Dedication I dedicate this volume to Gail Allen Lanphear, M.S.W. Gail is the singularly most compassionate and wise individual I have ever known. Gail Allen Lanphear is compassionate on a collective level. She has brought an empath’s vision to her work as president, for decades to the following entities; The Pardee Cancer Treatment Fund in Midland, which supports the Pardee Cancer Center at Mid-Michigan Medical Center in Midland, as well as serving individuals in the central Michigan region with diagnoses of cancer; The Allen Foundation with projects that benefit nutritional programs in health, education, training, and research; The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation whose primary purpose is to carry on indefinitely financial aid to charities of all types concentrated in the states of Michigan and Ohio, which had been supported by Mr. and Mrs. R.M. Gerstacker during their lifetimes. Gail Allen Lanphear is compassionate on an individual level. Through her work during the past twenty-five years as co-founder, executive director, and board president of the Association for Children’s Mental Health, I have seen Gail provide profoundly empathic, compassionate, one-on-one support to mothers who have children with mental illness. ACMH is a family organization with statewide staff and membership, who together advocate for enhancement of services that address the needs of children with serious emotional disorders, as well as their families. Further, ACMH is a statewide chapter of a well-organized, highly regarded national organization, the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health. Gail is compassionate on a personal level. She has provided peerless support to me during the past year, as seemingly nearly everything I cared about, worked for, believed in and loved… was challenged to the very core. Gail listens with all of her being and offers from her heart, her wisdom. The wisdom of a lifetime well spent. I have been most fortunate to have her as a dedicated mentor during the past decade. Beginning with my service on the Association for Children’s Mental Health Board of Directors. She had told me that she was most enthused about the genuine passion I brought to my service to the ACMH cause, owing to the commemorative nature of my endeavors. There’s a place in my heart where I’ll always miss my three brothers who died too young. Gail would tune into my heartfelt service, as she is motivated similarly by losses and the wondering… Wondering what would have been the more ideal circumstance that would have prevented such untimely deaths. We labor together, silent witnesses to the memory of tragedies that could have… and should have been prevented. Gail’s belief in me extends to Starry Night, the charity I founded in 1998. She serves and has since 2007 as my vice president and secretary. Without her dedication to the Starry Night vision there never would have been the Starry Night program for youth with mild autism, Max’s Place at Central Michigan University. As president of the The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation, Gail invited proposals for Starry Night and Max’s Place endeavors each year, for seven years... Gail is grace personified. Max’s Place at Central Michigan University Founder, Marie Lannen, Marie Lannen
with Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley. Brian Calley is a politician who
April 27, 2014
worked across party lines to accomplish Michigan’s autism reforms. This legislation had languished for a dozen years.
Since 1998 501 (c) (3) Tax Exempt
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Mission
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History
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Commemorations
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Max’s Place/ Max’s Stars
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Gail Allen Lanphear Artist in Residence Program Contributors
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Wrap Up
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Contact
Back
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Starry Night promotes a collaborative community, the professional development of its member artisans, utilizes the arts as expressive therapies, facilitates an educational milieu that fosters positive behavioral supports, and engenders the virtues of compassion. Starry Night develops programs inherently sustainable in the care of the Earth, the disabled, and our society, both architecturally and agriculturally. Starry Night Art and Nature Conservatory, Incorporated
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Starry Night is establishing a community-founded project, to form a Central Michigan Camphill Community. Starry Night takes inspiration from The Camphill Village USA in this endeavor. The graphic above is from the website of Camphill Village USA, Incorporated. The narrative herein is also taken from the Camphill Village USA website: In September 1961, a handful of people from established Camphill communities in Europe answered the call to create a community in the United States for people with developmental disabilities. These dedicated individuals founded what became Camphill Village USA, Inc. with one old farmhouse, a barn, a
garage, and roughly 70 acres of land in Copake, NY. Today, the Village is 615 acres and 50 buildings – family homes, work and educational spaces, and social spaces for 250 people, including 103 adults with developmental disabilities. Every member of the Camphill Village community cares for each other and the Earth. Our villagers engage in important and dignified work every day alongside trained craft-masters, homemakers, farmers, and gardeners. They participate in artistic endeavors like music lessons, performance, or singing. They eat together, pray together, sing together, work together, and celebrate together.
