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Grand Poohbah
Member Since Feb 2007
Location: The place where X marks the spot.
Posts: 1,848
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Mar 06, 2010 at 09:03 PM
I've noted previously that I tend to be active in a number of online environments and prefer to go where the conversations take me. More recently, I've been active on facebook where I encountered an individual known as DJ Jaffe who posted the following:
My curiosity tweaked, I clicked on the link...
Quote:
Doris Jones (pseudonym) of Scarsdale, NY (where I grew up) felt sad. Her husband left her, the kids were at college and she was feeling alone in her big house on three quarters of an acre. At the same time, Alejandro Morales, a 25-year-old man with schizophrenia, started becoming paranoid.
Free hotline services, support groups and counseling were instantly made available to Ms. Jones, but nothing was available for Alehandro Morales. As a result, he stabbed to death 9-year-old Anthony Maldonado.
Ms. Jones mental "health" needs trumped Alehandro Morales's mental "illness".
This is the result of an intentional, disastrous and massive migration in America away from treating the seriously mentally "ill" in favor of improving mental "health".
Mental "health" is defined "as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community." Mental health services focus on making the worried-well less worried. There's plenty 'o funding for that.
On the other hand, mental illness is a biologically based no-fault medical problem that resides in the brain's chemistry or neuroanatomy. Untreated, it can lead to irrational thinking, and therefore irrational behavior. There are virtually no programs left for this group. According to a Treatment Advocacy Center study, in 1955 there were 340 public psychiatric beds available per 100,000 U.S. citizens. By 2005, the number plummeted to a staggering 17 beds per 100,000 persons.
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On the one hand, I felt that some of Mr. Jaffe's statements were ill-founded; on the other, I know it can be difficult to find suitable care for people who are in crisis states. I continued reading...
Quote:
... Advocates are running TV campaigns that say the "mentally ill are just like you and me". But they refuse to show the seriously mentally ill in their commercials. You won't see anyone standing on a street corner screaming, "I am the antichrist. Follow me". Ask anyone who has experience with schizophrenia. Are people with schizophrenia human and have the same needs as us? Yes. But would you define yourself as being like them? Not likely.
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I wasn't sure what to make of Mr. Jaffe. He presented himself as an advocate of the mentally ill but his article contained such a mish-mash of half-truths mixed with speculation. I went looking for some information and found this article...
Quote:
... They have described Mr. Jaffe as an ill-informed zealot and much worse.
But he is an anomaly in the tight-knit advocacy community for more reasons than just his stand on the bill. He is not a psychiatrist or psychologist. He has never run a clinic or program that treats the mentally ill. He is, in fact, an advertising executive at Foote, Cone & Belding in New York, which handles clients like Chase Manhattan Bank.
And his only connection to mental illness came more than 20 years ago, through his sister-in-law, who moved in with Mr. Jaffe and his wife, Rose, in Manhattan when the sister-in-law was a troubled teen-ager. Before long, she was catatonic...
Source: New York Times
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That didn't tell me much.
__________________
~ Kindness is cheap. It's unkindness that always demands the highest price.
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