YOU SO CRAZY?

Aloha 2u,
Tucson on 2nd thot.
SOUL MATE and i have been crip activists for almost 20 years now since Ed Roberts,found of CIL died
. yet we were at wits end when my youngest  extremely bipolar/Aspergers son came to live with us.
now we live in a Senior Mobile Home park (estate-sic) and there is a 3 month limit of visitors.
one of our nabes with a dottir and child escaping an abusive situ was almost Evicted for doing so,it has something to do with fedgov loans and some tight asses who live here.

anyway we were novices when it came to meeting mental health issues and our prickly son M was of lil to no help...Sigh.luckily SM knew someone in her union who worked with the local homeless population and we pulled a few strings..and got him in trouble in the process.

1.identify the need
or son M has been in and out of nuthouses upstate and had been arrested
numerous times after he was aged out of foster care at 18. no problem there.
2. you have to be homeless..
time for Tough Love, we lockt him out of the house and called the cops.
this was after i'd driven him around to the local peer support groups,
free kitchens and homeless shelters..all of which failed to impress the gravity of the situ.
3.resistance is futile
after one coll summer nite on a park bench he returned and was ready to accept being homeless.
i drove him there ASAP.
4.community resources
NAMI  NATIONAL ASSOCIATION for MENTAL ILLNESS
(see website) has a peer support group and housing here, there is a long waiting list.
but they did offer a course in LIFE SKILLS
which our son stopped going to cuz
"someone looked at me funny"???
5. a good homeless shelter
there is a fedgov subsidy for the local shelter,
so it has survived and expanded despite locla county cuts.
the Intake process..they feed you then take you to a local church
to shit,shower and shave..if you want to.
if you can maintain being drug free you can move into homeless housing for 18 months and get mandatory therapy as well as experiencing Life Skills with your roommates.
we visited the small bungalow with five rooms and a fully equipped kitchen, we gave him an old PC we had laying around and he got a cheap color TV from the nearby Goodwill and he seemed content.rent was deducted from his SSI.
he bitched that he could not live on $10 a day...until
we pointed out that each of us had worked,paid rent and eaten
on $1 a day when we were his age, tis true. Sigh.
we also told him at least 5 spots to eat cheap or free in Downtown S'Cruz.
one way i saw him windmilling his arms in a "crazy" fashion
en route to his mental health appointment and
also encountered him in the same lobby later in the week.
6.transition out
our son hooked up with Americorps (fedgov domestic Peace Corps)
which trained him to be a Nursing Assitsant and he is now gainfully employed somewhere in Uta,yes Utah where blax are considered the spawn of Stan bearing the balck skin Mark of Cain (they use a different Bible that usual).other than a sociopath i cannot imagine anyone more ill suite for that position.
 IT IS WHAT IT IS...Sigh.

7.independence ..........play it as it lays (also an xlnt novel  & so so movie about mental illness)

BTW on a recent radio show NAMI has rated Arizona as The Worst State in the USA
for Mental Illness Care, that includes the Bible Belt Deep South..sigh. so given the overheated rhetoric so common nowadays, something like this was probably inevitable.
in the USA ther are 90 guns for every 100 peeps, the highest average on the planet,
yet 2nd Amendment rights and ominous black helicopters
are still the cry of the land HUGE HUGE SIGH.

"Toleration is good for all,or it is good for none." Edmund Burke 


sane peace
namaste
mega