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Starry Night’s founder, Marie Louise Lannen, has overcome significant personal tragedy, including sibling suicide due to PTSD. These siblings suffered, as well, due to inherent flaws and failures of the human service systems of that era. A toxic social services model of the family known as the ‘Child Guidance Model,’ which was enshrined and empowered by the family court system, sculpted the foundational trauma in Marie’s family of origin. Sadly, elements of this blaming and shaming model have flowed through time, through the taxonomy of social service delivery and are delivering toxic residue to families still. Primarily to single parent headed families. Following a period of deep mourning for her deceased siblings, Marie moved through her grief using the power of the arts as process. Out of this deeply personal work, she came to develop a vibrant conceptualization for Starry Night. At which point, Lannen led a dynamic group of fifty forward-thinking individuals, representing a cross section of the Central
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Michigan Community, to form Starry Night Art and Nature Conservatory in 1998. Out of this group came this mission: Starry Night promotes a collaborative community, the professional development of its member artisans, utilizes the arts as expressive therapies, facilitates an educational milieu that fosters positive behavioral supports and engenders the virtue of compassion. Starry Night develops programs inherently sustainable in the care of the Earth, the disabled, and our society, both architecturally and agriculturally. SN is an ethically grounded, legally structured nonprofit, with an intention to inspire our regional community in the development of greater compassion through the arts. Shortly after the 1998 founding of Starry Night, Michigan’s economy stalled dipping into a deep recession and new nonprofit funding took a severe hit, but Ms. Lannen forged ahead with the help of Attorney Cynthia Kilmer and secured the IRS tax-exempt status.
Lannen earned her master’s degree, continued steadying Starry Night’s course through the great U.S. recession of 2008 and beyond, persevered through ongoing familial and personal challenges, and grieved enormously the death of a dear family friend, a young child, Max Paladino, who is the “Max” behind Starry
creativity engenders hope, and it is this hope that serves as a potent antidote to destructive tendencies. Creativity fosters contentment and serves as a concrete alternative to the rage behind systemic and familial abuse, destruction of the environment, substance
Night’s Max’s Place and the developing Max’s Stars Program. Starry Night’s founder continues to be steadied by the continuing creativity, her commemorative work in remembrance of her deceased brothers, and to the Starry Night concept, which grew out of a lifetime of her transformational work in the arts. At the core of Starry Night’s mission, is this: A firm dedication to the arts and to all transformative creative endeavors. All
abuse and greed. Further, creativity engenders a healthy individualism and is curative in regards to the loss of individual identity in large bureaucratic institutions, toxic family environments and corporatism gone wrong. Arts therapies are empirically based and proven to heal at a profound level.
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At Starry Night, our key people honor and commemorate deceased loved ones with our volunteer-ism and hard work.
Robert John
Michael Joseph
Richard James
Marie Lannen commemorates three brothers, who during the ‘Child Guidance Model’ era became wards of the State of Michigan. All three brothers died young.
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Maximillian Dale Paladino
Kaye Paladino, Starry Night Board Member since 2007, commemorates her son, who died at age 12 in a motorboat tubing accident.
Carnel Chamberlain
Kevin Chamberlain, Starry Night Board Member-Elect, commemorates his cousin who was murdered.
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At this program, Max’s Place at CMU, Starry Night offered unique social-emotional therapeutic modalities combining the very best of all possible therapeutic worlds. We offered a balance of therapies, which uniquely combined appropriate and joyous emotional expression through the arts, and positive behaviorally supported emotion regulation. These modalities, through the arts focusing on acceptance of feelings through felt emotional work, combined with learning how/when to regulate emotions, together, served as critical therapies for use with such populations as autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, Bipolar, grief-stricken, and trauma survivors. These unique social-emotional therapies were provided in pro-social group settings at Max’s Place for Mild Autism at Central Michigan University. Our Max’s Place Program participants demonstrated an across-the-board average of a 27% gain in both social and emotional domains in our pilot. Precisely, the domains people with autism are empirically and anecdotally demonstrated to have deficits. Max’s Place worked within a therapeutic
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milieu using the expressive arts within a friend-to-friend peer group model. Why did Max’s Place serve autism spectrum youth with what is dubbed "milder autism?" Youth with mild autism have a profound awareness regarding how very different they are from their peers. Add to this the higher rate of bullying that happens in school for these "higher functioning" autism youth, and the result is a much more heightened risk of deep, chronic depression and suicide. The Max’s Place Program was developed to provide specific specialized supports to the segment of the autism spectrum identified as mild, and their families, because no one has it easy with any child at any point on the autism spectrum. Max’s Place was specifically designed to enhance the quality of life of individuals with autism and their families. This was accomplished through an intense level of day-long socializing, for our program participants with autism, over a two-week period. Socialization was wed to creativity, the arts, movement and music, to promote
enhancement of self-esteem. The program design included a summer day camp, as well as regularly scheduled family field trips intended to provide a welcome relief to the severe isolation common to these individuals and their families. Starry Night had intended to permanently house Max’s Place in our new Starry Night Facility, a beautiful 1945 home purchased in 2011, and currently undergoing extensive renovations. Further, Starry Night was planning to build Max’s Place into a full-service resource center for youth across the entire autism spectrum. However, the broad changes put into place by the Michigan Autism Reform Laws of 2012 drastically changed the landscape of services in Michigan from one of a mostly grass roots model, to one of a reimbursable medical model. This reformed service delivery to youth with autism is now under the provenance of Michigan’s regional Mental Health
