Forensic Care Working Group at Loggerheads
After receiving an extension on a pair of reports owed to the state legislature earlier this year, the Vermont Department of Mental Health (DMH) offered an update in July to the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee on the progress – or lack thereof – of the Forensic Care Working Group convened last year by Act 57.
Introduced as S.3 by Sen. Dick Sears in 2021, Act 57 initiated a process for a possible overhaul of Vermont’s “forensic mental health”
BY BRETT YATES
For the first time in three years, Vermonters gathered in the streets for Mad Pride on July 16.
Representatives from peer-led organizations and advocacy nonprofits – Another Way Community Center, MadFreedom, Pathways Vermont, the Vermont Center for Independent Living, and Disability Rights Vermont –comprised the planning committee. A long list of sponsors included the University of Vermont Health Network, the Vermont Association for Mental Health & Addiction Recovery, Vermont Psychiatric Survivors, and LMW Design.
NEWS, COMMENTARY, AND ARTS BY PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVORS, MENTAL HEALTH PEERS, AND OUR FAMILIES VOL. XXXVI NO. 5 • FROM THE HILLS OF VERMONT • SINCE 1985 • FALL 2022 20Voices from Mad Pride14The Arts5CONGRESSIONAL FORUM (Continued on page 4)
Starting in 2016, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, annual demonstrations took place in Montpelier, Bennington, or Brattleboro. This year, Burlington welcomed psychiatric survivors and mental health consumers from across the state for a downtown protest and party.
system, a term that refers to the treatment of psychiatric patients alleged to have committed criminal offenses. Amid seemingly competing demands for public safety and retributive justice on one side and for clinical best practices and
adherence to civil liberties on the other, the legislature assembled a working group, under DMH’s auspices, to contemplate both new modes of restriction and new models of care for arrestees deemed incompetent to stand trial or adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity.
Reflecting an international tradition, Burlington’s Mad Pride Day wasn’t the only one this summer. According to Mad in America, festivities also took place in Bern, Switzerland; Mexico City, Mexico; and Cork, Ireland.
A minor calamity appeared to strike when one of their riders accidentally bumped into and knocked over a fence of linked planters at Kru Coffee Collective’s patio, but a supportive employee waved off and urged on marchers who’d paused momentarily to attempt to restore the spilled soil.
The group made a left turn on Pearl Street and, with a pair of police cruisers as escorts, continued toward Battery Park as blocked traffic congealed in back. In the park, a free lunch, tents, and chairs awaited, along with a punk concert by Feminine Aggression, a band from Northampton, MA. Nine speakers, two additional musical acts, and a poet subsequently took the stage.
For more Mad Pride coverage, see pages 12 and 20.
“Forensic mental health” is a term that refers to the treatment of psychiatric patients alleged to have committed criminal offenses.
Deadlines for subsequent reports passed, however, without new submissions to the
The group’s first meeting took place on July 15, 2021, and it issued its first mandated report in January this year. The report stated that group members had settled upon two points of focus: the development of “diversion programs” to monitor and treat forensic patients in the community; and the potential construction of a locked psychiatric facility designed specifically for forensic patients, with services aimed at competency restoration.
Street to don free commemorative T-shirts and hats before heading north for a procession up the length of the busy Church Street pedestrian mall. Weekend shoppers made way for their banners and signs: SOLIDARITY, NOT STIGMA; COPS DO NOT SOLVE CRISIS; NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US; TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY IS A HUMAN RIGHT.
A pair of double-decker bicycles, with seats as high as a horse’s saddle, also drew curious glances.
“The approaches with the work group we have engaged in thus far have not been successful,” DMH General Counsel Karen Barber acknowledged. “It has become clear to DMH that the group will likely not be able to put forward consensus recommendations.”
mind is really great!”
Mad Pride Celebrated in Burlington
Chants, led by Clare Pledl’s megaphone, prompted outdoor diners to look up from their lunches: “Hey hey! Hey ho! This narrow normal has got to go!” “One, two, three, four! We won’t be patient anymore! Five, six, seven, eight! Every
According to the event’s press materials, “Mad Pride is about challenging discrimination against folks the world has labeled ‘mentally ill,’ advocating for rights, affirming mad identities, remembering and participating in mad history and having fun.”
Attendees assembled at a parking lot on King
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The Vermont AFL-CIO announced on June 30 that Soteria House staff at Pathways Vermont had formed a union, joining AFSCME 1343. Management reportedly granted voluntary recognition after all the workers in the facility had signed union cards.
QUESTION:
Does Vermont need a forensic psychiatric hospital?
Citing sensitivity concerns and increased mental health awareness, the historic South Pomfret ski area Suicide Six changed its name to Saskadena Six on July 13. “Saskadena” means “standing mountain” in the Abenaki language, according to the resort’s owners.
On Aug. 2, state officials announced a new collaboration among the Vermont Department of Corrections, DMH, and Pathways Vermont, aimed at Vermonters in the criminal justice system who face “mental health and/or substance use challenges.” Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) will “help to reduce the likelihood of individuals being incarcerated again, and increase productive, safe, and structured time in the community where they will be provided resources for housing, employment, and opportunities to build social connections.”
https://facingsuicidevt.com/ (Left) Health’sDepartmentVermontofwebsite to support “988,” the new three-digit dialing code for the National SuicideLifeline.Prevention
The Vermont Association of Mental Health and Addiction Recovery (VAMHAR) hired Will Eberle as its new executive director, per an announcement on Aug. 2. A peer support specialist, Eberle previously served as the executive director for Another Way Community Center. VAMHAR, a nonprofit, has organized educational events and advocacy campaigns since 1939.
“988,” the new three-digit dialing code for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, went live nationwide on July 16. Now known as the 988 Suicide & Crisis Line, the toll-free number links Vermonters to counselors at Northwestern Counseling & Support Services and Northeast Kingdom Human Services, who together handle 85% of the in-state calls, according to the Vermont Department of Mental Health.
This summer, NAMI-VT saw the exit and the subsequent return of its executive director, Laurie Emerson, who first joined the organization in 2012. Based on changes to NAMI-VT’s online staff directory between July and August, Emerson’s temporary farewell appeared to accompany or shortly precede the departures of several employees, as well as the introduction of a new board president, Chip Siler. In an open letter to newsletter subscribers, Emerson acknowledged that the organization had faced “challenging times” and attributed her two-month leave to a need to “step back to take care of myself and some family members who needed my support.”
On Aug. 13, Burlington Police Sergeant Simon Bombard fired three shots at a knife-wielding, reportedly suicidal man, David Johnson, hitting him in the leg and narrowly missing a nearby motorist, who sustained minor injuries from a broken windshield. According to a press release, Vermont State Police arrested Johnson following his release from the hospital on charges of aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. Described as “mentally ill” by his public defender, Johnson had recently been a patient at the Brattleboro Retreat and at the University of Vermont Medical Center’s psychiatric unit.
Based on filings with the Green Mountain Care Board, a VTDigger report projected that Vermont’s hospitals will end their fiscal year on Sept. 30 with a combined $63 million operations deficit. Negotiations for rate increases – led by Rutland Regional Medical Center, which hopes to regain its financial footing by upping charges
In Newsthe
The National Empowerment Center (NEC) welcomed its new CEO, Oryx Cohen, on August 18. A former chief operating officer, Cohen replaced Dr. Daniel B. Fisher. NEC is a federally funded nonprofit that offers technical assistance to mental health consumer organizations and peer service providers.
Fall 2022 NEWS . 3Fall 2022 Counterpoint Online Poll VOTE “yes” or “no” https://tinyurl.com/5m254th6
On June 21, the University of Vermont Health Network (UVMHN) opened a new, 18-room adult inpatient psychiatric unit at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital (CVPH) in Plattsburgh, NY. At 19,000 square feet, the facility triples the size of CVPH’s previous psych ward. UVMHN cited funding assistance from a $1.95 million grant issued by the New York State Department of Health and the New York State Dormitory Authority in 2016.
This fall, Vermont’s Peer Workforce Development Initiative will host six Zoom meetings to solicit community input for the design of a mental health peer support worker certification program. The first meeting happened on Sept. 9; the second will take place on Sept. 23 at 11 a.m., and two meetings apiece are scheduled for October and November. Visit shorturl.at/gkNRY to register.
A forensic psychiatric hospital would house and treat criminal defendants who’ve been adjudicated incompetent to stand trial or found not guilty by reason of insanity. Vermont does not currently have separate facilities for forensic mental health patients.
on insurers by 18% in fiscal year 2023, according to the Rutland Herald – began in August.
The Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee
Heidi Henkel and Zachary Hughes represent VPS on the working group. “It’s 38 people on this working group – with anything that big, it can be hard to come to an agreement,” Hughes told Counterpoint on Sept. 1.
Fall 2022NEWS4 WORKING GROUP • Continued from page 1
“The work group is comprised of individuals with various degrees of knowledge about our current system and coming from very different backgrounds and experiences,” Barber said. “We soon realized that the difference of opinions was perhaps further apart than we had originally thought, making it a challenge to have some of these discussions. In addition, the legal complexities and nuances around competency restoration and a forensic facility continued to causeAccordingconfusion.”toBarber,
Toward the end of the meeting, Emmons surmised that improvements in the traditional mental health system might reduce some of the perceived need for a new forensic mental health system.“Ifour foundation of our mental health services in the community is crumbling, that only puts pressure on our criminal justice system,” she observed. “It’s going to come out somewhere, and maybe we’re addressing the back end of the problem more so than the front end. And maybe that is one of the recommendations that the working group can come back to: let’s not let the
horse out of the barn and then close the door –let’s take care of them while they’re in.”
In the absence of direction from the working group, DMH staff could play a larger role in advising the General Assembly on forensic care legislation.“DMH,per usual processes, has already begun to discuss our own legislative priorities and ideas for the coming year, and we expect that there may be some recommendations on the topic of the intersection between the mental health system and the criminal justice system,” Barber forecasted.
“My hope is to present around making sure that we don’t criminalize this in any way –punishment, probation, anything,” he said. “It’s not a very popular view because people want justice.”
DMH employed various strategies to try to get the group moving, such as narrowing the range of concepts under consideration and breaking the group into two separate, smaller units. Even so, members “struggled with finding common ground.”
Sears blamed “people who view their job [as] to protect the status quo” for the working group’s dysfunction. “The reason we put together the report is because we had divergent opinions throughout the legislative process. We’re hoping people could come together,” he reminded DMH’s team.
“We soon realized that the difference of opinions was perhaps further apart than we had originally thought, making it a challenge to have some of discussions.”these
“I think they’ve given up on the consensus thing, and I think what you might see out of this is options,” he remarked. “I think this will be much better for us. Our time will be much better spent.”Hughes spoke of the challenge of honoring the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” without upsetting victims.
“I find that very, very frustrating,” responded Rep. Alice Emmons, who chairs the committee.
“It’s a fine balance,” he acknowledged. “I do understand victims. I’ve been a victim. I was assaulted, and that person was not charged, and that really frustrated me.”
legislature. With representatives appointed by the Department of Corrections, the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services, the Vermont Medical Society, Vermont Legal Aid, and Vermont Psychiatric Survivors (VPS), among others, the composition of the group appears to have recapitulated the same philosophical conflicts that led to its creation in the first place.
Vice Chair Sears reiterated what he saw as the urgency of formulating new means of bringing andsuspectsdiagnosedpsychiatricallyhomicidetojustice.“They’regettingawaywithmurder,that’spartofthereasonforthecallforsystematicchange,”hesaid.
But, he emphasized, “I really think it’s important that we recognize that it’s not supposed to be a punitive situation. These people have been found incompetent or insane at the same time of the offense. They haven’t been convicted of anything.”
Hughes praised DMH’s new, open-ended approach. “We had a meeting the other day. It was the shortest meeting I’d been to, and it was great,” he said. “They’re wanting us to do presentations around different areas that we want in the report and come up with these ideas of what we want.”
Zachary Hughes
Vice Chair Sears reiterated what he saw as the urgency of formulating new means of bringing psychiatrically diagnosed homicide suspects to justice. “They’re getting away with murder, and that’s part of the reason for the call for systematic change,” he said.
Eventually, by Barber’s account, DMH realized that it would not secure broad support within the group for any particular set of proposals. Moving forward, the group will encourage individual members to develop and present ideas of their own, and its meetings will function as “forums” for the discussion of these ideas. The group’s final report, which it will submit to the legislature at the beginning of next year, will summarize these discussions without necessarily issuing guidance.
Barber noted, for instance, that not all members could see the value in competency restoration programs, which offer treatment focused on making psychiatric patients eligible to stand trial. “People have really strong beliefs about this stuff,” she remarked.
“I just need to say that. And for legislators, it puts us in a bind because we want to do what is the best for everyone, and we need direction from those folks who are involved in the system, and we’re not getting it.”
