888

888

       That is the number of hits my blog got (across a 90 day period) until I was “fired”. It was a blog generally concerned with mental health. Now it has been closed down. So where do the 888 people go to share and follow ideas about the mental health community in Manatee County? Where do 888 people go to share their opinions about marijuana legalization and other topics of mental health? I can say with confidence it is not NAMI.

       Is 888 a significant number? Do the excluded people count? Or are the people who removed the blog protecting their members from dangerous thoughts. As somebody once quipped Freedom of the press is a guaranteed right as long as you own the press. The users of blogs are overwhelming people born after 1980. People running NAMI were born before 1960. If bloggers wanted to make a wedge issue out of age, it wouldn't be difficult.

Group-think

Group-think, which is actually an assimilation of yes-men, is often a red flag that there is a deeper pathology buried in the organization. In the group-think mentality, there is a price – often implicit – that has to be paid for speaking one's mind. Although most organizations pay lip service to free speech and the like, there is little free speech in this type of group. Group-think cultures suffer from a pervasive lack of trust, communication and cooperation.

In the group-think organization the leadership constantly complain that they can get no commitment or cooperation from the rank and file. Indeed, this is the first signal that the leadership itself is corrupted. In my experience there is also a pervasive feeling of “walking on eggshells” in an attempt not to jostle the leadership with any ideas alien to their own. 

Although the questions for the politicians at Thursday night's SCF forum were mixed, the audience was anything but. The youngest member of the packed house appeared to be the age of a grandparent. The question, among others, was asked When is the state legislature going to fix the chronic unfairness every time Florida has an election? Even though the rest of America sees Florida elections as bigoted and dysfunctional, the three politicians on stage seemed to think there were rational reasons for the state's history of flawed elections. People should adjust. Nobody on stage wants to stop anybody from actually voting. Another question came up about the legalization of medical marijuana. Polls show that some 82 percent of the population of Florida favors this. Representative Boyd's response to this was, essentially, We cannot allow this to become a question on the ballot this November. This goes a long way to explain why people view Florida legislature as elitist. Boyd really has no interest in seeing everybody vote. If 82 percent of the electorate disagrees with Boyd about medical marijuana, he wants to do everything possible to keep them from expressing their opinion at the voting booth.

It comes as no surprise that young people and black people did not attend the forum last Thursday night. Representative Boyd does not want to hear other points of view, he only wants to impose his own opinion on the electorate with as little interference as possible from voters. The old, rich, white people in the audience were happy with what they heard. The idea that they represent anybody but themselves is almost laughable.

Mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, Alzheimer's, postpartum depression, even compulsive gambling are all disorders of the mind with special support groups to go along with them. The people who attend these support groups, including our own attendance at NAMI, find it easier to discuss their individual problems with others who share the same unique obstacles. This is why we point out to people living with alcoholism that there are groups other than NAMI that can better fill there needs. This is the preferred way of running a support group. The women who make up the Postpartum Depression group would probably agree: separate is better.

Having said that, the goals of the political advocacy wing of NAMI are different than the goals of the folks in NAMI who focus on support and education. As far as getting the political respect we need to produce the results we want (i.e., a larger footprint), having many fragmented groups with different names is counterproductive. In politics, the smaller a group is the easier they are to ignore. State senator Nancy Deter refused to talk to me last year after she heard who I represent. A lobbyist with no money and no visible number of voters is a waste of her time. That sums up the problem.

The solution, from NAMI's point of view, is coalition building. We can make a larger footprint, the kind that can demand attention from politicians, by uniting the many separate support groups into a single lobby. Politicians would have to either hear our point of view or risk being voted out of office. They would be aware of the consequences of ignoring us before we made the appointment to speak with them.

Interested in literary fiction that has a new take on classic literature? My novel is actually a reworking of Henry James's Washington Square. Readers who liked A Confederacy of Dunces would also like my book. The genders are reversed, the story is moved forward half a century, but the fundamental conflicts are the same. My novel, A Most Lost King, takes place in America in the Eighties. I prefer, if I must work inside a specific genre, to call my work literary. “High concept fiction” is perhaps the more precise term. Although other books and novelists are mentioned throughout A Most Lost King, Henry James is not one of them. A hint that there is an underlying theme to be discovered is one thing; a key to the theme on a velvet lined plate is quite another.

A Most Lost King is the story of a 29 year old alcoholic, Charlie, who has an accident involving broken glass which lands him in a rehab against his will, prevents him from returning to liquor, and opens the far scarier door: sobriety. This is because a few pieces of broken glass entered his body, also against his will. The story takes place in the New York City of the 1980s, a time when AIDS was in its infancy and the fear of catching AIDS, through any number of ways, ran ramped. This is the backdrop for a distinctly neurotic love story between an ill educated agnostic and a half Jewish girl who aspires to become all Jewish, despite her mother's misgivings to the faith.

Impoverished, in denial, misunderstood and lonely, Charlie starts the story when he is compelled by compassion to put his aching, aging show dog to sleep. He sets off from the suburbs to the glitter of New York City where he hopes to find a soggy spark of a shoulder to sob on with a woman he knows but infrequently sees. The opening sentence is actually a corrupted opening sentence which pays homage to Camus. Are there 100 dorky questions at the end of the book to help you gain a better appreciation? Nah. That's your job. 

Available at amazon.com.