Max’s Place: Grass Roots Table 2: Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation funding
State Mandated: Medical Model
No Funds
Authorities, in Central Michigan that would be Community Mental Health for Central Michigan, CMHCM. A handful of insurers must now reimburse for services to youth with autism (Table 1). The original Starry Night’s Max’s Place Pilot Program with CMU, was a completely free program with funding networked for, proposed by, and coordinated by lead volunteer and founder of Starry Night, Marie Lannen. Max’s Place for Mild Autism’s most generous and continuous benefactor was the highly innovative and sustaining, The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation, of Midland, Michigan. The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation helped youth with autism in our region, when for years there were no generous payouts going to providers of autism services. Starry Night would like to sincerely thank The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation, for their part in coordinating services to youth with autism in the previously lean times. Figure 2 indicates The Rollin M. Gerstacker Foundation levels of funding to Starry Night & Max’s Place for Mild Autism.
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A Project of Starry Night Art and Nature Conservatory, Incorporated
At the Starry Night Board of Directors annual meeting in 2013, Marie Lannen was designated as Starry Night’s founding Gail Allen Lanphear Writer-in-Residence. Ms. Lannen’s education, which in part prepared her for this two-year residency includes a master’s degree in English composition and comTh munication from Central Michigan University. Lannen e believes that the completion of the MAECC degree from CMU was essential in assisting her in securing this writer’s residency. The subject matter of Ms. Lannen’s GAL Writer’s Residency is an exploration of the topic of the current state of affairs in human services in the USA, with a particular examination of how these interconnecting systems can more sustainably support the impoverished, the disabled and more precisely the autism community. Lannen intends to especially explore workable, well established and innovative approaches in the care of the disabled, such as the Camphill Communities concept. She will spend time in New England in order to continue her in-depth research into the Camphill Communities model, with a view towards understanding this model’s protocol for the residential care of the autism-disabled. Her expertise in the realm of autism spectrum disorders has been well demonstrated, as she is creator and founder through Starry Night, of the Max’s Place for Autism Program.
Gail Allen
Lanphear ArtisThe Max’s Place Pilot Program at Central Michigan t in Resid University, according to the outside evaluating en ceof gains Pro psychologist, produced “unheard in program gram attendees.” Gains were noted at the rate of 27% in
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social and emotional domains, precisely the empirically established areas of deficits of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. The Gail Allen Lanphear Artist-in-Residence Program has been established by Starry Night, specifically to honor the lifetime of work in support of the therapeutic arts by Gail Lanphear. Ms. Lanphear’s career, working as a person with a master’s degree in social work, has been one of thorough dedication to Michigan’s youth with mental illness. At the advocacy level, Ms. Lanphear has authored and championed several unique state programs for children with mental illness and their families, such as wrap-around and respite, and she has continually promoted the hands on, lived, arts experience for all youth with disabilities.
The United States of America’s Poisoned Apple Discourse: Leading to Persistent Poverty By Marie Lannen, M.A. The winter of 2014 in Northern America has been one typified by perilous freezing spells of record breaking duration. Frigid arctic air, the Polar Vertices, have reached further down into the U.S. than ever before. In many ways, this paralyzing, hostile freeze is a useful metaphor descriptive of the state of human services delivery to the economically disadvantaged in the U.S.A. I believe that without post haste adjustments we are on a collision course in the delivery of effective human services to the impoverished in our nation. I am writing this from the vantage point of someone who knows this system intimately from the inside out, and vice versa. My professional background includes decades of service to the poor and disabled, also, I grew up in an economically disadvantaged family, additionally, I suffered a work-related injury while I was teaching at the kindergarten level, which led to an early retirement due to medical disability. I have lived the disability experience in the USA, and sadly many of us in similar straits have found that disability drives a reckless course through the poverty landscape. From my vantage point, the system of care for the impoverished and the impoverished disabled in the USA is forging a head-on collision course between two Mack trucks traveling 70-MPH. One example of an impending disability-related collision that requires fine-tuning, now, is the anticipated aging-up of individuals on the autism spectrum as they proceed into and live through their adult years. Many youth with autism are misidentified and not given appropriate, effective interventions during preschool and school years, or if they do receive services these may have only been minimally effective. Without benefit of proper care in the formative years this could lead many of our nation’s individuals with autism into a place of joining the permanently economically disadvantaged. My well-developed expertise in regards to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is as a result of founding an arts-therapy oriented program for youth with autism, The Max’s Place for Autism Pilot Program at Central Michigan University. According to a doctorate level psychologist specializing in autism who served as outside evaluator of my program, Max’s Place produced “unheard of gains in program attendees.” These gains were noted at the “rate of 27% in social and emotional domains,” precisely the empirically established areas of deficits of individuals with ASD. I understand the autism disability experience thoroughly, and I believe we can serve these autism-identified children and their families much more effectively than we are currently.