Madden, who works in the solar industry, also advocated for decarceration, energy conservation, wealth redistribution, and electronic ballot initiatives on the federal level. An independent who has never held public office, he encouraged skepticism about the two-party political system’s ability to solve major problems facing the country and planet.
“If you know in your heart that it’s no longer useful to be changing the players but it’s time to change the rules of the game, then I want you to look at me,” he said.
“For small businesses, for businesses that meet certain criteria, such as democratically worker-owned [businesses], I think there should be much more support,” he said, “because small businesses are the backbone of our economy, but also the heart of our communities. We need to recognize that they should be treated differently.”
NEWS . 5Fall 2022 5
Four candidates for Vermont’s at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives answered questions “submitted and vetted by members of Vermont’s disability rights community and independent living community,” in the words of Vermont Public journalist Peter Hirschfeld, who moderated the event. These candidates included Becca Balint and Liam Madden, who would go on to win the Democratic and Republican primaries, respectively, on Aug. 9.
The Vermont Center for Independent Living (VCIL) partnered with the Vermont Statewide Independent Living Council to organize a Congressional forum on July 26.
Balint voiced a range of proposals, from implementing assistive technology in workplaces to changing the “cash cliff” in the Social Security Disability Insurance program to a “gradual phaseout.” One especially significant topic of discussion was housing.
While hoping to rein in the power of big corporations like Amazon and AirBNB through increased taxation and regulation, Madden expressed a desire to give a leg up to smaller companies by, for example, offering federal subsidies for the implementation of “universal design” principles in their facilities, which larger firms would have to pay for themselves.
Balint, the outgoing Vermont Senate President Pro Tempore, pointed to her years of legislative experience addressing issues affecting “Vermonters with developmental, intellectual, and physical disabilities.” She also told
Mental health, he asserted, depends on people’s sense of “purpose in life, our communities, our connection to the beauty of reality, and the stories that used to hold us together and provide that meaning on a huge arc-of-history kind of time-scale. Patriotism and religion and even just work itself and all of these stories are beginning to weaken and fragment for lots of large historical-force reasons, and we kind of have a God-sized hole in the psyche of our civilization. And if we don’t fill that with community, and we’re not willing to invest in the infrastructure that supports communities’ well-being, we’re not just going to have a God-sized hole; we’re going to fracture as an entire civilization.”
VCIL Hosts Congressional Forum
“I bring this experience with me into my legislative work,” Balint said. “I’m always thinking about who needs an ally and how can I show up in allyship in a way that is meaningful, in a way that is helpful and is not in the driver’s seat – true allyship, which is learning and growing together.”
“I bring this experience with me into my legislative work,” Balint said. “I’m always thinking about who needs an ally and how can I show up in allyship in a way that is meaningful, in a way that is helpful and is not in the driver’s seat – true allyship, which is learning and growing together.”
of American government to “build a just, healthy, regenerative society” that would protect “the most vulnerable among us.” A former Marine and an anti-war activist, he envisioned a “military-scale” public-sector jobs program that would build centrally located, accessible housing and shore up understaffed care facilities and home-based services.
“If you know in your heart that it’s no longer useful to be changing the players but it’s time to change the rules of the game, then I want you to look at me.”
The forum took place on the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A celebration, with speeches, songs, and cake, followed.
“As educators in Vermont, we need to do a better job of communicating with students as early as junior high and high school, to say that you actually can have a really fulfilling career in a profession like being in attendant care,” Balint said. “It’s incredibly rewarding, and it’s something that we don’t often talk about within the public schools. We push everybody to go to a four-year college, and that’s just not what everybody needs to do.”
—Liam Madden
Another subject addressed by the candidates was Vermont’s labor shortage and how it has affected programs for people with disabilities.
On the subject of mental health services, Madden suggested that the best way to improve their quality and availability was to build a nationwide universal healthcare system. But he also cautioned against viewing mental health strictly as a medical matter.
“It isn’t enough just to build more housing. If you don’t have housing that is accessible to all, if you don’t have housing that has wrap-around services and supports, then that’s not actually housing that all people can take advantage of,” she observed. “So I know, at the federal level, we have to not just look at the brick-and-mortar piece of the puzzle – we have to look at making sure that we have the mental health supports, the peer supports, and also making sure that we enforce code regulations as new houses and rental properties are being built.”
By BRETT YATES
Meanwhile, Madden described a need for a wholesale transformation
Democratic Congressional nominee Becca Balint
“Part of our mission is to encourage people with disabilities to understand and be involved in the election process, from voting access and running for office and becoming involved in the political process yourself,” VCIL Executive Director Sarah Launderville said.
Republican Congressional nominee Liam Madden
how her experiences as an LGBTQ+ person, as a person with depression and anxiety, as a middle-school teacher, and as “a mom to a neurodiverse kid” have shaped her commitment to fighting social stigma.
“Things in my life were kind of settling down a bit to where I actually had the time to do it. And not only that – I kept thinking this might help me: I’m a survivor, and I just felt that I was needed,” Merrow recalled. “I was home, kind of stuck, and I felt like it gave me something to do, something to look forward to, because I’m a social butterfly. I like talking to people.”
By federal law, each nonprofit hospital in the United States must compile a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) every three years. CHNAs use polls, focus groups, interviews, and data analysis to identify shortcomings in local healthcare.
In addition to reviewing reports by the organization’s financial officer and executive director, the board works to resolve problems faced by VPS’s patient representatives, who help individuals in psychiatric facilities understand their legal rights. Since the introduction of new precautions owing to COVID-19, some apparently have encountered barriers to entry at Vermont’s hospitals.
When Merrow joined, she had not had prior experience in mental health advocacy or in the provision of mental health services. “I’m happy to be on the board. I kind of like being the president because everybody comes to me with issues, and I like to figure out what to do, the next step,” she said.
New President Leads VPS Board
Anyone potentially interested in joining the VPS board can email Merrow at merrowsara@gmail.com or VPS at info@ vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org.
UVMMC Report Spotlights Mental Health Needs
NEWS6 Fall 2022NEWS6
“If you are housed successfully for a few years, chances are that your access to health, mental health services, and better quality of life will increase,” another adds.The CHNA reports that one in six households in the community “experience severe housing problems such as being overcrowded [or] having incomplete plumbing or kitchen facilities.” The number of homeless individuals – which includes those staying in state-funded hotel rooms – jumped from 261 in 2020 to 700 in 2021.
“Since I’m new, he’s been kind of shadowing me and helping me deal with things,” Merrow described. “So if one of the staff comes to me with an issue, I talk with him first, before I make the decision, and we kind of make the decision together.”Afriend of a longtime friend, Hughes first recruited Merrow for the board in 2019, by her recollection, but she didn’t agree to join until the following year.
VPS board meetings take place monthly. In late July, Merrow was working toward restoring their pre-pandemic in-person format, albeit with a teleconference option.
“There is a lack of affordable, safe housing,” one quoted interviewee laments. “There isn’t decent housing for families or multigenerational households. Small apartments aren’t adequate. New builds are not affordable – all contributes to stress and depression.”
Similarly, it seems that some Abenaki community members who suffer from anxiety have not found effective mental healthcare in the formal sense. But they have found a soothing sanctuary of peers in the Vermont Indigenous Resource Center. “If I know I can go there and I can be with people who understand and I don’t have to feel anxious, or nervous, or deal with a million questions, that’s the program to help me,” a focus group participant states. The CHNA lists 26 recommended action steps. On the mental health front, these include more “peer-to-peer” programming, more “cultural centers and community gathering spaces,” and better “transportation options to services and community resources.”
Merrow succeeded Zachary Hughes, a peer supporter who works at Washington County Mental Health Services. Hughes has remained on the board as vice president, helping Merrow learn the ropes.
B y BRETT YATES
The CHNA suggests that the three needs intertwine.
Board members may also show up to fundraisers, occasional emergency meetings, and other events. Merrow mentioned plans by VPS to host a “popup” at the Walmart in Rutland in the near future to distribute information and promotional merchandise.
University of Vermont Medical Center, Burlington, VT
The report cites data from the Vermont Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to point to an increase in “adults with poor mental health,” who constitute 15% of the community by the latest estimate, up from 11% in 2012–2013. “Mental health and wellbeing” are among the top three “community health priorities” in 2022; the other two are “cultural humility and inclusive healthcare” and housing.
Early this year, Sara Merrow began a three-year term as president of the board of directors at Vermont Psychiatric Survivors (VPS), the civil rights advocacy organization that publishes Counterpoint.
As president, Merrow has prioritized finding additional volunteers to serve alongside her on VPS’s currently shorthanded board. Candidates must attend two meetings and can become members following a vote at the second one.
In 2021, the average number of “mentally unhealthy days” in a month for an adult also increased to 4.1, from 3.6 in 2018. Psychiatric patients constituted 11.5% of UVMMC’s admissions in 2019, but that figure rose to 13.3% in 2020.
The report also amplifies well-publicized recent accounts of emergency department strain amid backups at Vermont’s only psychiatric unit for children: “Participants described having ‘horrendous experiences at the emergency room.’ Families spent hours, days, and even weeks trying to get the services their child needed.”Forcertain groups of adults, too, mental healthcare appears at times to remain out of reach. LGBTQ residents of Chittenden and Grand Isle counties, for instance, are “less likely to report mental health resources as being available compared to respondents who reported their sexual orientation as Heterosexual or Asexual.”
64.7% of survey respondents told UVMMC that they “strongly agree” or (in more cases) “somewhat agree” that “mental health resources are available in my community.” Pediatric psychotherapists, however, may be harder to come by than other mental health professionals, as one parent testifies in the CHNA that she has “been waiting on five different wait lists over the last five months to find her son a new therapist after his current one moved away.”
“A popup is where some of the staff and/or board members have a table and go out to explain what VPS does,” Merrow explained. “There are a lot of people that don’t know we’re out there, that we exist.”
“Being on the board gives me some insight on other people having mental problems. Knowing that I’m not alone helps me,” Merrow said.
“I’ve been hearing more about the Brattleboro Retreat than any others,” Merrow noted.
In collaboration with organizations ranging from the Howard Center to the Champlain Housing Trust, the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMMC), the state’s largest hospital, completed its 2022 CHNA for Chittenden and Grand Isle counties in July. A three-year implementation strategy for its recommendations, in the form of a Community Health Improvement Plan, will kick off in 2023, with grants distributed from UVMMC’s Community Health Investment Fund.
A native of Londonderry, Merrow now lives in Rutland County, between the villages of East Wallingsford and Cuttingsville, where she moved with her husband, who works in the area. In 2005, she received a diagnosis of depression. More diagnoses followed, along with “at least three, maybe four” hospitalizations.
“Not suited for that?” she responds. “Then let’s give them that training.”
“I try to explain – the pain of living was almost worse than the pain of dying.”She’s been asked, “while you were suicidal, what would have made you stop” before it got to an attempt? Were you showing signs? Could others have predicted it?
While she was there, a police officer from Brattleboro came up to Hanover to visit her.
Though she doesn’t remember anything, she later learned that she went the wrong way on I-91 and was heading for a bridge. She knocked down a highway sign and totaled her car. There was lighter fluid poured all over the car.
They “could have humiliated me,” but did not. The way she was treated made a powerful impact, she said.
The feedback “was great,” Hommel said, and she was told someone with lived experience was needed for police academy training sessions.
“I have a daughter,” he told her. “I think she might have the same thing… I’m not sure.”
Hommel’s first serious suicide attempt came when she was 32 and selfmedicating with alcohol, she said. She had walked several miles into the woods in Brattleboro after taking a combination of pills and alcohol.
Hommel tells them that everyone is different and she recognizes that for the police, going into a situation “not knowing what they’re thinking, I can’t imagine; that’s got to be scary for you.”
Kristy Hommel knows firsthand how the right kind of police intervention can be not only lifesaving but also life-affirming.
“I’m tired of fighting this depression,” she said she felt. “I’m a burden. In the long run this is going to be better.”
In more recent sessions, the presentations have gone overtime with all the questions. A typical one is “What’s the best we can do for you in a crisis?”
“I don’t think it’s impossible,” she added. “If they’re here to protect people, then that’s in their best interest to be able to talk to people.”Hommel’s mental health story goes back to her childhood. She remembers blowing on dandelions, watching the drifting seeds and thinking, “I wish I could be going withShethem.”recalls having deep anxiety without knowing words to express it. She only knew that “something doesn’t feel right” compared to other family members, and even tried selfharm at a very young age, throwing herself off the jungle gym.
She was angry to wake up in the morning because she had prayed that she would not.
Despite all that happened, the police “didn’t treat me like I was crazy.”
She tells them that even now, in her late thirties, she is only just learning her own signs and “to be in a place in my own recovery to know.”
People are really good at hiding it, she tells officers.
