Short Notes: Will Brady's Ruminations: 12 December 2010

12 December 2010

spirituality - prove what you believe

It isn't that Faith is wrong, nor the premise beneath the belief is false; but things sometimes cannot be proven.

SOURCE: Found at Mesila's blog, otherwise known as "Elevated Highway: Dominating the Subversive Paradigm". Mesila is also the spirit and the brains behind an inactive weblog that goes by the name of Choronzon; which I have been following since it had been called "Thraam". I'm pleased to see her still present on the internet.

mental health - "recovery"

Wither "recovery" today?
The mental illness industry has once again glommed onto its treatment flavor of the month from those who are in the system. The clients argued during the 1990s that people can and do recover from prolonged bouts of psychic/spiritual/emotional disabling experiences (short version "mental illness") and, eventually, many service providers got the words but not the message.

Some have partly gotten the message, going so far as to self-disclose during therapy sessions with "their" patients. But many just mouth the words without having any idea what they are talking about.
As an academic or clinical concept, "Recovery" drew attention as far back as 1985 when researcher Courtney Harding and John Strauss conducted a long term follow-up study with people in Vermont [taking date gathered in the 1960s] to see what success they had (if any) at "recovering" from their travails.

The findings of their work revealed that as many as 66% of the people once believed to be "forever ill" had gone on and left the mental health treatment system. A number of those interviewed said they recovered "in spite of" what the system proffered as care or services.

Photo to the left ~ typical of housing provided from the late 1800's until the end of the 20th century

     Now, more than 25 years later, the career bureaucrats have latched on to this and suddenly embrace the concept like a fuzzy toy, while further try to shoehorn the idea in with their own career objectives. Show "success" and maybe they will go on and get accolades at a national conference.
     But what they are still doing is riding the evident success of some who were once severely disabled without ever having done much more than fill out some grant applications from SAMHSA [that's the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, an arm of the federal government].
     Alright, maybe that sound too cynical, but they are still slow on the uptake. And, by trying to make the process of recovery ~itself a very personal journey~ into some facet of the rehabilitation treatment model for mental health, they show how far they miss the point.
     What point is that, you ask? Point being that rather than create a new set of complex treatment plan curriculae and models and workshops to force non-comprehending staff to encourage or cajole "their clients" into following in hopes they get better (so as to allow the system to meet "measurable goals" and satisfy funding sources) how about providing people with:

• Affordable Housing
• Supportive, non-judgmental helpers
• An atmosphere of safety
• Chances to be treated as equals
• Combat the prejudices of a society that devalues people who don't appear to be "doing anything"
• Ask people what seems to work for them when in crisis ~and then make sure its available
• Make certain that basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, ability to get around are ensured
• LISTEN to people who suffer and/or experience disturbing discontinuities of thought
• Help provide people ways OUT OF the treatment system

     ...to name but a few things that could be accomplished ...or at least tried for.
     Finally, do things to help a person integrate back into the larger society at their pace and preference, rather than create a subordinate caste with "clubhouses," or programs and services that already duplicate what may exists out away from the mental health system funding and employment machine.
     Just wondering.

IMAGE SOURCES: "Tell Me..." face: International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation; [left side] South wing of Weeks Hall, Middletown CT - destroyed in a fire October 2010; [right side] Gate in the Callan Park Mental Asylum, Sydney, AU - Frangipani's Flickr Photostream

other voices - David Horsey

The Frat Boys are still at it, apparently. The 'toon is wrong in so many ways, but the viewer would be pressed to miss them. Yet all those wrong ways ~ racism, harassment, indifference to social consequence, obsequiousness ~ given the acerbic tone of the rabid right, are likely accurate conjectural observations.

IMAGE SOURCE: Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey on "Obama goes far to accommodate GOP frat boys". Re-posted here under "Fair Use" principles.

original work - Tag Sale

reference materials - the Federal Register

At the Federal Register, Tending to the Details of Democracy
     Published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.
     The Federal Register is published every federal workday. Not even snowstorms, hurricanes, or the events of September 11, 2001, have prevented its publication. In 2003, more than eighty thousand pages were published in the Federal Register. It is updated daily by 6 a.m. and is published Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays. GPO Access contains Federal Register volumes from 59 (1994) to the present.
     The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) provides access to the official text of:

* Federal Laws
* Presidential Documents
* Administrative Regulations and Notices
* Descriptions of Federal Organizations, Programs and Activities

The Office of the Federal Register also administers the Electoral College and the Constitutional Amendment Process.