In observing, reading and writing about the myriad roads leading to USA’s poverty destinations, I have been truly blessed by many people who have shared their stories with me. People who know every curve and bump on the poverty highway. Some stories are bitter, some are bittersweet and some are downright sweet and heartening. Within this document, you’ll find some of these stories with all identifying information omitted. I have discovered that the majority of the impoverished are what I call the decent poor, then, there are those who I must term the despicable poor. Like highway robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the despicable poor will rob and pulverize a victim, paradoxically all the while these very same despicable poor will claim that they are the ones being victimized and that they are the ones who are being horribly wounded. One of the most forbidding and foreboding scenarios is when a denizen of the despicable poor rises economically, to the point of being able to afford a lawyer. This turns into abuse of their victim through the legal system. Having been badly burned myself by one of the despicable poor, I have been led into the study of the antisocial personality. This valuable and validating research has led me to some surprising conclusions, which I will share within. In my undergraduate and graduate years, as well as in my early career, I honed my skills as a researcher. I learned excellent research methodology as well as the critical importance of doing high-quality, unbiased research. Being ever intrigued by mysteries and enigma, I am grateful that my skill set includes the ability to thoroughly research any given topic well. Prior to my work-related accident, when I was young in my career in Manhattan, on my daily walk to and from my employment at the prestigious Cooper Union Research Foundation, in the winter of 1980 everyday I encountered a voluminous burgeoning of the homeless population. Even on the bitterest of winter days I saw homeless people on the un-gentle, iced streets of New York City, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The grizzled, unkempt homeless mostly were comprised of the mentally ill, those jettisoned from mental hospitals due to a promise, that being the highly touted medical treatment of mental illness. I saw them, the homeless, mentally ill wanderers, often verbally signifying. Air-lashing themselves in panicked plumes of warm breath within their personal atmosphere. Through the arctic blasts they hulked. Layered in filthy, soot-blackened winter coats. They moved. Slowly. Usually a warm, woolen, Navy Pea Jacket was worn closest to the shirt, buried underneath an Army Jacket,
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topped off with a nylon-tufted, furry hooded storm trooper parka. Finished with a heavy wool cap snugged tightly on the head. Often alone, sometimes huddled in small groups around roaring fires ablaze in rusted 55-gallon drums this plein-air army of the mentally ill poor was my naïve Mid-western, twenty-something’s introduction to the savageness of human services failure. We had seriously failed the mentally ill in America, then, and we are continuing to do so. This was the very dawn of my understanding of the USA’s icy slope of human services failure to the disabled. Over west of my daily trek to work in Greenwich Village was another army, the threepiece suited army of Wall Street investors and financiers, some who assisted in marketing the promise, that being the medical cure of mental illness. Some were then, and continue to be handsomely rewarded by the promise. Those who assisted in developing this glossy promise have helped create and continue the human services failures to our mentally ill disabled. How did these failures come about? In part, I will draw upon on my master’s level coursework in critical discourse analysis to examine this plight. Before I do so, I will borrow from the Gospel of John…“In the beginning was the word.” Words. Pretty words, clever words, Machiavellian words, Puritanical words, Horatio Alger words… are at the foundation of the promise. Highly effective advertising has given substance to the promise. Words shape our ideology, which in turn shape our world. Logos. Words form laws that structure services. Or not. Beyond commerce in the political realm too, there is a decisive use of words as weapons aimed at the impoverished, which in part informs a malevolent national discourse towards the poor. Words as weapons precisely aimed at the poor are to be found in pivotal reports tendered by a few ill-informed psychologists, the very same psychologists who assisted in developing portions of our national War on Poverty. A few, damning reports on the nature of chronic sensory deprivation of low-income children by their mothers, which have been subsequently proven to be baseless, were provided to President Johnson and his consultants by these goal-oriented psychologists. Likely they were seeking to enhance their career by tendering these theories. These reports have led to an inherently flawed, federal structure functioning even today that pathologizes and casts aspersions on the poor, and especially on low-income mothers. Sadly, these unfounded, confounding reports informed portions of the foundation of our nation’s War on Poverty inaugurated with great ballyhoo under President Johnson in 1964. President Reagan added his spin to words as weapons in our toxic national discourse… specifically targeting the impoverished using intentionally repetitive images of Welfare Queens driving brand new Cadillacs, women who continually abuse the welfare system, Reagan’s words inflamed a fiery war against the poor. This quote from Slate general editor and author, Josh Levin, in his article entitled Welfare Queen, indicates