By ANNE DONAHUE
Hommel now feels that one of the best ways she can give back is by sharing her story with others. “It’s definitely very therapeutic” as well, she said.
“If you are in a place where you need to go to the hospital, call me; I’ll get you there,” he told her.
The officer replied, “You don’t have to apologize. I just wanted to check up on you. You were in rough shape.”Hommel’s second suicide attempt came after she had been sober for almost three years. She was hoping to have a child, so she reduced her medications and found herself spiraling down, she said.
Her parents lived four hours away, but the officer brought her father in by phone, she said.
Hommel “hadn’t wanted to put anyone in danger” but said she hadn’t recognized that risk. Because she had sent text messages out in advance, her parents knew to tell the hospital to admit her to psychiatry.
Hommel now feels that one of the best ways she can give back is by sharing her story with others. “It’s definitely very therapeutic” as well, she said.
Kristy Hommel chats with the Counterpoint reporter at a picnic bench. (Counterpoint photo: Anne Donahue)
She had argued with her husband, who said he couldn’t meet her level of need and left. The power had been out, and her phone went dead when she was in the process of reaching out to her Hommeltherapist.saidshe was not suicidal at that point but “was in bad shape.” When her therapist was unable to return her call, the therapist contacted the police to do a wellness check.
When the officer knocked at the door, she let him in reluctantly. They talked, and she shared her history.
Her first time, there were not a lot of questions during the presentation. But afterward, an officer came up to her, she said.
To see art by Kristy Hommel, go to page 15.
“I thought I was in trouble,” she recollected. She felt “so ashamed and upset,” and “I said I was sorry.”
“Somebody saw me wandering around,” Hommel said. By that time, she needed to be airlifted to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where she woke up.
“I don’t know what you could do to help me,” she told him. The officer talked with her for more than an hour.
NEWS . 7Fall 2022 NEWS
It was “incredibly embarrassing to wake up [in the hospital],” Hommel said. “Two officers [were] waiting to get blood collected.”
Survivor Brings Lived Experience to Police Trainings
The officer gave Hommel his card. He “didn’t talk down; didn’t make me feel small,” she said.
She began with the “In Our Voices” speaker program with NAMI-VT, and then was asked if she would be willing to do a brief version for the collaborative training for police and first responders called “Team Two.”
The positive supports she received in several experiences with police while she was in crisis have led her directly to help with police training so that more officers can learn how to offer assistance effectively. She’s found receptive audiences, full of questions and eagerness to learn more.Hommel has heard people say that mental health support is not the right role for police.
But only a few months later, after being discharged by the hospital as “safe enough to go home,” she was in crisis again.
“But it’s also scary for us,” she notes.
She “needed to hear there is hope” beyond that day.
On other secondary priorities, the advocates don’t yet know what the final outcomes will be. In their letter, they identified a few potential areas for additional improvement, including furniture, where, by supplementing the CON application’s “single bed or stretcher in each room,” NMC could avoid creating a “stark, non-therapeutic setting.”
NMC’s psychiatric subunit will consist of two patient areas and four individual patient rooms. Its updated policies regarding the planned uses of these areas and rooms appear to have assuaged earlier worries, based
The advocates also urged NMC to reconsider the job titles and responsibilities of the hospital staffers whom it expects to assign to monitor psychiatric patients. These “sitters,” as NMC referred to them, could – with more training on how to interact with patients – instead become “support staff.” Additionally, the advocates encouraged NMC to modify its security camera setup to make clear that patients will not be under constant surveillance.
on a letter sent to the Green Mountain Care Board on July 25 by Donahue, Nial, and Towle.
While expressing satisfaction on the issue of restraint and seclusion, the Donahue-Nial-Towle letter reports only a partial victory on another issue raised by advocates in 2019, which was the absence of any plan for a “lounge or gathering area” for psychiatric patients within the emergency department. They had, at that time, stressed the need for a “calming space” that would also allow for “visits by peers or support persons,” to whom, by law, involuntarily committed patients must have access.
“We will be retrofitting an old intensive care unit to be able to move our existing emergency department, while it’s still caring for emergent patients, into a different area of the hospital and have it immediately function as an emergency department, and then we’ll come back to renovate the existing emergency department,” Billings related, anticipating a move-out at the end of NMCAugust.expects to open the renovated emergency department next year in the fall.
Northwestern Medical Center Refines Psychiatric Subunit Plans
NMC fulfilled this requirement in July. And according to psychiatric survivors who attended the meeting, hospital officials did more than just check a box on a list of regulatory obligations.
Billings called the resolution “a matter of clarification.” NMC’s earlier plans hadn’t had “the level of detail and clarity that folks were looking for. And some of that was because the project just hadn’t evolved that far,” he explained.
“The idea that NMC would have common spaces where families can come in and meet and have meetings and be social, et cetera, is a concept that is more in line with an inpatient mental health facility, where folks have longer stays,” Billings argued.
“We were really pleased at how receptive they were to input that they wouldn’t necessarily have been bound by,” said advocate Anne Donahue. “We were pointing to a number of different things, and they were very receptive to them – even, I would say, excited about them – and are going to be looking into them.”
NEWS8 Fall 2022
In St. Albans, the pandemic-delayed plan by Northwestern Medical Center (NMC) to build a new emergency department, announced in 2019, remains underway. One component of the process, mandated by the Green Mountain Care Board as a condition of the project’s Certificate of Need (CON), was to be a meeting between hospital officials and “interested advocates” on the subject of “restraint and seclusion policies” within the forthcoming facility’s psychiatric subunit.
“They made it relatively clear that there would be occasions where voluntary patients would be locked in,” Donahue recalled. “They never said that explicitly, because they never said much of anything explicitly. It was all pretty hard to follow, and different answers seemed to contradict themselves, and that’s why advocates continued to push, saying this does not meet the standards of the law.”
“We had two good meetings earlier this summer with those folks and have gathered additional input that is in the mix for us as we work towards refining the design,” NMC Interim CEO Jonathan Billings told Counterpoint in August.
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The letter announced the writers’ understanding, drawn from their conversation with hospital officials, that “NMC will not be using any locked area to provide care to a patient who is not being legally detained under the emergency interim custody of the Commissioner of Mental Health. In addition, NMC will not use any individually locked room (regardless of patient status) for anyone who does not meet the legal criteria for short-term emergency involuntary seclusion.”
According to Billings, NMC will work on these issues over time. “It is clearly on our action plan at this point to continue to look at these and to have continued conversations on the design as it goes forward,” he said.
NMC has not incorporated such a space into its design, but among preexisting areas in the hospital, it has identified what Billings called a “comfortable, lounge-style room” that is “in decent proximity to the emergency department” and could be made available to patients for certain purposes.
Northwestern Medical Center Interim CEO Jonathan Billings
In early 2020, the Vermont Department of Mental Health (DMH) also submitted a comment to the board, backing up the advocates’ concerns: “While we appreciate there may be safety concerns that cause some involuntary patients to be in locked rooms, we do not believe voluntary patients should have their rooms locked.” Regulators determined that DMH and NMC would have a follow-up of their own, which ultimately took place after the same coronavirus-induced delay.
Sam Peisch from the Vermont Office of the Healthcare Advocate also sat in. “I would say that they were quite transparent with us about what they’re thinking, and I got the sense that it wasn’t a fake, performative thing. I genuinely felt like they wanted us to feel comfortable about it,” he observed.
For now, there appear to be more immediate matters at hand during the hospital’s complicated transition out of its outdated emergency department.
Originally, NMC’s submission to the Green Mountain Care Board had not inspired such confidence. In 2019, Donahue, Ward Nial, and Dan Towle – as “individuals who have direct lived experience with psychiatric hospitalization” – submitted a comment to the governor-appointed regulators, contending that NMC’s preliminary plans made “no distinction between patients who are seeking out medical care and the small number of patients who are under the care and custody of the Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health.”
vtps.help/ counterpoint Contact our toll-free office 800-475-4907number or email info@vtps.help Read Counterpoint Online
“We went door by door in the emergency department and spoke of, ‘How does the lock work? Which direction does it lock? When will it be locked? When will it not be locked? What are the laws in terms of how and when doors can be locked? How does that fit into our care plan in various situations?’” Billings described. “People had very specific scenarios that were very interesting to stop and think through that.”
“It would be non-discoverable,” NAMI NH Executive Director Susan Stearns explained. “It really is about wanting to have all the information in order to create better outcomes in the future. So if agencies or individuals are concerned that that information could be brought forward in either civil or criminal complaints, folks would not want to participate.”
New Hampshire to Consider Mental Health Incident Review Board
In 2017, the Vermont General Assembly created a Mental Health Crisis Response Commission for the purpose of “conducting reviews of law enforcement interactions with persons” in extreme mental states. New Hampshire could be the next state to institutionalize this form of scrutiny in one fashion or another, thanks to a new law that will create a committee to examine the advisability of assembling “a board to review police incidents involving citizens affected by mental health issues.”
“In New Hampshire, over 50 percent of officer-involved shootings involve someone with a known mental health disorder,” Stearns asserted. By Giuda’s count, that category encompasses all four of New Hampshire’s most recent fatal shootings by police.
“A lot of it’s probably going to be about procedures and protocols,” she conjectured. “Can we learn from this incident and recognize that, in that interaction that happened a day before, something should’ve been done then? Similarly, if it turns out that perhaps the law enforcement officer hasn’t had a particular
The law empanels two members of the legislature’s upper chamber and three of the lower to hear testimony from 14 experts in the public safety and mental health fields.
“I said, ‘OK, two things: we need to get officers trained, and we need a review committee that looks at things to help police departments change their procedures,’” Giuda told Counterpoint.
Bob Giuda (New Hampshire State Senate, District 2)
government, and “what kind of mechanism will there be for accountability that the board’s recommendations are implemented.”
NEWS . 9Fall 2022
“I convened a number of high-level meetings with the Commissioner of Safety, the Commissioner of Health and Human Services, the Attorney General. Everybody was walking around the issue,” Giuda told Counterpoint. “I said, ‘OK, two things: we need to get officers trained, and we need a review committee that looks at things to help police departments change their procedures.’”
The senator pointed out that the New Hampshire Attorney General already reviews every fatal shooting by police “from the point of view of criminal law.” In his view, however, these
training, do we want to make sure that all law enforcement officers have additional training?”
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“If you don’t provide a system within which events and incidents can be dissected safely, without threat to the people involved, you are preventing a very effective tool, the tool of critique, from happening,” Giuda said. “And whilst a department may do a critique or may not after an incident review, nonetheless they’re not doing it from a mental health intervention point of view. They’re doing it from a police procedure point of view. What we need to do –and the purpose of this – is to marry those two things.”Thelaw empanels two members of the legislature’s upper chamber and three of the lower to hear testimony from 14 experts in the public safety and mental health fields, including Stearns. They will report their findings by November.Thestate
NAMI NH played a role in the drafting of the legislation during meetings with its sponsor, Sen. Bob Giuda. SB 376 also appropriates $1.1 million to reimburse local police departments and sheriff offices in New Hampshire for crisis intervention trainings.
Besides focusing exclusively upon the intersection of law enforcement and mental health, the entity contemplated by SB 376 would differ from the Law Enforcement Review Committee recently established in New Hampshire by HB 1682 (and from the civilian police review boards in many U.S. municipalities) because it would not serve to guide disciplinary processes. Instead, it would study uses of force – especially deadly force – against “individuals suffering from mental health disorders” for the purpose of forming policy and training recommendations, without calling into question their legality.
Giuda said that he envisioned a body whose membership would include both mental health professionals and police officers. To protect law enforcement, its “deliberations will be totally blocked out from public view,” he added.
Among the important tasks for the study committee, in Stearns’s judgment, will be determining whether the potential board should operate under the auspices of the Department of Public Safety or within some other part of
legislature will subsequently determine whether to create a mental health incident review board and, if they do, how it will operate. SB 376 establishes few parameters for it beyond a mission to perform “a comprehensive analysis of all mental health aspects” of lethal policing incidents and, discretionarily, of “nonlethal SWAT engagements.” Stearns, however, imagines that the board would administer a process similar to that which hospitals use to evaluate incident reports.
“There are going to be folks in law enforcement, I imagine, who are going to have concerns about what this really looks like, how it impacts law enforcement. I don’t know that they’d be opposed. But I know that they’ll have concerns about how it is implemented, should it be. So the intent here really would be to give everyone an opportunity to weigh in,” Stearns said.
According to Stearns, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s 2021 report on a fatal shooting in Claremont by the state police prompted the push for a mental health incident review board, which began under her predecessor at NAMI NH, Ken Norton.
“It’s tragic,” he said. “These people were known to be mentally unstable, and there were opportunities for the police that engaged in these shootings to have prevented it from escalating to the point where they had to kill a person.”
