things, too. I remember 9/11, but that was many years later. I was in college, at Emerson College in Boston. I was 43 years old. My classmates were all about 18 years old. I arrived early to class that day, actually by over a half hour, even though this was an early morning class (not a favorite time for teens). This was a required essay-writing class taught by a graduate assistant. WLP 101, if I recall correctly. The instructor was younger than me. He wore a beard and wire-rimmed spectacles, had a light complexion and was on the thin side. I cannot recall his name offhand. I still have my class notes somewhere in my computer.

The day of 9/11, I sat in the classroom, quietly reading and waiting for class to begin. I was one of the first to arrive. All at once, someone came in and said, “An airplane ran into the World Trade Center in New York.” I thought the kid was kidding. I broke into a smile, thinking this was just another college student joke. Then, another student came running into the room, looking terribly upset and saying, “Another plane hit the World Trade Center.” I was sure this was a joke then. Two? College kids can think up all sorts of pranks. I wondered if someone had fooled these kids. Maybe it was a Tabloid story. I used to see many stories about UFO’s landing in rather unlikely places. When i was a kid and full of imagination, I thought of the Great UFO from science fiction that would come out of the sky and save the world from disaster. Deus Ex Machina.

Was it true? Slowly, I began to realize it was. The kids looked worried. Scared. All of us knew someone who lived in New York. Were our friends and family okay? More and more news came in. Wreckage. Dead people. Fallen debris. As older student, I felt a need to nurture these kids, even though I barely knew these kids. The semester had just begun. I wanted to hug them, to let them know that everything was going to be okay. I didn’t think I had the authority to say that, but I wanted to, anyway. I knew that they were freshmen, and this was their first time away from home. I can’t even recall the content of the class that day. Our minds were elsewhere.

My next class was in an older building. This was a fiction writing class taught by Richard Hoffman, one of my favorite faculty at Emerson. Richard started the class with an exercise. We studied a poem and then, Richard handed out another copy of the poem. This one left out the last few lines. We were to write our own versions. I have duplicated this exercise when I have taught writing. The poem is by David Ignatow, called “Above Everything.” I cannot reprint it here due to copyright restraints, but here’s a link: http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/11/david-ignatow-above-everything.html

I believe this assignment was planned out ahead of time, before 9/11 happened. The students were an older group, mostly around 20 to 22. Richard, a few years older than me, had us read our pieces aloud. We went around the room, and each of us read.

….I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with_____
____________________

____________________.

Dear members of Congress and folks interested in the Murphy Bill: What would you fill those blanks in with? What is beautiful to you? I probably have my own answers hand written and stashed away somewhere in storage. How would you answer?

A couple of students read. It was time for the next student. She began to read. Her voice began to falter and crack. At once, she began to weep, but continued to read.

It was then that so many of us cried.

Richard, feeling empathy for us all, suggested that we stop the exercise and take a break. “I want to know how all of you are doing,” he said. “Let’s talk about that.”

We went outside. The day was beautiful in Boston, as it was September, about the only time when New England tends to be picture-perfect. Throughout the semester, we did many outdoor writing exercises. Each time we went  out, I remembered the first time.

What do you recall?

I want to ask you right now, Do these words I have written sound like the words of a person you think  of as “mentally ill”? Do these sound like the words of a person who was thought of as violent, and seen as dangerous?

I had the following diagnoses, rather arbitrarily given to me at various times: Schizophrenia, Major Depression. Bipolar. Borderline Personality Disorder. Manic. Paranoid. Psychotic. Danger to Self. Anorexic.

If the Murphy Bill had been in effect, I wouldn’t have been at that class that day of 9/11. I would have been attending some  day program I never needed. I wouldn’t have been able to go to graduate school since they thought I “required treatment” instead. I’d be forcibly drugged right now, probably locked up in an institution. Instead, I am free to write these words. While I still could, I turned away from psychiatry because I realized that all those years, I never needed any of it. Turning down psychiatry was the only way I could stay alive. Without forced treatment, I have been able to live and continue to work on creative endeavors.

Do you want to see more force in the USA, more people drugged unnecessarily, more people denied a voice, more people denied their freedom? Isn’t Freedom what people were talking about after 9/11? What does freedom mean to you? What did it mean in New York the day the towers fell? What did the Statue of Liberty mean to your ancestors who came to the USA seeking refuge?