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how Reagan extrapolated from one story of just one apparently psychopathic individual, to great magnification effect in vilifying the poor… “In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan villainized a Chicago woman for bilking the government. Her other sins—including possible kidnappings and murders—were far worse.” According to the destructive tale in this purposeful Reagan era spin it is unmarried, single mothers who reproductively lead the way to the failure of our economy. What about that segment of our population, ‘the wealth-addicted’ and the ‘too big to fail’ bankers and Wall Street financiers in Cardin and Armani? Haven’t they actually paved the freeway for clear-cutting our national resources? Haven’t they actually cleared a wide-laned freeway for creating gibberish financial products, which lead to an enormous swath of foreclosures and the destruction of our economy in 2008? Yet, even now, these very same wealth-addicted, under-regulated financial wizards and money launderers, continue to point fatuous fingers at the Welfare Queens. The poisoned apple, blame-the-poor discourse continued in the Clinton era with Workfare. For an example of the shame-generating discourse of that time, The Ludwig von Mises Institute in a 1994, monthly publication entitled ‘The Free Market,’ carried an essay, Throwing in the Towel, by Jeffrey Tucker. Tucker berates the lobby group Empower America, for their proposal to transform welfare into workfare, for not being conservative enough:
EA wants to cut the amount of cash subsidies to women with illegitimate children, and end income aid altogether for such women under the age of 21. Great. As the most reformist aspect of the proposal, these cuts should help restrain the fatuous practice of pouring subsidies on fatherless households. For his part, Mr. Kemp [former HUD secretary Jack Kemp] has promised to retain all other benefits, which are high by historical standards. So much for the adage, it is impossible to legislate morality. Wait, wouldn’t these policy shifts actually affect… children? If anything is fatuous here it is referring to the children who will be assisted or not, by changes to welfare dismissively as “fatherless households.” And, after all the Clinton era blather about the intention to ‘End welfare as we know it,’ ten years on the research indicates that the changes wrought by Workfare were actually what was… fatuous. Some numbers crunching of actual data from several nations that use Workfare indicates that Workfare is indeed fatuous. In an essay from the Liberal Conspiracy website authored by Chris Goulden, entitled, Workfare – what does the evidence show? The essayist explains that in 2008, the United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions commissioned researchers to gather data from the USA, Canada and Australia on each nation’s workfare schemes. Following Workfare one decade after its implementation, the data and the conclusions of this report are insightful: There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work.
It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers. Subsidized (‘transitional’) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than ‘work for benefit’ programmes. Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high. So much for the political bluster that created Workfare, it appears to be a ticket to endless poverty from the foregoing data collected by the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions. This deplorable Workfare situation was recently relayed to me through the cogent anecdotal observations of a now-retired, former lifelong employee of the Michigan Department of Human Services. Ed Helwig, is retired too from a lifetime of service in the National Guard. At DHS Ed watched this change of guard, from supportive to cajoling when welfare was revamped to Workfare. He stated simply, “It used to be that we’d send these young moms to community college, they’d become nurses or secretaries, then have a decent standard of living and we’d never see them again. Now, they work at minimum wage jobs, drive crappy cars that break down all the time and they never get out of the system. Sad.” Workfare has ensured that they’ve become the serfs of the new U.S. service economy. These are the “lazy” poor who work 2-3 jobs without health insurance, barely able to make rent. Never having family time, kids growing up latchkey and feeling unloved. From the Gospel of John again… “In the beginning was the word.” Especially through the genesis of words as weapons our impoverished have become the hated, the feared, the other. Otherness pertains to all ostracized groups. People forming the otherness caste are generally the minorities, the disabled and the poor. These people are other by virtue of being different. Polite society holds the other at a distance. The poor, minorities and the disabled are housed differently. Away. They are fed differently. So often they only can afford starchy foods, and they often become obese, or are rail-thin from diarrhea as their bodies continually reject the “food.” Consequently, on visible appearance alone we blame the other for being fat, lazy and stupid. Over the decades handsomely rewarded, cagey corporate lobbyists have driven this discourse of blaming and shaming the poor, the other. There are few lobbyists speaking for the impoverished in Washington, D.C., and those who do represent the economically disadvantaged are often vastly underpaid and grossly overworked. Look, by and large, to corporate lobbyists and their spin-doctors, who collectively create, generate, market and maintain our lopsided national discourse of contempt for the poor. We seem to be becoming a nation of haters. The Great Society imaged by LBJ held that a nation working together creates a better world for all. The poor would be given a federal hand-up and a way out of poverty. The Great Society would have been better served, however, if its founding
