Pathetic

I just got my disability tax statement, which says how much I got in benefits last year. It's just over $6000. That's pathetic. I got forced into the mental health system very quickly when young when a student at OSU. At that point, I was told by a Benton County mental health caseworker that I could forget about having a life, about holding a job ever again, about marrying and having children, about finishing college. She told me my life was over as I knew it. She went on to say the psyche drugs at least would make me have a better life. Well, that was a big fat huge lie. There would follow lies compounded upon lies, forced treatment from crazy addicted shrinks and painful weekly visits with a caseworker her clients, including myself, dubbed "The Ice Princess".

Be careful who you listen to.

The next three decades of my life I'd love to forget. Drama, misery, pain and suffering, abuse, the suicides of nine friends. I suppose the only good part about the electro shock therapy I received at OSH is it wiped out huge sections of my memory. It also gave me headaches that made me want to tear my skin off and, yay, finally the shock doctor, also an addict, got fired, but way after I left those halls of horror. The state hired him either without checking his background (he'd lost his license in at least two states) or, they didn't care they'd hired a practising addict to shock the hell out of people's brains. I reported him to the powers that be then, because of his behavior, and was told he was not an alcoholic or addict and that the reason he came to work with his face all puffy and swollen and his hands shaking was because he had a nervous disorder. Yeah right.

Anyhow, all the friends who killed themselves were in the mental health system and living the unlovely life of forced treatment. In forced psychiatric treatment, you get no choices. You are often on seven to nine different psyche drugs, which, if you weren't mentally ill before, they would make you crazy with the extreme side affects. Then you were stuffed into some low income hotel to rot, mentally and physically. I called this "the drug and stuff" policy.

The state just released a report citing mortality rates of those in mental health treatment. I guess you can expect a life cut short by a couple of decades if you seek help, primarily due to diseases often induced as side affects of those dangerous psyche drugs/unhealthy lifestyles in treatment (i.e. isolation, boredom, inactivity, purposelessness) or death from the side affects of the drugs themselves.

What does the state plan to do? Form a committee, of course, and study the issue.

Well common sense alone will tell a person what is wrong with the mental health system. Shrinks and sometimes regular doctors push drugs, tons of them, rather than a healthy approach to mental health treatment, including socialization, work, fun, exercise, proper diet. Instead, a client is urged solely to take those destructive drugs and all symptoms are attributed to not taking the drugs, instead of common sense causes or the drugs themseleves.

I finally left mental health treatment, after the horrendous abuse beating by staff that occurred at Portland Adventist Hospital, on their psyche ward, just before Christmas in 1998. I still bear the scars of that beating, namely, a metal plate in my neck. No one was ever charged with a crime for altering my life forever. The usual. I had also discovered over the course of those horrendous decades that there really isn't equality of justice or liberty in our country. In 2001, I completely left mental health treatment. Strangely, I immediately improved.

I was as shocked as anyone. I have my issues that stem from way too much abuse, way too little justice and way too much isolation. But I'm still alive at least. Most of my friends never escaped and died in the system. By the score.

And now I think about trying to get something for me. I see how very little I got last year, in disability, and I wonder, could I do better now, could I get a job of some sort.

I tried once to find something I could do that would produce a living wage. I was told by an LBCC job counselor not to bother applying for the nursing program. She didn't know if they'd let me in but said the state would never grant a license to someone who had been committed.

I then tried various other programs, all requiring physical strength. I didn't know how my neck plate would do in other programs where arms overhead or neck tilting was required. I can't do those physical jobs anymore. So I gave up trying to find a short program of education that would produce results in a living wage job.

I'm in my mid fifties and lack any skills. My greatest weaknesses for employment are I lack ability to deal with people and my spinal cord problems that disallow both long term standing in place or sitting. My greatest strengths are intelligence and creativity.

I do not have a resume and couldn't create one, not without lying severely, which can come back to haunt you. Fact is, I did absolutely nothing for almost three decades, the lost decades I call them, but become a victim of the state's forced psychiatric treatment. Why? Because my dad abused me as a child and I was lost when I hit the world.

I've kind of admired those who just make up their credentials, because sometimes street and life experience create a far more valuable employee than books and education ever could. Stories like "The Pretender" have always intrigued me.

I've tried to get jobs over the years, especially since I began finally meeting people out trapping their cats. Anyhow, being over 50 probably won't help. But, nonetheless, I'm on the hunt for a job that pays at least enough so I won't end up living in a car.