Albany Forensic Psyche Group Home

There's been huge controversy even a large protest in a residential district in Albany, where a contractor for the state, that provides mental health services, including group homes for forensic psyche patients, has bought a house they intend to use to house five forensic psyche patients.

After seeing the massive protests and anger this has sparked, I wrote a letter to the editor. I suppose the tongue in cheek nature of the letter, did not come across. It was also severely edited.

What I wanted to get across was: you're not safe anywhere, really, in Albany; you don't even know, if someone is labeled a mental, if they deserve such a label, more say than your average joe blow citizen, and, finally, that you can't trust the psyche system or state to monitor anything.

I wrote the letter too hurriedly. Besides, sarcasm really doesn't come through well in word.

So what is up with this state contractor repeatedly buying houses in heavily middle class residential districts to use as group homes? They spark everywhere exactly what is happening in Albany. In the end, they never locate the group home in that neighborhood and the house is sold. In Portland, the house this contractor bought was eventually, after protests, bought by the city or county. So I begin to wonder sometimes, if they use this as a ploy, and make money when the house is sold.

Could they be that stupid? To try to locate a group home in a middle class neighborhood on a cul de sac? BEcause that's dumbshit stuff. It will only harm those people, trying to integrate back into society. Middle class people don't want anybody "different" in their neighborhoods and they are going to automatically fear for their children when the words "forensic psyche patient" is used.

When the state list of sex offenders first came out, I typed in my Albany address and found that three sex offenders live within a few blocks of me.

I once knew an angry woman on 5th Street in Corvallis. She had over 100 cats. She was in continuous wars with neighbors, all judged sane. They'd come scream at her. She'd scream at them. One neighbor and his wife for some reason thought her backyard should be communal property, like a neighborhood park. First they allegedly poisoned one of her cats or dogs, then allegedly stole one. Once they came over in their pajamas to scream at her or something and she hosed them down, then showed off in glee a photo she snapped of their shocked faces. Pajama clad and getting soaked with a garden hose on her property. The guy across the street, a professional, allegedly slashed her tires, in the ongoing hatred of that neighborhood. I called it the 5th Street War Zone.

The sanest quietest people on the block? The ones in the mental group home on the corner. It was funny as hell.

Most people have little knowledge of what goes on in the mental health system. There are some areas, that have mental health courts, and if the cops or DA think a person needs treatment, whether it's even just for depression, they can pressure a person into mental health court, where a person pleads innocent by insanity for the most minor of offenses, say open container. These folks then, unfortunately, become a "forensic patient", and sometimes languish in mental hospitals, that are basically horrendous warehouses, for years upon years. They can never shake these destructive labels.

Nothing changes unless it comes under a spotlight. People do not want light on what goes on in the mental health system, because it might need changed and change is so damn hard, you know.

But, I still wonder why this contractor with the state, for mental health services, repeats this behavior, of buying houses for group homes in middle class kid heavy cul de sacs, when they know it will spark protests and fear. Why do they do it? Are they stupid? Or is there some underlying financial incentive for such behavior?

The people who bought the house who would be backyard to backyard to the group home need to sue their realitor. And they need to wait. My guess is the group home plans will suddenly disappear.