discourse in the form of reports provided to the White House administrative branch had not so willfully pathologized the poor, specifically the mothers of children in those “fatherless households.” The precepts of the War on Poverty as codified by a handful of psychologists at its inception, which in turn formed national services to the poor are marred by malevolence towards low-income single mothers. The War on Poverty with its embedded discourse of faultfinding the very people it was intended to help couldn’t help but fail. Fifty years on we’re still stalled at almost the same numbers of people in poverty. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mical Raz, MD, PhD, for her excellence in research in my developing understanding of the pathologizing and mother-blaming done by key LBJ era psychologists. Psychologists who specifically advised the federal government in its developing War on Poverty cast definitive aspersions on impoverished single mothers. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, this period presages a need to take a very hard look at where we are in this ‘War.’ Basically like most war, it emphatically has not worked. It has succeeded however in a continuation of blame and shame of the poor, especially impoverished single mothers. It has provided lucrative opportunity for some who continue to pathologize the poor, and currency for programs built on a faulty premise. Such discourse needs to be reexamined. Discourse taken from the ‘scientific’ psychological report genre forms laws, which in turn forms bricks and mortar facilities built to the specs of the founding discourse. Closely. Through many decades of observing the political scene at all levels, I have observed that whenever political hands en masse point blaming, shaming fingers at women, especially the poor unmarried women who are the heads of “fatherless households”… those blame-filled pointing fingers, in actuality have three fingers on each hand pointing back at themselves. These extra three fingers, often, do point to a sleight of hand that is occurring, a sleight of hand involving the shifting of vast sums of money to the accusers. Pay attention to the discourse, there is often covert, lucrative intent in weaponized words. Even the disabled are not spared these verbal volleys. Generally, our current national discourse concerning the poor is frightful and to be disabled, with rare exception, is to be poor. Vilifying the disabled is especially cruel. We seriously need to reframe our national discourse of poverty. Much of this discourse holds that you are where you are in your life through all fault of your own. In my study of linguistics, specifically critical discourse analysis, I have learned that he who controls the discourse on any given topic, in turn controls the ideology that informs our realities. And further, more critically these ideology-informed words lead to the structures that serve us. Or not. We live in human societies that are controlled by ideologies. Creators of effective discourse dominate our ideologies. Therefore the most effective of these ideologues assume the reins of power and control driving perceptual realities and
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the formation of our institutions. Our discourse champions amass power and control, leading inevitably to their ‘rightful’ taking of the money and resources of society. Words are keys. They open locked doors, or lock the mind. Think “Yellow-Cake Uranium” and the surrounding crazed kerfuffle. Armies were unleashed with fury into Iraq because of the “Yellow-Cake Uranium” discourse, a discourse of fear that permeated the media. Just so, the discourse of hatred and disdain for the poor, the disabled and the mentally ill among us has made for fearful, frightful circumstances. For them. We have been discoursed into believing that all will be right and well and good, if those people would just get a damn job or two or three. Stop faking their disability. Or, the mentally ill would not be homeless if they would just take their meds. This frightfully controlling, abusive discourse has only gotten worse since my early career days in the 1980s in Greenwich Village. Within Manhattan and far beyond it, as well as throughout our entire nation, a squeaky-clean army moves through our collective lives. This cleancut army was launched nearly, chronologically simultaneously to my early career period and my first exposure in that timeframe to the grizzly roving bands of the homeless mentally ill. This fashionable army has built force over the ensuing decades. This is an extremely well groomed army. Generally dressed head-to-toe in black, this is the highly polished army of pharmaceutical reps visiting my doctor and your doctor, bearing handsome gifts and providing expensive lunches and dinners often accompanied by lavish imbibing… to our local medical providers. Handsome perks received come in exchange for a well-appointed, self serving, sound bit, marketing spiel. Discourse again… on the latest generation of antidepressant, antipsychotic, anxiolytic or sedative. Ultimately, these black-garbed privates ensure that pharmaceutical profits are maintained. It is good and necessary to keep Wall Street flush. This army of pharmaceutical reps contributes specifically to the discourse at the local level… and to a broader more harmful pretense… that of a medical cure for mental illness. The promise is the illusion that the medical cure has led and will continue to lead to the independence of the mentally ill. The promise has failed the mentally ill for decades. Has any one ever, had a bad reaction to a med? Many of us do, and so will the mentally ill. Have any of us occasionally failed or have consistently failed to take a prescribed medication? Many of us do, and so will the mentally ill. Have any of us gone to pick up a prescription that had been highly effective for us, only to find that somehow this specific medication is no longer a covered med and is no longer in our insurer’s formulary? Many of us do, and so will the mentally ill. Have any of us been on an effective med for a period of time, and then suddenly it no longer worked the way it always had? Many of us have, and so will the mentally ill. These challenges for us are bad enough, but when the mentally ill are given these challenges they often are insurmountable. So heartbreaking.