Instead, it would study uses of force – especially deadly force – against “individuals suffering from mental health disorders” for the purpose of forming policy and recommendations,trainingwithoutcallingintoquestiontheirlegality.
A lot of discussion will likely take place before the legislators finalize their report.
investigations into individual culpability do little to illuminate “what could have been done differently” by the department leading up to the deadly moment.
A lot of discussion will likely take place before the legislators finalize their report.
NEWS10 Fall 2022
Banquette Chair by Stance
Occasional Table by Stance
New
Multi-use Chair by Spec
The locked, 16-bed step-down residence, named the River Valley Therapeutic Residence by the state legislature in May, will replace the makeshift Middlesex Therapeutic Community Residence after nine years of “temporary” operations. The estimated cost of construction is $24,790,473.
Two pieces of furniture – the Liberty Platform Bed and the Custom 5” Mattress, both by Stance – will outnumber the rest. They retail for $2,620 and $1,164, respectively.
Responses to the RFP were due by Aug. 11, but the document doesn’t set a timetable for the completion of the job.
Construction on the facility began last year in October with the demolition (except for its gymnasium) of the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, which previously occupied the same forest clearing near the Winooski River at 26 Woodside Dr., Essex, VT.
Viewed from public hiking paths in the second half of August, the construction site revealed a building that appeared already mostly structurally complete, with windows and doors installed and a roof not yet shingled. Alongside excavators and other heavy machinery, trucks and trailers representing a slew of contractors – PC Construction, SD Ireland Construction, Brickliners Custom Masonry & Chimney Services, and Evergreen Roofing – dotted a yard of gravel, dirt, and one large pit.
ValleyselectedfurnishingsforRiverTherapeuticResidenceinEssex,Vt
Dining Chair by Pineapple
Three manufacturers – Stance, Spec, and Pineapple – will supply the majority of the furnishings. Stance and Pineapple specialize in products for behavioral health settings, while Spec serves a wide range of institutional clients, including companies in the healthcare industry.
On July 28, the Vermont Department of Mental Health released a request for proposals (RFP) for the procurement and installation of furniture at its new secure residential recovery facility, due to open in the first quarter of 2023.
Construction Continues at River Valley Therapeutic Residence
Its guidance included a recommendation to include peers within mobile crisis teams, based on evidence that the use of peer support during mental health crises reduces the likelihood of hospitalization. State guidelines for existing mobile crisis services in Vermont do not demand a peer component, but the legislature’s appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022 set parameters for their forthcoming expansion, and among these was a mandate to hire “peer support staff.”
The needs assessment directly quotes SAMHSA, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services: “For community-based mobile crisis programs, incorporating peers can add complementary qualifications to the team so
According to SAMHSA, mobile crisis teams should “respond without law enforcement accompaniment unless special circumstances warrant inclusion in order to support true justice system diversion.”
DMH’s letter of intent indicates that the department expects to contract a different vendor for crisis response in each region of the state. Each vendor must have “three or more years of experience in providing services to people with mental health and substance use issues.”
Vermont Mobile Crisis Needs Assessment by HMA
Expected Start Date for Statewide Mobile Crisis Response Is Sept. 2023
Input from clinicians, first responders, public officials, mental health consumers, peers, and others has informed HMA’s research through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. A “Vermont Mobile Crisis Needs Assessment” was released in June.
DMH has long encouraged its Designated Agencies to offer mobile crisis response services but has acknowledged that they haven’t had the resources to implement robust or expansive programs. In 2021, a $600,000 appropriation by the state legislature funded a one-year regional mobile response pilot by Rutland Mental Health Services, with the stated intention of decreasing local emergency department visits for psychiatric care among children by deploying rapid-response teams to homes and schools.
“SAMHSA deems incorporation of peers within the mobile crisis team as a best practice. CMS also recognizes the value of peer integration, noting that best practices include incorporating trained peers who have lived experience in recovery from mental illness and/or substance use and formal training within the mobile crisis team,” HMA found.
Financed by the American Rescue Plan Act’s COVID-19 recovery stimulus, the pilot aimed, in part, to demonstrate the feasibility of a permanent, statewide, 24/7 mobile response system that, through compliance with federal regulations, would ultimately sustain itself by drawing Medicaid dollars. Last fall, the Vermont Agency of Human Services used a federal planning grant to contract Health Management Associates (HMA), a consultancy firm, to help design such a system. DMH expects to receive a one-year extension on the grant to facilitate additional work, according to a spokesperson.
By BRETT YATES
NEWS . 11Fall 2022
that individuals in crisis are more likely to see someone they can relate to while they are receiving services. Peers should not reduplicate the role of behavioral health professionals but instead should establish rapport, share experiences, and strengthen engagement with the individual experiencing crisis. They may also engage with the family members of (or other persons significant to) those in crisis to educate them about self-care and ways to provide support.”
Responses to the upcoming RFP must arrive by December, with DMH expecting to award contracts in February next year, about a month after delivering a report to the legislature on the results of the Rutland pilot and the status of the anticipated expansion of services. If all goes to plan, statewide operations will begin on Sept. 1, 2023.
On Aug. 1, the Vermont Department of Mental Health (DMH) distributed a “notice of intent to procure community-based mobile crisis intervention services.” The document announced an upcoming request for proposals (RFP), whereby, in November, DMH will solicit vendors to deliver “a statewide unified, equitable, mobile crisis response system of care that is community-based and addresses the needs of people experiencing a mental health and/or substance use related crisis,” starting next year.
WHEREAS, all people, from all walks of life and age groups, face difficulties and challenges in their mental health at some time during their lives; and
WHEREAS, Mad Pride Day emerged out of many historical movements for selfdetermination and dignity, including Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Mad liberation, Gay Rights, anti-psychiatry, ex-psychiatric patient, self-reliance, anti-poverty, consumer survivor, service user and other movements;
WHEREAS, people with mental health challenges experience stigma, discrimination, and disparate health outcomes; and
NOW THEREFORE, I Miro Weinberger, Mayor of the City of Burlington, do hereby proclaim July 16, 2022 to be MAD PRIDE DAY in the City of Burlington, and commit our City to delivering the protections, safety, and equality to all so that everyone can realize their full potential and enjoy the full promise of America.
CITY OF BURLINGTON, VERMONT Office of Mayor Miro Weinberger
Burlington Proclaims Mad Pride Day
On July 16, Mayor Miro Weinberger issued an official proclamation, declaring Mad Pride Day in the City of Burlington. With the mayor stuck in Italy after contracting COVID-19 while on vacation, MadFreedom founder Wilda White read the proclamation in his absence. Its full text follows.
NEWS12 Fall 2022
Counterpoint photos: Brett Yates
WHEREAS, every human being has intrinsic worth and is entitled to dignity and respect, and therefore should have pride and live without shame or in silence; and
WHEREAS, Mad Pride Day is celebrated annually in cities and countries around the globe, beginning in 1981, when the New York Mental Patients Liberation Alliance selected July 14, Bastille Day, to mark Mad Pride Day. Bastille Day is the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in Paris, France in 1789 to free prisoners, including two individuals with psychiatric labels who were being held there for that reason; and
WHEREAS, these organizations fight against discrimination, injustice; and advocate for rights to improve the quality of life for psychiatric survivors, service users, ex-patients, neurodiverse and Mad people, and folks the world has deemed “mentally ill;” and
WHEREAS, there are Vermont organizations run for and by individuals with mental health challenges who support and advocate with and on behalf of others with mental health challenges; and
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In the film Any Given Day, which premiered on public television in July as part of the World Channel’s America ReFramed documentary series, director Margaret Byrne offers a revealing glimpse into the nature of the Circuit Court of Cook County’s Mental Health Court Program. Streaming audiences can view the film at pbs.org by logging into their Vermont PBS member station’s digital library.
Any Given Day doesn’t spend much time in the courtroom, but the effects of the criminal justice system become apparent in its portraits of the lives of three Chicagoland arrestees who, after pleading guilty to nonviolent crimes, became eligible based on their psychiatric diagnoses for a unique form of probation centered on residential or outpatient treatment and medication monitoring.Theprogram is “voluntary” in the sense that the defendants could instead submit to a traditional court hearing and sentence (e.g., prison). By choosing mental health court, they gain access to opportunities for housing, counseling, and job training. But whether it means to or not, the film casts doubt on whether a judge can effectively mandate mental health.
The documentary centers three people: Angela, a single mother of four; Daniel, a former fashion student; and Dimitar, a Bulgarian immigrant and frustrated creative writer. Byrne’s camera follows Angela, Daniel, and Dimitar through their daily lives, capturing interactions with family members, store clerks, and probation officers. Some parts of their worlds remain offlimits, however, leaving a considerable portion of the 84-minute runtime to B-roll of Chicago streetscapes overlaid with text-message conversations with the Byrne’sdirector.presence in the narrative grows as her own struggles with mental health worsen, blurring the line between the art and the artist. Her self-described depression leads to a hospitalization and a delay in filming; an empathetic bond between the director and her subjects appears to have played a significant role in carrying the project to completion.
Still, the court program leads all three protagonists toward happy-ish endings, and Byrne presents each criminal justice functionary along the way – from police officers to forensic case managers – as essentially humane. But does that mean the system itself is humane?
The Arts 14 Documentary Sheds Light on Mental Health Court
Even so, Byrne’s uncritical acceptance of “mental illness” – bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and psychosis – as the driver of her subjects’ suffering inevitably limits the scope of her investigations into their lives and histories. Her own introspection tends to cut short for the same reason.Angela, Daniel, and Dimitar are distinct, multifaceted individuals, even within the relatively narrow frame of the documentarian’s lens, but there are some common threads related to housing, employment, and social isolation. Criminal histories have limited their job prospects, and between evictions, convictions, and commitments, they pass in and out of jails, hospitals, residential facilities, relatives’ homes, and subsidized apartments, rarely finding stable places to call home.
The term “mental health court” has the ring almost of an oxymoron. But for some criminal justice reformers, such programs (which include Vermont’s Chittenden Adult Drug Treatment and Mental Health Court Dockets) demonstrate a means of reducing the rate of incarceration in a society where people who need help too often end up behind bars instead.
As their fortunes fluctuate, Byrne presents mental illness as a cycle: it comes and goes like rain, getting better and then worse before it gets better and then worse again. But one senses that a different story could be told about why psychological stress tends to arise or subside at particular moments for these individuals. The invasive, authoritarian structure of the mental health court program itself could be one factor, especially given its onerous reporting requirements, which, for Daniel, require at one point walking six hours in the cold to avoid a probation violation.
“It’s just a lot of dictating: do this, do that,” Angela describes. She resists taking her prescribed medications – in part because she distrusts their efficacy, but also because resisting makes her “feelSeekingfree.” what he calls “enlightenment,” Dimitar similarly recognizes the limits of mere compliance in the face of a forced treatment regimen.
“How can I consider my accomplishments within the court system accomplishments at all?” he wonders.
The director’s seeming neutrality on this question may be an artistic choice or a political one – or no choice at all, because, at bottom, her interest is in individuals, not in the system at all. Viewers may draw conclusions of their own.
counterpoint@vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org or by mail to: Counterpoint, The Service Building, 128 Merchants Row, Suite 606, Rutland, VT 05701 Please include name and town Share It! Send it to us at: Film Review
THE ARTS . 15Fall 2022
Trying to hold onto the trees, the earth Their ear drums pop Blaring sounds stand still They are lost once again in the silence — THELMA STOUDT, Sudbury
“I use tiny pieces of paper and collage them into images, and I also use found materials to create artwork.”
“Reflections on Room 101 in the Ministry of Love” by Phoebe Sparrow Wagner (collage, made from magazine scraps and wrapping paper)
Gravity is not working They scale the noise
Curling up in between silence and sound Screams never uttered Void of noise they huddle In a gas chamber after the hiss They’re in the middle of a hurricane Foreboding distracting calm They want to trust it Expectations haunt them Then a cacophony beats them down They try to huddle close to the ground
Art by Kristy Hommel
“Is there a problem providing a reference?”
“No! Your number’s on my caller ID. I’ll… I’ll get back to you”
“I don’t know.” She looked confused. She didn’t mention anything about the chiropractor job. So I asked if she’d like to stop up to my place, join me for a coffee or something.
“Her name’s Anita,” Alice mentioned. “She’ll calm down after a few minutes.”“Sillyof me to imagine all cats are female, all dogs male,” I said.
This is getting us nowhere, I thought. It seemed overdue, so why not just broach the topic? “Some people think you say strange things,” I ventured.
(Continued on page 17) SHORT FICTION
Alice’s husband and mine were colleagues in the same law firm. The evening of that concert was the first time the four of us had gotten together. It was also the first time Josh and I met Hal’s wife Alice.
“No,” he said. “It must just be the way he and his wife communicate.”