When you walk into your stately workplaces today, think of your children, who very well may be in college right now. Do you want your children to undergo forced care? Would you force your own daughter, a person like me, into a hospital or treatment center against her will? I’m a person who was diagnosed, because I made the choice to consult a mental health professional. Over three decades have passed since I made that choice. However, I’m just as okay and legitimate as anyone else. I have real feelings, just like you. I am a human being.

Welfare fraud: Maybe the man had no choice….

I’m skeptical of these courtroom decisions these days. Here’s the story:

http://patch.com/massachusetts/wilmington/wilmington-man-indicted-fraudulently-collecting-workers-compensation-benefits

As you may know, Massachusetts is an expensive place to live. The rents you find there are generally over $1,200 per month, usually much higher. The cheapest room in a rooming house that I could find cost $700.

If this man collected 26,000 as the article states, this over a period of 14 months, that adds up to over $1,850 per month. This is much higher than I could ever dream of earning. How can a person earn that much in compensation from restaurant work? The job itself probably paid just over $20,000 per year. Here’s the breakdown of restaurant work wages:

http://www.job-applications.com/restaurant-jobs/restaurant-server-job/

This was workers’s compensation. He apparently “collected” for medical expenses as well and I don’t know if that was included in the total.

Still, we don’t know his circumstances. Maybe he had kids to support. Living in Wilmington he probably had a car and cars are a huge expense, you pay and pay. Maybe he had a mortgage to pay.

The article does not state how he was injured. Perhaps he hurt his back or other body part. We don’t know. If pain was involved, then I can imagine what happened. He went to a doctor, he was uninsured or on public insurance due to being temporarily out of work. Instead of getting good care, he was handed pills. And more pills. The easy way if you can’t pay.

I wonder how much he earned while collecting from the other job? Was he working part time or full time? The article doesn’t say. How do we define disabled?

It’s all screwed up. The concept of disability should be canned. If a person uses a wheelchair and is working full-time, that person is considered not disabled, but still gets to park in a handicapped parking space and can ask for “accommodations.”

It sounds like “disabled” has too many meanings. On one hand, it means “Can you get hired?” If a person is subject to discrimination, is that then a disability?  That would mean a person living in a rural area where there are hardly any jobs has more chance of being “disabled.” Disabled used to mean, “Can you do the tasks?”

I accepted disability because I was talked into it in 1984. It didn’t take much. I knew I couldn’t hold down a job because I kept ending up in a hospital. While they’re supposed to hold your position, I had never been so lucky.  Employers break the law all the time and I lost my job.  Even after a three-day hospitalization (which my employer found out about), I returned to work to find I’d been replaced already.  After that, no one would hire me due to medication side effects such as shaking and pimples. By all means I could do the tasks, though. However, my doctors were convinced of my incompetence, and continued to insist I take their drugs and do their bogus therapy where they tried to drill it into my head that I was mentally defective. It was all bogus. I wish I had not believed their lies all those years.

I believe Dr. Charles Capers, who filled out my disability form, lied on the form. He would have had to to show that I was mentally incompetent enough to not be able to do the work. He said I was schiz and by all means I wasn’t. I could do many kinds of work. If I was lucky enough to get hired, I couldn’t keep any job I’d tried to do due to repeated hospitalizations. I didn’t have to go for an evaluation at that time, and no one gave a second opinion. I didn’t fill out anything myself. It was all done by the doc.  I highly doubt any other doctor would have agreed I was schiz, unless they were told ahead of time and judged me by their own preconceived notions.

And so, the decades passed.

So where do I stand on this? To accept handouts is the last thing anyone should do. It’s the last resort. If you just cannot get by any other way. This guy’s Worker’s Comp payments, though quite low, weren’t as low as what many of us received on “disability.” In Massachusetts, for me, that was $850 a month which no one can live on in Massachusetts. My guess is that he probably needed to take time off of work due to injury.  But why did he continue to receive handouts after he no longer needed them? I guess this was bad judgement.  A bad decision. He got caught. Still, the whole system is so screwy, it seems they went after him as scapegoat and should have gone after the real crooks.