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The promise of a medical cure for mental illness has failed miserably. The promise held that the mentally ill on the right meds, would finally be free, to live free in the least restrictive environment. Hence, the closure of facilities for the long term care of the mentally ill came about in part, due to the promise. The LRE euphemism that promised so much for the mentally ill, ensuring their care in the ‘least restrictive environment’… actually… oftentimes means living on the streets. And, that surely is least restrictive. Least restrictive environment, LRE holds different meanings depending on whose perspective it is viewed from. LRE has served primarily as a savings to governments by closing down mental hospitals, this then shifts the burden of the care of the long term mentally ill to jails, prisons, adult foster care homes, a parent’s basement and ensuing long term dependency on families, and the streets. This is emphatically not working. The devil is in the discourse, and this devil often drives a discourse of profound heartbreak and shame in the families with mentally ill members. At times, our damning discourse is a cruel mockery of the plight of poverty of the mentally ill, and any and all who are affected by the plight of poverty. Our disparaging national dialogue on poverty currently, continues in its tone of contempt for the poor. This from New York Times writer, Charles M. Blow, from his March, 2014 Op-Ed piece, entitled, Paul Ryan, Culture and Poverty, highlights the perspective of a professor of social welfare at Washington University, Mark R. Rank. Professor Rank states: Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policymaking. They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong. New York Times author, Blow, continues with his own observations on Paul Ryan’s recent comments, which many people perceive to be highly offensive to the impoverished in our nation. Ryan’s comments reportedly insinuate that inner city males lack a proper work ethic: By suggesting that laziness is more concentrated among the poor, inner city or not, we shift our moral obligation to deal forthrightly with poverty. When we insinuate that poverty is the outgrowth of stunted culture, that it is almost always invited and never inflicted, we avert the gaze from the structural features that help maintain and perpetuate poverty discrimination, mass incarceration, low wages, educational inequities — while simultaneously degrading and dehumanizing those who find themselves trapped by it.
One thing is certain we need to reframe our polemic dialogue on poverty. Our polarizing national discourse on poverty only harms, and it harms in Christian parlance “the least of these” the most, the impoverished among us. The least of the least of these surely are the chronically mentally ill. Chronically mentally ill people do need quality long-term care. Leaving chronically mentally ill people homeless creates an enormous burden on them, on our society, and on police on the beat who often have no specialized training whatsoever in working with, or even in understanding the mentally ill. Police on the beat have one obligation, keeping their turf crime-free. They are generally not specifically trained to actively interface with the mentally ill. There are minor and major ways that police oversight of the chronically mentally ill can and does go wrong. Very, very wrong. Consider the horrific fate of Kelly Thomas, the homeless man with schizophrenia brutally beaten to death in 2011, by two Fullerton, California policemen. This particular police interface with a mentally ill man shows just how terrible LRE is, and the utter delusion that the promise is. We need to realize that what we have done as a society to the chronically mentally ill in allowing so many of them to be homeless is basically… cruel, abusive, and sometimes fatal. Beyond an implicit cruelty contained in the promise and the consequence of LRE-induced homelessness for the mentally ill, we as a nation need to consider the extremely bizarre patchwork of failing or failed structures ‘serving’ the mentally ill. Jails, prisons, and poorly run adult foster care homes, which cohabit opposites: violent-mannered people with mild-mannered people, people with criminal intent paired to people with mental impairments, ex-convicts with empaths, calculating sociopaths paired with the intrinsically naïve, are some of the existing housing arrangements that exemplify our failure to treat the chronically mentally ill with compassion. We must provide the chronically mentally ill with stable housing in safe, warm and welcoming residences. To a bean-counter closing the mental hospitals showed a revenue gain, but to our society it is a gross loss. In so many instances, in jails, in prisons, and in substandard adult foster care homes, and certainly for our homeless out on the streets, high-quality research serves as a countervailing influence to the moronic poisonous discourse of our American caste system. Well-conducted and widely disseminated research bears out precisely why many of our current destinations for the longterm mentally ill emphatically are not working. My intent in this publication is to develop a research-oriented discussion regarding the state of human services delivery, which purposefully coincides a broad intersection with those among us who are chronically impoverished. Beyond the scope of our failures in service to the mentally ill, my intended overview will include our burgeoning army of individuals with autism including an examination of the comorbidity of mental illnesses that accompany a primary diagnosis of autism, comorbidities that begin
