Ask Thomas

Many thanks to Professor Giovanni for a riveting, irreverent, depressing, inspiring two hours.  If I were in charge of this blog, I would just feature the steady stream of quotable quotes, such as "what you don't condemn, you condone," or "we want it done more than we want it done right" or "we mistake certainty for leadership" or, my favorite, "we hide from our humanity because we have a role to play."  I will just say there are real life lessons there and leave it at that since I want to open the blog up to your questions for Thomas.  Your professors, delighted at being students again, asked a lot of questions this morning -- perhaps you didn't get to ask yours?  Or you want to push back on something concerning you?  Ask away.  Not only can Thomas respond, but you should feel free to engage one another's comments as well as you would during a regular week. Engage!

YOUR AGENCY NEEDS YOU!

Thank you everyone for participating in our class discussion and making everything run better than I expected it too! This class definitely expanded my ideas about the influence that our psyche has on our actions. Particularly, our actions in relation to others in a group environment. For that reason I turn to the article titled Circles outside the circle: Expanding the group frame through dance/movement therapy and art therapy by Jean Davis and Joan Wittig, The authors pay specific focus to psychology of students participating in group activities and attempt to portray within the literature what art therapy’s role is in the process. This article stresses three key components for influence the greatest amount of persons to the best of ones ability; leadership, trust and following others examples. When these three are not present within an individual, or the individual does not strive to acquire the three, successful group work becomes nearly impossible to obtain. 

Take the group arts and crafts activity that these authors discussed. Students participating in a group arts and craft activity tended to find a common enemy in particular students acting out in the class. One student spilled a glue substance all over the floor and the smell agitated and angered the other surrounding participants. This is important because the authors feel that true leadership comes in forms of both verbal and non-verbal communication so they allowed the student to act out, which leads into the third tier of this study. The authors moved on to another group in a similar situation but these students have been together longer and were in a more sophisticated developmental stage. The authors saw that students here were more willing to follow one person’s behavior of acting out rather than to feel anger towards them. 

It would seem that in order to build community and find people to help tackle social justice issues, we must be willing to build report and share our stories with one another. This has been particularly true at my agency Housing and Services Inc. I have found ways to relate with my mentors and "higher ups" at the agency but our relationship is only as strong as I allow it to be. In other words, I built the strongest relationship with my direct mentor simply because I have been sharing the most personal experience with her and even in that pursuit I withhold the entirety of my story to keep the distance between our professional and personal relationship. As we briefly discussed, three feelings must be present to inspire us to act. We must be confortable acting in the group, the opportunity must not be coercive meaning we volunteer to act, and our actions are guided by something that matter. Before I tell more of my personal anecdote as to how these three relate to me at my agency, I would like to open this blog to discussion. What have your experiences been thus far at your agencies? Do you see potential to move your agency a little bit closer to their social justice goal? I would appreciate hearing your personal stories thus far at your agencies!

P.S: Please feel free to bring up the other two articles or any theme we discussed that was particularly interesting to you. 

Separating Crime and Mental Illness—A Dual Dialogue

First, thank you all again for sharing your stories and taking part in the discussion. A topic as complex as mental health and our justice system is difficult to fully explore in such a short period of time, but I am glad we were able to brush over a couple of different areas. I don’t have so much a couple of specific questions here as I do a general idea and theme, so freely respond with how you feel, and to whatever most jumps out at you.       

For this blog I wanted to extend our discussion to current events, the media, and communication of a cause. Mental health cuts (as shown by the Huff Post article) have been on the rise for decades. In recent news—and as a result of recent gun violence—there have been cries for increased mental health support and services. It almost seems as if criminal behavior and mental illness have become so enmeshed that the discussion has to begin there. But, it raises important questions…

Don’t get me wrong: It is great to talk about mental health and advocate for more treatment and services. With that said, the framework on which we argue for such services is of equal importance (my view). As we’ve seen in class, the “criminalization of mental illness” is a multifaceted issue. How do we assess the independent pieces of the puzzle? How does government balance public fears and research and facts in creating new policies? Does the way we portray a cause (i.e. “criminalization of mental illness”) evoke emotional responses?  Given the narrative we’ve built—and the multiple perspectives we have explored in class—what do you make of these recent calls for more treatment and the general societal stance? 

Further, how do we attempt to alleviate the vexing problems of our times without compromising the main goals? Then again, what even are the “main goals” here? Is there some give and take that we just have to deal with? Can you ever advocate in favor of something… but for the wrong reason?

This small debate presented on the NY Times may be helpful in guiding the discussion. Listed as one of the experts is my mentor from the Vera Institute— Jim Parsons. Also provided is an interesting perspective from Dr. E. Fuller Torrey again, author of our deinstitutionalization article for class.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/17/can-mental-health-care-reduce-gun-violence

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*Additionally, feel free to share your “close reading” passage here if you feel very strongly about or can link it to the current events I mentioned. Sorry we couldn’t get to it in class!