The telephone trumps

The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over the obstructing the truck and noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over obstructing the truck and the noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).

Combining Determinism and Self-organization

My understanding is that the human body is optimitzed for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, install a balance to the auto-response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction (suffering) by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and on which it depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

Safety and Protection in Santa Cruz

Community health is about optimal functioning - do we plan to create that by removing those we don’t consider optimal?

How can removing liberty help health? What kind of psychiatric health do bars and locks feed?

We are really talking about illness, disease, brains, a medical model that has been proved inadequate, supplanted by including the social determinants, ...

Protect whom? From what?

Protect Santa Cruz residents from people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions, suggest safety by rejecting a group of people with psychiatric disabilities, claim to protect for rare harms by instead confining people who are more often themselves victims.

Or keep people with psychiatric diagnoses safe from their own madness, deprive them of the chance to learn the skills to manage themselves, teach them they are helpless over themselves and must be locked.

That’s not safety. That’s rhetoric.

Selecting against us, distancing to keep us as far away as you can, naming a lock-up a healthy facility, naming health instead of illness

What can be healthy about locking people up? Wwhat are we pretending and not saying?

Building a new lockup might divert attention from the current failure intention and construction is not results or accountability. Do you expect a building to by proxy for results?

Entropy

Entropy is so high, the moment is so chaotic and so full of motion that it is as unperceivable by the human eye so it seems empty

When the disorder begins to bump into itself there becomes a tipping point, critical mass, popping off - old system is less full, calmer; new system is much less full, calmer because less stuff in more space. Self-organizing begins and creates order and disorder at the same time, the disorderly outliers. And the orderly gets bigger and bigger, power laws, and topple of their own weight/size/greed thus leading to more disorder.

Whose life?

Stopped short (in her explorations) by their expectations ...

Hope and a unified theory

My understanding is that the human body is optimitzed for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, balance to on response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

People Who and Human Rights

From the perspective of the UN Universal Periodic Review, there are bold and there are subtle indignities.

When the United States signs the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities we must as well honor its careful crafting. For the wants of people with psychiatric diagnoses are diluted by so many others who claim to be stakeholders, who want to share, really direct, instead of support our decision making.

But the most sly, the most subtle deprivation is that I’m stripped of responsibilities, and that deprivation is based on my diagnosis of disability. I’m encouraged to only join low-stress activities, to ask for help to manage myself, and at the extreme I’m not allowed to vote or to sign contracts. Rights have to do with liberty, and mine can be curtailed. Duties have to do with dignity; but I’m asked for few.

We people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions are consistently denied many of the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that it seems those rights don’t fully attach to us, that we are invisible, or an exception, a yes, but ...

There is no but. The rights of the UDHR are fundamental. They are not entitlements; they are not reversible. They are meant to include me too.

So, what to do?

Education and access.

In order to exercise my rights I need to know what they are. Continue the broadband initiative and create electronic accessibility for full inclusion in the knowledge society. Require transparency, including industry-funded health non-profits and web sites. Emphasize critical thinking starting in grade school.

For my disability in particular, the psychiatric diagnostic manual is being revised. Amidst controversy. The “Clinical tensions mask social and political ones.” “As if to demonstrate the point that the creation of mental illness categories remains as much a social and cultural endeavor as a scientific process, the APA is soliciting input from the public [for DSM-V].

We change the paradigm by changing the language. Not medical. Not criminal. Words do matter. Use words that truly presume “wellness, response-ability and the value of the person’s interpretation of their own experiences”

Include me too.

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Citations:

Jonathan Metzel, Protest Psychosis, 2009. Beacon Press, Boston, p 192.

Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, 2010. Free Press, p 252.

http://www.peoplewho.org/documents/mediaguidelines.htm

http://peoplewho.org/documents/wordsmatter.htm

http://www.mentalhealthpeers.com