no money, no rights

Page Sixteen

Wednesday 7 May 2008 Greenfield

So it seems that in the eyes of the DMH I did not have the right to have more than 2 animals, or the right to choose to be reclusive, or the right to have a lot of personal belongings, or the right to say that I did not want to live in public housing. I had at least two strikes against me when it came to having the right to decide these things for myself. One strike, I'm poor. Coudln't by my own house and do what I damned well pleased. Two, I have the dreaded mental illness label. Depression, anxiety. We're not talking what they call Axis 2 stuff: the things like multiple personality and other things that move into the bizarre. We're talking Axis 1. It isn't bad enough that society at large tends to view mental illness with a gimlet eye, but we have to have the Department of MENTAL Health discriminating against us too, denying us both our human rights and our rights as their clients to expect that they will be helpful to us rather than destructive. I go to them with PTSD and a long history of repeated trauma in my life, and they deliver unto me the worst trauma ever, the queen of pain and grief.

And I myself, having been raised in the society that views psychological issues this way, ALSO have certain conditions that I look at with a VERY gimlet eye. Sociopathy, for instance. One that has appeared in more than one person in my life, and these people have inflicted serious trauma. If I've mentioned it before, well, I'll do it again. There's a decent book - though not as extensive as I'd like it - about sociopathy written by a psychiatrist. Her name is Martha Stout, and her book is The Sociopath Next Door.

Lines from poem #8, which I think I already put into this journal whole:

My name is enfiled by you,
and the day I was born.
(Who will tell you the day I die?)

Update 16 Nov 2009: I've said in another on-line journal that a short while back my current therapist told me there had indeed been a plan by the DMH to get me an apartment and let me have at least 2 of my animals back (2 of 14), but this plan fell through. He said he didn't yet know what the plan had been or why it had fallen through. I wonder if he knows now -- I'll have to ask him. My anger at the DMH, this juggernaut of a state-wide social service agency, is enormous. And almost every DMH employee I ever spoke to -- in Greenfield or Boston or Northampton -- seemed to have an intellect and sensitivity that would qualify them to do bricklaying or janitorial work. The state of Massachusetts doesn't hire the cream of the crop (they hire the dregs, largely) because the cream do not want to work for state pay. So when you go to the state, what you get is the bottom of the barrel.

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