presenting intensely in the pre-adolescent and adolescent years. Beyond my consideration of individuals with autism, the plight of homeless veterans will be discussed. A special look, too at the juncture of poverty with disability will be included as will an especial focus on invisible disability, which leads to heightened rates of poverty, and is accompanied by pervasive disdain of the invisibly disabled as likely being fakers. Moving beyond these discussions in regards to the nexus of poverty in the context of the foregoing, I will present and explore viable alternatives, to America’s standardized approach to least restrictive environment destinations. This exploration will include an in-depth look at the Camphill Community model. Prior to moving to solutions, we must consider etiology. We need to look at the root causative factors of the maltreatment of the poor. Since my introduction to the NYC army of the homeless mentally ill in the1980s, and moving further along now in my life in 2014, the situation for the legions of the poor, especially the homeless mentally ill has vastly worsened. Looking back with the gift of hindsight, which often provides crystal clear insight if one does a nuanced investigation of the hows and whys of any given situation, I find that beyond the generally dismissive discourse towards the impoverished among us, without a doubt a key causative element would be continuing complacency. Complacency in the interlocking systems that ‘care’ for the impoverished, complacency of bureaucrats, complacency of profiteers, complacency of nonprofits that have allowed extensive mission creep and, complacency of ordinary people. Many of us keep our heads down. The road most traveled in the continuation of poverty in our nation is the wide road of complacency, complacency and denial. Complacency forges a head-on collision course with denial, to inflict a broad-based collective moral injury in our populace. Moral injury to us all is the exacting price we pay for doing nothing about this situation.
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• Indian Boarding School Mount Pleasant, Michigan By Kevin Chamberlain, former Tribal Chief
• The Child Guidance Model By Gail Allen Lamphear, MSW.
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• Child Protection Toady By Marie Lannen, M.A.
Collaborating Towards the Best Possible Future... Essays can be found at www.maxsstars.com
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“
Receive the children with reverence. Educate them with love. Let them go forth in freedom.
These were Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s instructive words to the first group of the Waldorf School Teachers in 1919, in Stuttgart Germany. Workers from the Waldorf-Astoria Factory in Stuttgart, in the wake of and horrified by the destruction of World War I, asked Dr. Steiner to help form and create a school for their children that would lead their children onto a path of peace. Out of this protective, loving parental impulse, a solid curriculum, very much in the vanguard for the time developed around the arts that has led to the present day formation of nearly one thousand. Waldorf Schools globally. The foundation undergirding much of the work of Starry Night is the lucid thinking of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner is often referred to as the practical philosopher, as the products of his luminous mind have inspired valuable and lasting evolution in the fields of medicine, agriculture, care for the disabled, as well as education.
”
Steiner’s instructive to the first group of Waldorf teachers stands in sharp contrast to education today, which could be characterized by this dictum:
“
Receive the child with a test Educate them with testing
Let them go forth and be continually tested
”
Starry night believes that what separates human beings from the lower orders of species, besides our intellect is creativity. Creativity unlocks the luminous quality of a human soul, engenders hope, as well as fosters fruitful collaboration. Indeed, instead, educate the children with love.
Sustainable architectural structures, sustainable agriculture and sustainable children green our world by eliminating unhealthy co-dependencies. 22
At Starry Night,
we believe:
• that encouraging families is the best “medicine” • that the power of parental love harnesses the power to overcome • that a mother’s tender love is a deep and abiding gift to her child • that often institutions, be they governmental, financial, corporate, familial, or religious are often dehumanizing, and sometimes these structures are too toxic, or too big to serve well • that hurting families and individuals nurture and assist in healing one another on very profound levels • that finding and bringing together professionals who unlock the inherent goodness within the individual and the family is the reason for Starry Night. • that every human being, no matter how visibly or invisibly misshapen… on a fundamental level is perfect and whole If we allow it, those with profound disability have the power to unlock an inherent compassion within us. This leads to better, more sustainable ways of being within our very being. And, that the elements around us: wind, sun, and water harnessed correctly will lead to sustaining our beautiful planet.
Believing that creativity in service of compassionate communities is a singular key...
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