Alice’s husband had not been diagnosed with Aspereditinal’s. It didn’t occur to me until I was waking up the next morning to wonder why in that case he’d offered his own “You’re Sorry? I thought you were Alice” on that night we met her.
“Barbara didn’t mean to ask if you’d be taking the George Washington Bridge home with you,” my husband clarified. “She meant, would you be driving over it on your way home?”
“I read it, in Playboy.”
“A… what?” I asked.
Everyone around Alice burst out laughing. She didn’t. That – plus the fact that, unlike in our conversation after the concert, she didn’t mention that she was joking – made me wonder if a second diagnosis, in addition to her compulsive sense of humor, might be necessary.
Strange things: the phrase itself? I thought I was beginning to understand her gist, how her mind worked. Her dog had stopped howling. I started wishing she hadn’t.
“Oh, no!” Alice responded. “It’d be much too big to fit into our apartment.”
“Alice! What brings you to our neighborhood?” I asked her.
Alice smiled. Slightly built, with a mauve cashmere sweater buttoned neatly down her front, she didn’t look like the type who’d poke people in the“Iribs.can understand your misconception,” she said, sitting sideways, her legs crossed on my couch. “Eighty-nine percent of dogs are male.”
Looking hurt, Alice reached into her pocketbook and extracted a pill. Without excusing herself, she headed for the bathroom. When she came back, I could have sworn her hair was parted on the side of her head opposite where it had been before she’d left. She’d also apparently rubbed eyebrow pencil off one of her eyes and used it to paint the other side of her face with a thick black curve up to her hairline.
“Well, everyone says them from time to time.”
“Once every three and a half years,” she told me.
Several weeks after that evening, Hal and I were at the same party as the Jaltsens. Talking with someone a few feet away from Alice, I overheard a man tell her, “I don’t mean to say you’re crazy. It’s just that so many people are doing it today: have you ever seen a psychiatrist?”
Josh grimaced; then, poking my rib cage with his elbow, he exploded, too. Contagious hysterics are doubly hard to control. They continued, interspersed with my imitations of Alice, through the lovemaking we managed that night.
B y RON MERKIN, MONTPELIER
“I… I think I’d better call you back,” I said. “You caught me on my way out of the house.” Then, after a pause: “Oh, and I won’t be able to call you on the run. My cell phone’s not working.”
The next time I saw Alice was on the sidewalk a block from our house. I’d been shopping. Alice was having trouble controlling a dog on a leash.
“Oh, I don’t know. I may have seen dozens!” Alice told him. “Do you go up to people on buses and in the streets and ask if they’re psychiatrists?”
“I’m walking my dog,” she answered.
I’m concerned about you, I wanted to say. But that sounded tactless. Instead: “Um, are you feeling all right?”
“Oh… you read Playboy? ”
I didn’t, of course. Neither did I call Alice to ask what prompted her to give my name as a reference.
She Always Comes Home
Climbing the staircase to my living room, I heard Alice’s dog howling. She’d tied him with a leash to a lamp post.
“I know,” giggled Alice. “I was just joking.” Walking next to me, she jabbed her elbow in my ribs.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m Alice,” she told me.
“What? Where did you hear that?” I was studying her.
I learned sometime later that Alice had been diagnosed with a newly coined disability: Asperderitidinal Perplexitrous Syndrome. Among other symptoms is a compulsive sense of humor that influence those affected to interpret every word said to them as if it were literal. Apparently, they find that hilarious.
“She gave your name as a reference. Not to vouch for her professional abilities, just for her character, her general ability to function in an occasionally stressful environment. Preliminary information.” I was speechless. “Can you vouch for her?” the woman asked.
The Arts16 Fall 2022
Noticing me taking in these changes, she said, “The medication for my condition works better this way.” Then she followed that with another “I’m just joking” remark and jabbed an elbow in my rib cage again. Entering our house that night, I erupted in laughter. I must have been holding it in. Walking through our front door, a safe place, I exploded, “I can’t believe she’s for real!”
Having reached for it on my bedside table, I heard a Ruth Ashenon explaining that Alice had applied for a job as a receptionist in a chiropractor’s office. She’d given my name as a reference.
The Jaltsens lived in New Jersey. Walking through Manhattan after a concert we attended with them one night, my husband asked if they’d be taking the George Washington Bridge home.
“Ouch,” I reacted.
“You’re Sorry?” her husband asked. “I thought you were Alice.” Both of them doubled over in laughter.
After they left us, I asked Josh if Hal acted like that at work.
Josh had already left for work. The sun was shining through our eastfacing window, and I was staring at the ceiling, feeling not particularly like getting out of bed. Then the phone rang.
“Oh...” Before she said “my dog,” I’d assumed it must be the dog of a friend in this area that she was taking care of. “But… why did you come from New Jersey to walk him in Manhattan?” I asked her.
“Oh.” Then, untying her dog’s leash from the railing, she bent to her ear to ask where the nearest airport was.
I did not think reviving you would take my breath from inside me. Cause me great confusion and uproot. Saving you dear, keeping you alive, (sober) gave you the power to destroy and desert your one true love. How scared a man you are to live in the corners of your attic, With the unforeseen writings Unbeknownst to those who go there.
But, already down the block, neither the dog nor Alice heard me.
“You needn’t worry,” he told us. “Alice is here. She always comes home.”
Forbye, maybe, I could have lived
by Morgan W. Brown, Montpelier
“What?” she shouted.
The Arts . 17Fall 2022
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” I said. But walking toward the door, she didn’t show any sign of hearing me. I wanted to yell, I meant I’d like you to leave! Oh God, why had I invited her up in the first place?
It appears that one can sometimes be essentially cursed with habitual swearing, not necessarily of their own making or choice; uttering one swear word after another in rapid succession, oftentimes triggered by certain stressful experiences, events or otherwise childhood trauma and resulting inner turmoil, seemingly unaware about their coarse language and any potential effect on others, nor the myriad reasons behind these verbal outbursts, at least during an active episode; although, as rather disturbing as it might be perceived by others who happen to be observing or are onelsewisethereceiving
You came to me in a fragment Less than a sentence drew me Intrigued, I opened the door to a world That could hold our weight In pain, in laughter, in heart-hardening silence.
As if the dog understood, it started walking. Alice unleashed her and followed from behind.
“Alice! The dog doesn’t know which way the airport is!”
When Josh got home that night, he asked what happened after I’d phoned his office. Telling him, we both wound up laughing uncontrollably again.
A little longer…
And saved my heart some years
by Raven Joy Crispino
Was told I saved you from the waters That turned your brain to mush and bad decisions at two in the morning.
“It’ll just take me a minute,” she stopped me. “I’ll go get her and bring her up to join us.”
Ringing my doorbell, she started singing before I could buzz her in: “Strangers in the Night.” She sounded more like a baritone than a soprano. Once more, I leaned out the window. “Sorry I can’t invite you in again. I
Around five minutes passed. Alice had not come back upstairs. Leaning out the window, I noticed she was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. Just as I was about to yell down to ask what she was doing, she stood up and started walking down the block. Still tied to a railing, her dog didn’t bark for some reason.
“I have… to be… OUT… of the house… in five minutes!”
SHE ALWAYS COMES HOME • Continued from page 16
“Alice!” I yelled. “Your dog!”
“I’m coming back for her,” she shouted. But an hour and a half later, she hadn’t.
“What’s wrong with her?” I said.
I called Josh at the office. He said he’d tell Alice’s husband what happened. A few minutes later Alice returned.
“Her humor – if that’s what it is – has a sort of adolescent quality… pubescent, don’t you think? Like kids looking for silliness to make them giggle as their changing bodies make them tense. They want outlets, a release,” Josh hypothesized.
Before“Huh.” the evening ended, we phoned Alice’s husband.
If I had known saving you would bring a person back to life I did not know existed Then I don’t think I would have.
just got a phone call and have to be out of the house in five minutes.”
This time, my preposterous admonition that the dog didn’t know where the airport was had triggered our hysterics. But after a while, my amusement began to make me feel guilty.
“Josh and I have never had a dog who howled when left alone,” I said. “Yours has quieted down, but my heart goes out to them when they’re left waiting for their owners. The longer they wait, the more anxiety they experience. That’s not healthy…”
Reflection Lake
I promised to cry less…
I left the day you did not come home. I had enough of your hide and seek me out… Done chasing you down the street to stop signs Then looking both ways for what, safety? For you to come home?
I was there to keep you in line, guide you away from the poison. Remember what is worth living for: You, Your Daughter, Me? I was always a question mark in my head.
I have been there…
I Swear
end, this might be relatively better than if one were to otherwise literally either implode or explode due to having kept it all cooped up inside, absent some form of meaningful, creative self-expression; much akin to being a caged bird, singing out with the only means afforded, seeking freedom from involuntary captivity; unable to fly and soar as one’s nature requires, because their wings have been literally or virtually clipped in one form or another by their well-meaning captors or so-called guardians; who are apparently unaware or unconcerned of the severe damage done to one’s imprisoned and tortured, yet most sacred and yearning, soul. Hence, it is crucial to keep in mind how there can never be a truly justifiable reason or meaningful substitute for not allowing someone to exercise actual freedom. Thus, whenever possible, it is imperative to allow each and every soul an opportunity to fly as well as soar freely in their own unique fashion; otherwise, they might slowly perish in great anguish, eventually dying, completely alone, unnecessarily.
It is only after the recognition that mental health is not predicated solely upon the availability of mental health services – it is predicated upon everything – that one’s real progressivism on the issue is tested. Psychotherapy is expensive, but building a new society would cost even more.
Oliver praises a plan released by the Biden administration to invest $700 million in mental health workforce training and loan forgiveness in underserved areas.
In the face of state legislatures hostile to transformative change, however, advocates typically present peer support as a supplementary request, not as the basis for a new mental health system intended to prefigure a radically humane and egalitarian postcapitalist future where the need to outsource emotional support to professional services would ultimately disappear altogether. Within the current political context, the best argument for peer support is that it can fill gaps in the existing mental health system relatively inexpensively because the workers don’t command high salaries.
“In the past, so much of the problem here was that people would not ask for help, and thankfully that’s now less of an issue,” the liberal host observes. “But now when people do reach out for help, we’re just not in a position to give it to them.”
Silicon Valley startups have attempted to fill the void with iPhone mental health apps, but a short clip of a textmessage interaction with an automated therapist called Woebot demonstrates the inadequacy of such solutions.
There is, however, a logical incoherence in this presentation: the portrait of our benighted mental health past, at the start of the program, was not one of hidden, untreated suffering. Whether women in the 1950s had the opportunity to ask for help or not, the ones in the video in any case received it. The problem was the nature of the “help” to which their society subjected them, not their inability to request it.
128 Merchants Row, Suite 606, Rutland, VT 05701, or to counterpoint@vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org Include name, address and email.
On July 31, the popular HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a 25-minute video essay about mental healthcare in the United States. It begins with old-timey black-and-white documentary footage of psychiatric nurses inside a beauty parlor.
In the end, however, this claim portrays peer supporters as cheap and presumably shoddy replacements for credentialed mental health experts. The progressive instinct – particularly in political spheres that regard “believing science” as a crucial tenet in a battle against right-wing populism – would be to spend more and get the real thing: someone with an MD or PhD.
Though misguided in this case, the instinct demonstrates an underlying fiscal generosity, and in response, critics of the mental health system should emphasize the generous nature of their own designs. In truth, it is psychiatry itself that most frequently operates as a cut-rate, back-end fix for society’s big problems, which our political system cannot find the money or the will to solve.
What if mental healthcare in America has not evolved as much as one might assume from the days when medical professionals believed that despondent women needed little more than a new hairdo in order to find the will to carry on? What if psychiatrists continue to view their task primarily as one of reshaping dysfunctional individuals to fit a narrow definition of normalcy?
In fact, activists have consistently made the case that public libraries, public schools, and public housing could receive more funding if not for the exorbitant cost of policing. Unfortunately, their other go-to move frequently has been to promote the mental health system as an alternative, less deadly means of social control for individuals who contribute to
generous government spending to improve people’s lives.
COMMENTARY18 Fall 2022
tactic that can be used by psychiatric survivors is to counter demands for more psychiatrists with equally loud demands for more peer supporters. In other words, the need for mental health funding remains; it just needs to go somewhere different.
How should psychiatric survivors and ex-patients interact with mainstream progressive demands for a fully funded mental health system?
Today, Oliver assures the viewer, most Americans have a far more enlightened attitude toward the seriousness of mental health. Unfortunately, the system continues to let them down due to a dearth of available mental health professionals. For rural Americans in particular, the challenge of finding a therapist or counselor can be insurmountable.
Activists’ 2020 call to “defund the police,” though a failure on almost every level, represents a clear model for complicating the general perception of a particular form of government spending without otherwise sanctioning a retreat from the provision of public services. The abolitionists may not have abolished anything, but they have helped ensure that police departments occupy a separate political category from, say, public libraries, though both make use of municipal tax dollars.
