NIMH message to consumers

So the public’s been invited to get off its sorry ass and send personal recommendations to the moon in the sky regarding the national strategic mental health plan, which will “serve as a guide to the Institute for advancing mental health science over the next 3-5 years.”

The friendly solicitation of public comment strikes me as a cynical ploy, as if they have no idea what consumers want, as if we have no blogs, youtubes, pundits, journals or any sort of critical presence spreading like wildfire across the Internets, unless that’s the Tom Waits I’m listening to while toiling over my own heartfelt NIMH tidings all day:

What did that old blonde
Gal say?
That is the part…
You throw away
…

Will you lose the flowers
Hold on to the vase
Will you wipe all those teardrops
Away from your face
I can’t help thinking
As I close the door
I have done all of this
Many times before

Mindfreedom has a copy of the 26 page draft and reports the following predictable horseshit:

* 98 – number of times NIMH draft uses the words “drug, medication, biological, illness, disease, genetics”
* 38 – number of times NIMH draft uses word “brain”
* 16 – number of times NIMH draft uses word “recovery”
* 2 – number of times NIMH draft refers to the “mind”
* 0 [zero] – number of times NIMH draft uses any of the words “counseling, consumers, survivors, peer, mutual support, empowerment, rights, self-determination, employment, jobs, housing, psychosocial, wholistic, holistic, psychotherapy.”

We have til December 21st to email them at: strategicplanning2@mail.nih.gov

Why bother? asks Mindfreedom, and nearly kills my motivation by reasoning that at least NIMH won’t be able to deny that we gave them our input. So I thought about that, the going around in circles of it, yes they’re going to ignore us, but we’re gonna do it anyway just so we can tell them they ignored us, and this time, yes, this time they’ll um, oh, right.

Fuck the Man, what they do with my input I could care less, this is about me, between the
sayin’
and the
throwing awayin’
it’s
the sayin’
what matters most.

Or, as Jim Hightower put it “Even a little dog can piss on a big building.”

—

(Henry Arthur Miller tombstone quote.)