     The Office of the Federal Register publishes regulations that affect the daily lives of all American citizens, including the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the cars they drive, and the airplanes they fly as well as consumer protection, terrorism protection, and much more. Those regulations are published in the daily Federal Register and the annual Code of Federal Regulations.
     The Federal Register, sometimes described as the legal newspaper of the executive branch of the federal government, was created by the Federal Register Act in 1935 to provide for the custody of presidential proclamations and executive orders and administrative rules, regulations, notices, and other documents of general applicability and legal effect and for the prompt and uniform printing and distribution of them.
     Before the 1935 act, there were no facilities within the executive branch of the federal government for the central filing and publication of those documents. In order for rules to become legally effective, the Federal Register Act and the Administrative Procedure Act require agencies to publish those rules in the Federal Register. The Administrative Procedure Act also requires agencies to publish their proposed rules in the Federal Register for public comment.
     To keep track of the amendments to the regulations, in 1938 Congress amended the Federal Register Act to create the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The Code of Federal Regulations is an annually revised codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register, divided into fifty titles that represent broad areas subject to federal regulation. There are 214 volumes of the CFR comprising over 150,000 pages.
     In 2003, the Office of the Federal Register developed the electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR), which updates the CFR online every business day. The eCFR is available to the public at www.gpoaccess.gov/ecfr/.
     The Federal Register is actively engaged in e-Government initiatives, which are aimed at making it simpler for citizens to receive services from government while reducing the costs of those services.
     All of the Federal Register publications are available online through GPO Access (www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html), and last year there were almost 191 million retrievals of documents from those publications.

other voices - Joann Jones

On the value of caregivers ~

During my second year in nursing school, our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the building?"

Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper leaving the last question blank.

Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. "Absolutely," the professor said. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello." I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorthea.

poetry - spam poetry 1

gay mormons in love
this XML file does not appear to have any style
information associated with it
health/helpcenter
ENTERTAINMENT
http:/Security Response

essay - Government Exists by Consent

If you find this of interest, you might also want to look at Economic Treason a companion piece to this work.

Humor - Truth in Labeling

You can't make this up. Signage at a hospital. At least they are honest.

art + artists

Janette MacKinlay moved to New York City in 1997 and lived across from the World Trade Center. She was home on 9/11 and survived when the windows to her loft were shattered by the cloud of dust created by the collapse of Tower One.
She had studied Ikebana [Japanese flower arranging arts] since 1995 an used her skills in Ikebana and her interest in contemporary art to heal from the trauma. She wrote about her experiences in a book called, “Fortunate, A Personal Diary of 9/11”. Since 9/11 Janette concentrated on a series of “Organic Assemblages”using natural materials in exciting and dynamic ways.
Ms. MacKinlay passed away on 9 December 2010. The very dust that may have killed her, gathered from the 9/11 blasts, she collected and provided samples of to BYU Professor Steven Jones – who’s study revealed unreacted thermitic material in the same dust (a military grade explosive), resulting in a scientific paper published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. http://tinyurl.com/2ehtdz8.

Chris Jordan. Jordan documents images of anguish and pathos [see the Hurricane Katrina works], as well as creates artwork from things as apparently mundane as lists of non-profit environmental and human rights organizations.
     Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His 2003-05 series "Intolerable Beauty" examines the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.
     The online conference-center site TED, says of his work "Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.
     One of his series of photographs, "Running the Numbers," gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.

Walter McClintock. McClintock was a contemporary of photographer Edward Curtis. In 1896 he traveled west and began documenting the wilderness and, like Curtis, the people and lives of the Native Americans. For over 20 years, supported by the Blackfoot elder Mad Wolf, McClintock made several thousand photographs of the Blackfoot, their homelands, their material culture, and their ceremonies.
McClintock believed that Indian communities were undergoing swift, dramatic transformations that might obliterate their traditional culture. He sought to create a record of a life-way that might disappear. He wrote books, mounted photographic exhibitions, and delivered numerous public lectures about the Blackfoot.
McClintock's work, some 1,426 hand colored glass plate slides and negatives, are preserved at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library, in New Haven Connecticut.

IMAGE SOURCES: Janette MacKinlay, cover photo from her book. Image found at the weblog Mikiverse; Chris Jordan, "Ball field, St. Bernard Parish". the link provided to "Running the Numbers" warrants looking at closely. It appears to be Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," but the pointillist style, in Jordan's photo, is comprised of soda cans; Walter McCormick, Blackfeet Indians on horseback - Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
THANKS TO: Jason King for the link to Janette MacKinlay, Pat Guerard for the link to Chris Jordan, and to Wood's Lot for the McCormick link.