Send your reactions to commentaries or an opinion piece of your own to:
disorder.Another
And what if the coping strategies imparted by professionals to fend off the mental health crises that interrupt day-to-day functioning and productivity cannot address the root of an individual’s problem – which, in the end, may not fall within the individual’s control? What if the psychiatrist’s own conception of their role in society and in the lives of their patients actually precludes them from taking any meaningful action against the broader conditions that generate psychological stress?
For empathetic people who themselves have known only sanity, the case for boosting standard mental health services is straightforward, particularly on the left side of the political spectrum. The social democratic ideal centers a robust welfare state with universal access to a wide range of public goods, including well-funded mental healthcare. For psychiatry’s skeptics, the question is how to disentangle and challenge support for coercive or ineffective services from a broadly agreeable demand for
Specifically, how does one do this without unwittingly endorsing the neoliberal project of delegitimizing and slashing the social safety net as a whole? Some intellectual historians have observed that left-wing theorists of antipsychiatry like Michel Foucault fundamentally failed to resolve this problem, and their critiques of state power finally accommodated Ronald Reagan’s vision of rule by the market.
But why shouldn’t everyone have a home, regardless of their mental state? If they don’t, the problem is housing policy, not healthcare policy. In the eyes of many psychiatric survivors, Oliver and others have the equation backward: it is the traumatic, stressful, alienating experience of homelessness that gives rise to responses and adaptations to which psychiatrists apply diagnoses and labels.
New Week, NewEDITORIALIdeas
COUNTERPOINT
The real answer, as put forward by Last Week Tonight, is an increase in the number of psychiatrists and psychologists, along with a guarantee of reliable access to their services, preferably through a single-payer healthcare system.
The nurses are attending cosmetology classes with the expectation of passing on lessons in make-up and coiffure to their female patients. The 1950s rationale, it seems, was that if women with diagnoses of depression could learn how to prettify themselves, they’d soon find reason to cheer up.
“Mental health problems are a big driver of homelessness,” Oliver observes, for instance. This claim, meant to bolster the case for mental healthcare, also bolsters the presumption that people who lose the ability to participate in market society should also inevitably lose their homes.
Oliver also holds government agencies accountable for lax enforcement of mental health parity laws, which has allowed insurers to get away with refusing to cover psychiatric treatments.
HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a 25-minute video essay about mental healthcare in the United States.
It was my first day on the job as a psychiatric social worker. No interview had been required before I began work because I’d switched from a pediatric to a psychiatric hospital setting, and both were under the umbrella of the New York City civil service system. So, having met my supervisor-to-be a minute or two before this question and having no idea about her feelings on the issue, I found myself facing her across her desk while staring clueless at the air in front of me.“Don’t worry about saying what you think I want to hear,” Beatrice encouraged me. “I sincerely want to know your feelings about drugs.”“Well…” I stopped. Psychotropic drugs were so heavily relied on…
“Well… frankly…”
place,” she said.
“OK,” I surrendered. Then, fast, as if something in me wanted to get this over with: “I don’t agree withWithoutdrugs.”a pause – not even for a second – she erupted, “How dare you say that?”
Ron Merkin
She introduced me to four nurses who sat next to one another behind an elongated barrier station that separated the community room from the off-limits staff-only area. Then we proceeded to the psychiatrists’ offices. The two psychiatrists – a woman and a man, both young – happened to be discussing something in the man’s office when Beatrice knocked on his door.
Noticing my puzzlement, she continued, “Didn’t Beatrice tell you? He wants to talk with you. I thought you knew. His name is Herb Riley. Third floor, room 12.”
If he did, he wasn’t successful. My fourth day on the job, Beatrice informed me we’d be meeting with the two psychiatrists the next afternoon.
It seemed to me that at least a minute passed. Finally, one of the psychiatrists said, “Beatrice, why did you want to have this meeting?”
Oh, God, another lecture? I thought. A replay –emotional harassment, another admonishment?
A nightmare that fades but always recurs: “I want you to tell him how indispensable drugs are in the treatment of mental patients,” she said. “He thinks they’re unnecessary and should not be Silence.used.”An awkward atmosphere. Then slowly – like a cautionary, very bit-by-bit “testing the waters”-type process – the psychiatrists and I launched one of the most fascinating, fun and enjoyable conversations about mental health that I can remember to this day. Freud, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, our own hypotheses, even drugs: eventually, any topic we came up with was evaluated, discussed, even laughed about to theThisfullest.lasted an about an hour. With a mixed expression of double-crossed-plus-totallyuninterested, Beatrice hadn’t said a word.
I can’t remember exactly how the following occurred, but thinking I “heard” an instruction, I tried to picture my entire being descending to my stomach. Once there, I felt coaxed to “give Julia a task, something concrete. It can be simple, like telling her she’s required to find you and say ‘Hello, Mr Merkin’ wherever you are at several exact times during the day. Be sure at those times that you’re far enough away to make this seem like a challenge but close enough so
The two-year curriculum required to get a master of social work degree in my day included a “field placement” assignment in a different clinical setting each year. Working in the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital during my second year, I learned that almost all the patients there were young men who had served in Vietnam. Every one of them hallucinated. In spite of that, talk therapy worked.
“Why, drugs are a miracle!” she ranted. “We wouldn’t be able to function without them!” (Without saying anything, I mentally substituted the word control for function.)
“Oh now I understand. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to her. I’ll take care of it.”
Inviting us in, the psychiatrists shook my hand and welcomed me aboard. Then the man asked Beatrice if she’d already decided which patients to assign to me.
Note: All names, except the author’s, have been changed.
“It’s convenient that you’re both in the same
Once in the ward, we passed a young man who was shaking uncontrollably while trying to stand up straight. Before I could ask what was wrong, Beatrice explained, “That’s nothing to worry about. Especially when patients first begin drug therapy, the doses prescribed may be too potent. It can take a while before our psychiatrists’ experiments arrive at the right balance.”
It was the late 1970s. Because all this happened so long ago I don’t remember how long our “conversation” lasted. But when Beatrice seemed satisfied that she’d finally set me straight, she gave me a key to the locked ward a short walk down the hall from our office. With this I’d be able to let myself in and out.
She never did, but I found the information easily enough by reading a written log that all therapists had access to. When I arrived the next morning, I let myself into the ward and asked one of the nurses to point these patients out.
“I value your opinion,” she insisted.
“Not yet,” she answered.
“Then I suggest Robert Smith and Julia Nordic.”Nobackground histories or diagnoses were proffered. When I asked about that, Beatrice mentioned that the psychiatrists were busy but that she’d fill me in on that sort of thing later.
She hadn’t mentioned a word about drugs since I’d been called to the chief social worker’s office two days before. So imagining that Herb’s talk with her had indeed worked and an orientation lasting longer than my brief introduction to the psychiatrists three days ago was routine for new employees, I was dumbfounded when, as I sat in Dr. Welbroth’s office that Friday, no one said anything to begin the meeting.
It only occurred to me later that she might have guessed what I’d say in advance.
“I think you know that yesterday was my first day on the job,” I responded. Then, telling him exactly what had transpired between me and Beatrice, I noticed a knowing expression come over his face.
“Is that correct?” Herb was asking me.
“How do you feel about the use of psychotropic medication in the treatment of psychiatric patients?” she asked.
Accompanying me there that first time, she said she’d introduce me to the staff. It was also an opportunity for me to get an impression of the patients in the large community room where most congregated during the day.
Sitting behind his desk, the head of the social work department didn’t ask me to have a seat. With a chair unoccupied to his left, he instead dove right in while I stood the entire time: “Beatrice told me you don’t approve of drug medication.”
Part Two: “Psychotherapy”
Her question caught me completely unprepared.
Because patients were not allowed out of the locked ward, all therapy sessions had to be done in the patients’ community room. My daily “How are you today?” greetings while attempting to launch sessions with Julia were always answered the same: “I’m not Julia. Julia’s dead. Can’t you see her? She’s lying on the floor right in front of you!”That, plus similarly unproductive interactions with other patients, made me realize that verbal psychotherapy was a waste of time. So I started wondering how else I could reach these people.
I can’t say I got along with Beatrice the rest of
Walking to the subway after work one day, I noticed a sign in the window of a bank inviting passers-by to come in and enjoy a free live classical music concert in the lobby. Having entered and found a comfortable seat, I wondered if the music might somehow help me connect with some intuitive insight about how to help Julia.
B y RON MERKIN
Part One: Drugs
my time at this hospital. But especially because it must have been hard for her, I appreciated the occasional compliments she eventually gave me about the strange, risky, alternative experiments I attempted in an effort to help patients assigned to me and sometimes to someone else.
(Continued on page 22)
To my surprise, it didn’t with patients I had a few years later at the hospital described above. For some reason I’ve never understood, patients in this second facility seemed so deeply entrenched in their hallucinations that they couldn’t communicate in what seemed to me standard everyday conversation. One example was Julia, the young woman Dr. Welbroth suggested I be assigned to in Part One.
Drugs vs. “Psychotherapy”: A True Story
COMMENTARY . 19Fall 2022
“They’re not here yet. Both usually come to the community room late,” she told me. Then, looking puzzled, she suggested I talk with the head of the social work department first. “He’s waiting for you.”
“Who do you think you are? Your first day at work on a psychiatric ward and you think you know better than our psychiatrists?” (I did, but thought maybe I’d better not mention that.)
“Oh, come on. You’re entitled to an opinion! It helps us get an idea about your leanings as part of our staff. I need to know how you feel about…”
John is a person I knew who would regularly go and lie horizontally across the line of the highway because he felt sure it would bring peace to a wartorn part of the world. The first time this happened, police were called; he was cuffed, put in the police van, and spent time in forensic services.
Calvin Moen, Brattleboro
Wilda White, Poultney
There are people who talk about when they’re well and they love themselves, but then when they’re not, when they’re in an altered state or psychotic, as I used to describe what I was going through, somehow, they don’t love that person who’s psychotic. Somehow that person was crazy. They other that person.
Today is a day of celebration and a day of joy for our community – which makes me a little uncomfortable. I do want to celebrate, and I do want to experience joy, and I also want to be real about how I’ve been feeling lately and how I feel often, which is exemplified by a lot of conversations that I’ve had recently. […]
I remember spending time at a mixed forensic psych ward in Springfield, Massachusetts, when working with the Wildflower Alliance years ago, and coming up to the unit shaking with rage often. So much of what clinical teams and courts forced upon people held there against their will was not only disrespectful, inhumane, and narrow-minded, but it also was so destructive towards the creative ways people were trying to survive.
But no, we love ourselves. We love ourselves whether crazy or well, whether manic or well. We love our whole selves, and you cannot separate that self, that person, from you.
When what had happened was I had experienced a whole lot of losses. The cascading subsequent losses in my life of a job, secure housing, and relationships; the need to use the food shelf and charity services; and being on disability for many years launched me into this work.
The second time, mental health was called, and he spent months in the hospital. Both times he lost his job, his house, most of his possessions, and his sense of who he was. But the third time it happened, a stranger courageously walked to the middle of the road, held up his hands to stop the traffic, bent down, grabbed his hand, and whispered, “Come on, mate – let’s go and have a cup of coffee,” which he did this time.
Psychiatric survivors, mad people, we have not necessarily just sat around and waited for the government to pass just laws. We haven’t sat around and waited for the mental health system to grant us dignity and choice. We have fought for it. We have marched for it, and we have built our own communities and our own support because we know how to take care of each other and ourselves on our own terms. […]
Sean Donovan, Northampton (MA)
Chris Hansen, Burlington
Voices from Mad Pride
What is going on in the Supreme Court? What is going on in the economy? And are we being protected? Are we going to be safe? Are we going to be OK? […]
It’s about seeing distress, extreme states, feelings, beliefs and behaviors, as normal responses to the madness in our world and nothing to be ashamed of. Some say the word namaste can be translated as “the divine in me honors the divine in you.” If the divine is all-encompassing, it also includes our madness and our extremes. So for Mad Pride, I say namaste: the mad person in me sees and honors the mad person in you and in all of us.
My chief qualification for being here is my own history of being seen as mad enough to lock up at a significant time in my life.
COMMENTARY20 Fall 2022
That’s about developing community-based alternatives to psychiatric hospitals and to the deeper clutches of the mental health system. It’s about connecting people with their lives and with their families and the world, their communities of choice, and teaching a framework through which to think about relationships that are focused on being present and connecting, no matter how difficult things are, rather than on “helping,” coercing, or “doing to.” […]
We’re going to show up. We’re going to bring food. We’re going to do childcare. We’re going to march in the streets. We’re going to plant gardens. We’re going to share skills and build family. And we’re going to hold each other. And that is our revolution, and it is already in motion, and it is not stopping.
When I wanted to start an organization that fought against discrimination against people with psychiatric histories and was deciding what to name it, I selected MadFreedom.
A lot of people in our community hate being called mad, hate being called crazy, hate being called “people with mental illness.” But I call myself mad not because it accurately describes who I am, just like none of the other labels accurately describe who I am, but when I call myself mad, I’m saying, whether or not I’m mad, I am a human being and I am entitled to my home, humanity, my dignity. [...]
There’s something to be learned there. And so the world is a challenging place. And it’s hard to figure out what to do, but what you can do, what every one of us can do – the most radical thing we can do – is to be who we are, is to say it loud: I’m mad, and I’m proud.
The bandshell at Burlington’s Battery Park hosted speakers from across the state on Mad Pride Day. Excerpts follow.
There was no hospital, no job loss, just a bunch of conversations, which were sometimes scary and sometimes difficult. But I tell this story because that’s the sort of connection I know is possible. So to me, Mad Pride is about being willing to own and celebrate my own madness and that of those in my community. […]
And I guess what brings me back to the assurance and the joy and the celebration is the fact that those of us that society has dismissed and displaced have so much to share with the world – especially now that more and more people are looking around and asking, “What do we do? What is coming? What is happening?” We have been there, and we’re going to do what we have always done.
I know for myself that, had somebody sat me down, asked what was going on and what I thought might have made a difference, I might have stayed connected to my community, kept my job, and my life would’ve been so different. Although I was in a lot of distress and I was scaring people, I was still able to communicate, and an outcome that was really different to what happened could have been created.
I know that this can happen because I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times. And I know of thousands for whom this has been possible. So for the past 16 years or so, intentional peer support has been my work.
In a training on non-violent direct action. I was in some years ago, I remember a trainer paraphrasing, maybe, that amazing lesbian Barbara Deming, saying that “Creativity is the opposite of violence.” There’s so many ways our current systems – policing, psychiatry, social services, and beyond – suppress not only people living their lives more fully, but often stifle human creativity, both for the people working in them, but especially for those within these systems.
Ten years ago, I went to Alyssum. Alyssum is a farmhouse retreat in Rochester, and anyone who is a Vermont resident and has emotions can go free. And there I said, “No more.” […]
Together we have power, and we’ll fight the fakeness of society telling us that we don’t, and we are celebrating all of that today.
On the contrary, he believed – and I did too – that he had the ability to connect with many people living or dead that no one else could see in the room that gave him support and advice. What is reality in these exchanges? And how is a single reality defined but with force and coercion so often, and why is that the case? […]
COMMENTARY . 21Fall 2022
There’s a lot of possibilities in life, and I am Jodi. I am nobody but Jodi, and Jodi hears voices, and that’s OK.
I put that under my yearbook picture in my senior graduating class, and I didn’t really live it. I hid my symptoms because I was ashamed. I blamed myself. I made myself inferior and I lived hiding.
The late and great transgender warrior and revolutionary communist Leslie Feinberg wrote years ago that “My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.” This reminds me, in times when there’s great chauvinism and greed in this country, that the work of bringing into being the world we want, alongside the wonder of experiencing Mad Pride, are not solitary acts.
One vivid memory I have is accompanying a friend there for a treatment team meeting. We were both eager for a clear account about what he needed to do for discharge. He’d been there for four years at that point. The first thing staff said was, “Have more reality-based conversations.” They clarified that this would mostly involve him admitting and accepting he was schizophrenic.
And so my book is called Living with the Neighbors as if it was just through a wall, just something that I happened to have. And so 10 years ago, I said, “I’m not gonna hide that I hear voices anymore. I’m not going curl up in bed and pretend that that I don’t have this real symptom.” [...]
MadFreedom founder Wilda
We have our collective experiences of often being told by society that we shouldn’t have families, have jobs, live on our own, that we need to be fixed and that our experiences are not normal. We come together, and we know that’s just not true.
This is of those moments of joy that I look for in my life, looking out and knowing, and seeing this action, that we have collective power.
We’re all here together. Right? I did speak this speech into a mirror earlier, and it didn’t feel as nice.
Poet e e cummings said, “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
VermontWhiteCenter
So I wrote a book, my memoir. […] It’s called Living with the Neighbors because every day I had neighbors in my life. Those are auditory hallucinations that I hear every day that I cannot get away from.
Jodi Girouard, South Burlington
for Independent Living Executive Director Sarah Launderville
Sarah Launderville, Williamstown
this year’s unsuccessful peer certification legislation asserted that “more than 46 states” had already created statewide peer certification programs. The Wildflower Alliance’s August newsletter acknowledged that, in Massachusetts, “it is inevitable that this issue will resurface, and we should be prepared with ideas of what an equitable, just, effective, and supportive Board might actually look like.”
Julia smiled – broadly, the first time I’d noticed that – as I explained the rules of this game the next morning. Still smiling, she was always exactly on time to deliver her greeting every hour (the time span I decided on). Not only that, she stopped hallucinating and didn’t begin again for the next three days. Noticing that, the psychiatrists decided to discharge her.
B y BRETT YATES
Proposed Peer Certification Board Rejected in Massachusetts
An even more outlandish effort that worked (at least until he too was discharged) concerned Edward. He spent almost every day reciting the Catholic “Hail Mary” prayer while pacing back and forth for hours (and I mean hours) in the hallway outside the rooms where patients slept. So, “descending to my stomach” again, I heard that, to reach this guy, I should imitate him by walking to his side while reciting over and over the same prayer he was repeating.
A few months earlier, Vermont’s peerled organizations had lamented their own legislature’s rejection of a bill that would have implemented a statewide program to certify peers. But when the bill in Massachusetts died, the Wildflower Alliance, the nonprofit that operates the peer respite Afiya in Northampton, celebrated.“Allthe time spent by advocates across (and sometimes even beyond) the state speaking up in hearings, calling, writing, or meeting with legislators, and signing petitions has been well spent!” the organization’s newsletter rejoiced.
I can’t remember how many “Hail Mary” walks back and forth I did before, finally looking at me, Edward erupted in laughter. It became so hysterical that he collapsed on the floor. A nurse came to see what was going
To her, the discrepancy “appears clearly discriminatory, carrying the implication that people in peer support roles do not and cannot have the expertise to self-govern.”
Massachusetts’s peer certification proposal appeared inside a 120-page omnibus health bill filed by Gov. Charlie Baker in March. The bill aimed, broadly, to control healthcare costs while also making investments in primary care and “behavioral health.”
Like Vermont’s S.195, S.2774 aimed to make peer supporters eligible for Medicaid reimbursement by establishing a certification program in compliance with federal standards. The legislation also attempted to address concerns raised about Massachusetts’s previous bill by increasing the number of peer supporters and recipients of peer support within the board’s membership.
Partly because Edward stopped his pacing after that, he, too, was discharged. Unfortunately, walking in Times Square a few weeks later, I saw him on his knees praying in front of a porn shop. He didn’t notice me, and I was late for an appointment, so I didn’t stop to talk with him.
I was aware of space shortages, but her and others’ discharges without any resolution to family problems and other external issues in their lives virtually guaranteed returns to hospitalization. Agreeing with me, the psychiatrists I spoke with about this discharged her anyway.
Part of this vision was a revival of a 2021 proposal for a board that would “establish specifications for the authorized training of certified peer workers”; “define by regulation the appropriate standards for education, core competencies, and experience necessary to qualify as a certified peer worker”; and “receive, review, approve or disapprove initial applications, renewals and reinstatement requests” by peers.
will fill each designated seat.” Davidow cited the “substantially different” ethics and strategies within different sections of the peer community and the risk that one school of thought might overshadow others.
The Massachusetts Peer Workforce Coalition (MAPWC) also opposed the bill, citing similar concerns –including, again, insufficient attention to the “unique characteristics of each peer role” and to the need for a wide range of trainings and standards that would reflect those already “carefully developed” by various types of peer supporters.
“Part of our work in peer support,” Davidow observed, “is to push back on overly clinicalized or one-size-fits-all ways of operating, to promote harm reduction, to use our wisdom gained from navigating our own experiences to support others, and to broaden the lens of how different experiences are understood.” The proposed peer certification board, she concluded, would only impede this work.
The Massachusetts General Court concluded its 2022 legislative session on July 31 without passing a bill that would have created a board of registration to certify the state’s peer support workers.
NEWS22 Fall 2022
she can find you.”
“He’son.ventilating,” I told her. “There’s nothing wrong. He doesn’t need medical attention.”
I can’t remember how long after this I quit my job at this psychiatric hospital. Never understanding all my reasons, I suspect that one was feeling let down by cases like Edward’s. As I look back, I can’t help wondering anyway whether it was the outlandish techniques themselves or the patients’ perceptions that someone actually had gone to the trouble of devising individualized methods to get through to them that accounted for the temporary “cures.” My attempts weren’t the same as prescribing drugs, drugs, and more drugs to patient upon patient, after all.
Finally, noting that “a substantial number of people working in peer support roles have come from poverty,” Davidow cautioned against “application, licensure, and re-licensure fees.” She worried that these would exacerbate an already “significant under representation of black and brown peer workers, as well as peer supporters with lengthier psychiatric histories.”
“Our overriding concern is that plans for the Board of Registration of Certified Peer Workers… lacked meaningful input from the multiple peer workforces this Board will be charged with overseeing,” MAPWC emphasized in a letter to legislators.InVermont,
“Our current health care system, including the Medicare payment system that finances health care insurance for older Americans, rewards providers that invest in premium priced technology and transactional specialty services,” Baker wrote. “What we need instead is a system that rewards providers and provider organizations that invest in a comprehensive set of physical and behavioral health services and that understand that population-based health management requires time and connection.”
DRUGS VS. “PSYCHOTHERAPY” • Continued from page 19
But might this be dangerous? Might he get angry and pounce on me? For some reason I decided to take a chance.
Making matters worse was “a lack of clarity in place as to which type of peer support role
Massachusetts State House, Boston, MA
Even so, in a letter to legislators, Wildflower Alliance Director Sera Davidow objected to the seats still reserved for “people in more clinical or administrative roles,” which would continue to put peers in the minority. For contrast, she pointed to similar bodies such as the Board of Registration of Psychologists, which “is dominated by people educated and working in that specific profession.”
B y BRETT YATES
These cases nevertheless end up within the purview of the Agency of Human Services (AHS). AHS Field Service Directors do not work directly with these adults but take steps to connect them with mental health services, addiction recovery resources, housing assistance, or medical care.
This verdict refers not just to an absence of funds with which to contract a service provider that would address self-neglect among younger adults but also to “insufficient” current funding for the Area Agencies on Aging.
The major jump occurred in 2020, when Vermonters informed APS of 417 cases of self-neglect. APS had recorded just 272 such notifications in 2019.
For decades, the United Way of Northwest Vermont (UWNWVT) has raised funds on behalf of mental health organizations in Chittenden, Franklin, and Grand Isle counties. In February, however, it announced a new effort to “become more directly involved in assisting change” in the state’s mental health system, according to Mental Health Initiative Director Steven Berbeco.
This data appears within a new report delivered to the legislature in July by DAIL in accordance with the Older Vermonters Act (2020), which established a Self-Neglect Working Group. The report notes that Vermont doubtless harbors far more cases of self-neglect than APS has documented, largely because “self-neglecting individuals often experience social isolation that limits exposure and opportunities for reporting by others.”
Moreover, when Vermonters do observe self-neglect, they don’t necessarily call APS, which in fact has “no statutory authority to respond to self-neglect,” as the report points out. Indeed, “Vermont does not have a singular or centralized system for identifying individuals engaged in selfneglecting behaviors.”
By the working group’s judgment, this may be part of the problem.
The Mental Health Initiative intends to function as a “network of networks,” as Berbeco put it, convening service providers, advocacy organizations, policymakers, and “Vermonters with lived experience” in order to “align existing resources, identify gaps in the mental health system of care, and create a shared agenda for next steps in improving resources that help all of us.”
Planning began at UWNWVT well before the public launch of the Mental Health Initiative. “My colleagues spent more than a year doing the necessary background work to ensure this collective impact project got off the ground and was structured well enough to sustain the efforts
Self-Neglect Cases on the Rise
The annual number of referrals for self-neglect received by Adult Protective Services (APS), a subdivision of the Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living (DAIL), increased by 50% between 2017 and 2021.
support self-neglecting 18-to-59-year-olds.
of more than a hundred community members,” Berbeco noted.
State law defines self-neglect as “an adult’s inability, due to physical or mental impairment or diminished capacity, to perform essential selfcare tasks,” such as obtaining food or managing finances. Vermont’s Area Agencies on Aging, a network of five publicly subsidized nonprofits, assess and aid individuals engaged in self-neglect in cases where the individual is 60 or older, but the state has not allocated any dedicated funding to
NEWS . 23Fall 2022 Share your journey to healing: counterpoint@ vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org, or Counterpoint, The Service Building, 128 Merchants Row, Suite 606, Rutland, VT 05701 Tell Your Story. Gain Strength from Sharing.
“The mental health system of care has always been imperfect in Vermont, and the pandemic has laid bare many of the fault lines in that system of care,” Berbeco said. “And it’s become ever more evident throughout the pandemic that mental healthcare is healthcare, as we all continue to experience stress, isolation, and uncertainty that impacts our mental health.”
Since then, three “action teams” have formed to address the Mental Health Initiative’s top priorities: workforce development, suicide prevention, and youth mental health. The largest of these, Youth Mental Health, held its first meetings in August, hosting “nearly two dozen attendees” by UWNWVT’s count.
“One of the many things I really enjoy about this work is connecting colleagues whose work overlaps with and intersects with the mental health system of care, so that when our action teams come together, they’re bringing together neighbors who may not have had a chance to talk together or work together on their common problems,” Berbeco observed. “I think it’s really exciting to see the connections that are developing from that and to participate in those conversations.”
In July, the Mental Health Initiative served as one of the sponsors of Mad Pride, a peer-organized event in Burlington. Berbeco also mentioned that Karim Chapman, the executive director of Vermont Psychiatric Survivors, had joined the Mental Health Initiative’s “core team” and its youth action team.
The other recommendations focus on standardization: developing a single statewide process for referrals, a universal screening tool for selfneglect, and shared training courses for providers. A single entity would oversee the whole system and collect data from each service provider.
For more information and a sign-up form, visit unitedwaynwvt.org/ mental-health-initiative.
Other psychiatric survivors and mental health consumers can also lend their voices. “We are actively seeking more participants on our action teams,” Berbeco urged.
The most important part of the puzzle appears to be money. “The Working Group has determined that Vermont cannot meaningfully improve its response to self-neglect without directing additional resources to that end,” the report concludes.
The report observes, for instance, that, in other states, “agencies responding to self-neglect have discretionary funds to use to resolve urgent client needs – from the paying of an electricity bill to the cleanup/ sanitization of a home. We recommend that [Vermont’s] agencies/ organizations designated to respond to self-neglect be provided with discretionary funds to address urgent client needs, as well. Sometimes the application of discretionary funds can prevent a potentially-resourceintensive circumstance from ballooning.”
One of the report’s six recommendations is for the state to issue a request for proposals with the aim of contracting an organization to provide direct services to self-neglecting individuals below age 60.
B y BRETT YATES
United Way of Northwest Vermont Mental Health Initiative Gets Going
or 800-273-TALK
Peer Support
CRISIS RESPITE Alyssum, 802-767-6000; information@alyssum.orgwww.alyssum.org;
BENNINGTON, Turning Point Center, 465 Main St; 802442-9700; turningpointbennington@comcast.net
RUTLAND AREA: 802-775-0195; cell: 802-310-5334
ADDISON COUNTY: Counseling Services of Addison County 802-388-7641
CHITTENDEN COUNTY: HOWARD CENTER, 300 Flynn Ave., Burlington, 05401; 802-488-6200
Pride Center of Vermont
FRANKLIN & GRAND ISLE: NORTHWESTERN COUNSELING AND SUPPORT SERVICES, 107 Fisher Pond Road, St. Albans, 05478; 802-524-6554
BURLINGTON, Turning Point Center of Chittenden County, 191 Bank St, 2nd floor; 802-861-3150; www. turningpointcentervt.org or GaryD@turningpointcen tervt.org
Trans Crisis Hotline
MIDDLEBURY, Turning Point Center of Addison Coun ty, 228 Maple St, Space 31B; 802-388-4249; tcacvt@ yahoo.com
Statewide support for families of children, youth or young adults in transition who are experiencing or at risk to expe rience emotional, behavioral or mental health challenges. 800-639-6071, 802-876-7021
Vermont Recovery Centers
NEWPORT AREA: 802-338-4162; cell: 802-399-6250
OUTREACH TEAM LEADER: 802-338-3022; cell: 802-881-5057
RUTLAND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES, 78 So. Main St., Rutland, 05701; 802-775-2381
RUTLAND, Turning Point Center, 141 State St; 802-7736010; turningpointcenterrutland@yahoo.com
Vermont Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health
BURLINGTON: Waystation/Wilson 802-864-7402 FREE TRANSPORTATION: Disabled American Veterans: Toll Free: 1-866-687-8387 X5394
TOLL-FREE HOTLINE (24/7) 1-888-607-8773
RUTLAND: Mental Health Services, 802-775-1000
Vermont Psychiatric Survivors Peer Support Groups
Some Peer Centers and Recovery Centers may be suspended during the COVID-19 crisis. Call to check current schedules.
Connections Peer Support Groups
NATIONALpeer-support-groups/ALLIANCEON
FRANKLIN AND GRAND ISLE COUNTIES: Northwestern Counseling and Support Services, 802-524-6554; 800-834-7793
WILLISTON AREA: 802-879-1385; cell: 802-734-2123
NAMI is providing its support groups by various alternative means during the pandemic. All meetings are facilitated by trained NAMI peers individuals with mental health conditions who are at a good place in their recovery journey and want to help other peers get to a good place in their recovery. For more specific information, including on a new Central Vermont group, go to namivt.org/support/
BENNINGTON AREA: 802-442-2980; cell: 802-310-5391
BERLIN AREA: 802-224-7108; cell: 802-399-6135
VPS is a membership organization providing peer support, outreach, advocacy and education 128 Merchants Row, Suite 606, Rutland, VT 05701
ST. JOHNSBURY, Kingdom Recovery Center, 297 Sum mer St; 802-751-8520; c.boyd@stjkrc.org; j.keough@ stjkrc.org; www.kingdomrecoverycenter.com
Support Group locations on web: www.biavt.org; or email: support1@biavt.org; Toll Free Line: 877-856-1772
VERMONT SUPPORT LINE (STATEWIDE): 833-888-2557; 24 hours, 365 days [833-VT-TALKS] By call or text
Counterpoint publishes this resource directory to allow readers to seek out choices for support. Counterpoint has not reviewed or evaluated the quality or biases of these resources, and makes no representation about their value for any individual.
Peer Centers & Employment Support
PEER PLUS (STATEWIDE): 802-595-9829; 7 days/wk, 6-9 p.m.
JERICHO AREA: 802-899-5291; cell: 802-310-0631
Veterans’ Services
The Trevor Lifeline now at 866-488-7386. TrevorTextAvailable on Fridays (4-8 p.m.). Text the word “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200. Standard text messaging rates.
BRATTLEBORO, Turning Point Center of Windham Coun ty, 39 Elm St.; 802-257-5600; tpwc.1@hotmail.com
OUTPATIENT CLINICS: Bennington: 802-447-6913; Brattle boro: 802-251-2200; Burlington Lakeside Clinic: 802-6577000; Newport: 802-334-9777; Rutland: 802-772-2300
Vermont Veterans Outreach
The Trans Lifeline (dedicated to the trans population) can be reached at 877-565-8860.
VERMONT PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVORS OUTREACH AND PATIENT REPRESENTATIVES (800) 475-4907 info@vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org
CHITTENDEN COUNTY: Howard Center 802-488-7777
VET CENTERS: (Burlington) 802-862-1806; (White River Jnct) 802-295-2908
RUTLAND: Open Door Mission 802-775-5661; Transi tional Residence: Dodge House, 802-775-6772
HOMELESS PROGRAM COORDINATOR: 802-742-3291
VA HOSPITAL: Toll Free 1-866-687-8387
WWW.VTRECOVERYNETWORK.ORG
LGBTQ Individuals with Disabilities Social and Sup port: Connections and support around coming out, socializing, employment challenges, safe sex, self-advoca cy. During COVID restrictions, call (802) 860-7812
Samaritans 877-870-HOPEHotline(4673)
www.MakeTheConnection.net
VA Mental Health Services
PATHWAYS VERMONT COMMUNITY CENTER, 279 North Winooski Avenue, Burlington, 888-492-8218 ext 300; www.facebook.com/PathwaysVTCommunityCenter; our-programs/pvccwww.pathwaysvermont.org/what-we-do/
24/7 confidential support
MORRISVILLE, North Central Vermont Recovery Cen ter, 275 Brooklyn St., 802-851-8120; recovery@ncvrc. com
WASHINGTON COUNTY: Mental Health Services, 802-229-0591
LAMOILLE COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES, 72 Harrel Street, Morrisville, 05661; 802-888-5026
SPRINGFIELD, Turning Point Recovery Center of Spring field, 7 Morgan St., 802-885-4668; spfldturningpoint@ gmail.com
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Upper Valley Turning Point, 200 Olcott Dr; 802-295-5206; mhelijas@secondwindfound.orgsecondwindfound.org;
UNITED COUNSELING SERVICE OF BENNINGTON COUNTY, PO Box 588, Ledge Hill Dr., Bennington, 05201; 802-4425491
ORANGE COUNTY: CLARA MARTIN CENTER, 11 Main St., Randolph, 05060-0167; 802-728-4466
SURVIVOR PEER SERVICES
WHITE RIVER AREA: 802-295-7921; cell: 802-881-6232
Web site sponsored by The Department of Veterans Affairs with testimonials by veterans to help connect with the experiences of other veterans, and with infor mation and resources to help transition from service, face health issues, or navigate daily life as a civilian.
Vermont Veterans Services (VVS) program for homeless veterans with very low income, call 802-656-3232.
NORTHEAST KINGDOM HUMAN SERVICES, 181 Crawford Road, Derby; 802-334-6744; 800-696-4979, 2225 Port land St., St. Johnsbury; 802-748-3181; 800-649-0118
Resources Directory24
WARM LINES
BENNINGTON COUNTY: United Counseling Service, 802442-5491; (Manchester) 802-362-3950
Homeless?
Soteria House, information and online application at our-programs/soteria/www.pathwaysvermont.org/what-we-do/orcallPathwaysVermontIntakeLine,888-492-8212,ext.140
BARRE, Turning Point Center of Central Vermont, 489 N. Main St.; 479-7373; tpccvbarre@gmail.com
MENTAL ILLNESS-VT (NAMI-VT): 802-876-7949 x101, or 800-639-6480; 600 Blair Park Road, Suite 301, Williston, 05495; www.namivt.org; info@ namivt.org
Fall 2022
ST. ALBANS, Turning Point of Franklin County, 182 Lake St; 802-782-8454; tpfcdirection@gmail.com
HOSPITALIZATION ALTERNATIVE
NATIONAL PREVENTIONSUICIDELIFELINECALL“988”
Crisis Text Line
WINDHAM AND WINDSOR COUNTIES: HEALTH CARE AND REHABILITATION SERVICES OF SOUTHEASTERN VERMONT, 390 River Street, Springfield, 05156; 886-4500; 51 Fair view St., Brattleboro, 05301, 802-254-6028; 49 School St., Hartford, 05047, 802-295-3031
DBT Peer Group
BRATTLEBORO: Morningside 802-257-0066
COLCHESTER AREA: 802-338-3078; cell: 802-310-5743
www.vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.org802-775-6834
24-Hour Crisis Lines: Involuntary Custody Screening
Peer-run skills group. Sundays, 4 p.m.; 1 Mineral St, Spring field (The Whitcomb Building). tinyurl.com/PeerDBTVT
VERGENNES AREA: 802-877-2356; cell: 802-881-6680
COUNSELING SERVICE OF ADDISON COUNTY, 89 Main St., Middlebury, 05753; 802-388-6751
ORANGE COUNTY: Clara Martin, 800-639-6360
Brain Injury Association
LGBTQ Youth Crisis Hotline:
WINDHAM,WINDSOR COUNTIES: Health Care and Rehabili tation Services, 800-622-4235
ESSEX, CALEDONIA AND ORLEANS: Northeast Kingdom Human Services 800-696-4979
ENOSBURG AREA: 802-933-2166; cell: 802-399-6068
WASHINGTON COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES, 9 Heaton St., Montpelier, 05601; 802-229-6328
Please contact us if your organization’s information counterpoint@vermontpsychiatricsurvivors.orgchanges:
Public Community Mental Health
Around-the-clock help via text: 741741 for a reply explaining the ground rules; message routed to a trained counselor.
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC: Toll Free 1-866-687-8387 Ext 6132
ANOTHER WAY, 125 Barre St, Montpelier, 802-2290920; info@anotherwayvt.org; www.anotherwayvt. org; see website for events calendar.
BRADFORD AREA: 802-222-4824; cell: 802-734-2282
LAMOILLE COUNTY: Lamoille County Mental Health, Week days 8 a.m.-4 p.m. 802-888-4914; Nights and weekends 802-888-4231