Ward Stories

Ward Stories
Organized by Dan Frey, Editor in Chief
Four poets are featured in this Winter 2019 edition of Ward Stories. Ayesha, Louie Morano, Eva Tortora and Glenn Slaby have their poems featured below which describe lost loved ones, religious themes, and our soul’s journey. Enjoy!

Poem for my Grandfather
By Ayesha

I remember you Randy.
You were Randolph Nicholson.
A handsome man who, like my grandmother, remind me of alcoholic drinks and celebration music
Nat King Cole CDs I played at Christmas-time and Kwanzaa remind me of you.
The holiday season is almost here again 
I celebrate with alcoholic drinks a few times a year. A cold glass of wine or maybe a wine cooler. Miss you grandpa. 
I’m going to be 37 in January! I get carded all the time. 
I show my ID. I look 25.
I never want to abuse alcohol so I stick to planning my wedding.
Every time I meet a nice man I say “marry me” before we go further.
I need a commitment we can both honor before having sex.
I’m shining bright now.
I’m a poet, a blogger, a memoirist, a mentor and a granddaughter who remembers you all the time.
I thought of you today.

Work Will Seem Like Play 
By Louie Morano

Keep busy and stay active.
It’s a good way to live.
Believe in God and follow him
and you will surely win.

Be grateful for your blessings,
For small and big things.
It will make you happy and
you will feel free.

Love one another as Jesus said.
Say a prayer before you go to bed.
Sunshine will fill your day
and work will seem like play.

Key of Love
By Eva Tortora

And for all my imperfections
I have you
glorious you
to share my tune
to tune me to
the key of love
to the angels’ chorus 
up above
you to show
me how to sing
when storms don’t come
and hope can ring
you, you
glorious you
when I’m flying
you're beneath me in truth
thank you
for all the times
I could not see
it was your wings
that carried me
Bless you
my honored friend
this is only the beginning
and far from the end
and for all my imperfections
you glittered like gold
in truth and hope
it's you that I hold
inside my heart forever....

Soul’s Reach
By Glenn Slaby

Each of us stands alone
On the shoreline viewing
Eternity.

All us of stand together
On the edge of life
Temporarily.

Not knowing tomorrow.
Viewing life’s limited vision
But seeing more.

Because our minds see less
Our soul reaches out deeper.
Like a blind man’s hearing.

Our souls are
More Complete.
Because of our imperfection.

Promoting Tenant Advisory Groups in Supportive Housing

Promoting Tenant Advisory Groups in Supportive Housing
By Carla Rabinowitz, Advocacy Coordinator at Community Access and Nicole Bramstedt, former Director of Policy at Urban Pathways
Another Effort to Empower Individuals in Their Own Communities
The Supportive Housing approach recognizes the inherent dignity in all people. Low-income tenants and people with mental health conditions who were formerly homeless are offered an affordable apartment combined with voluntary supports and services that can help increase self-determination. As the Supportive Housing model grows in New York and the country, tenant engagement and empowerment is recognized as a factor in maintaining secure and thriving residences.
Tenant Advisory Groups are a promising initiative taking hold in New York City Supportive Housing, and may be a new scalable approach to encouraging self-advocacy and recovery. In Tenant Advisory Groups, tenants meet to exchange experiences, propose solutions and initiatives, and provide feedback to management regarding issues in their residence. This setting encourages tenants to advocate for their needs and collaborate on meaningful decisions about their home-life and community. Creating an advisory relationship between tenants and staff also builds trust and mutuality, which can be an important foundation for people as they recover from the disempowerment they experienced while homeless. In addition, it strengthens tenants’ communication and leadership skills, as well as relationships with neighbors and community members.
Community Access, a 44-year-old nonprofit that empowers mental health recipients by providing quality housing and employment services, created a tenant advisory council known as the Program Participant Advisory Group (PPAG) over four years ago. One of the first in New York City, the tenants in this Advisory Group designed several initiatives including a program that offers small grants to tenant applicants trying to regain employment. Grant awardees have completed courses in such skills as massage therapy and medical billing, and have obtained licenses and certificates for commercial driving, food handling, and more. PPAG also supports the agency in quality assurance by helping administer the client satisfaction surveys for Community Access, which helps ensure tenants completing the surveys feel free to express their anonymous concerns. Community Access’ PPAG also initiated a monthly karaoke event. PPAG brings their own karaoke equipment to a different Community Access building each month and facilitates an event where tenants and staff share songs and build community. While people are there, information about other events and community resources are shared. Tenants travel from all over the city to different buildings, getting to know new neighborhoods and meet other tenants. These are some of the most well attended events in the agency, in part because they were started and are run by the tenants themselves.
Urban Pathways—a 43-year-old social services and supportive housing provider for homeless single adults in the New York metropolitan area—also has robust tenant advisory group efforts. Each transitional and permanent housing residence holds a regularly occurring self-advocacy group where individuals address issues in the residence and improve their self-advocacy skills. In addition, Urban Pathways holds a twice-monthly Thursday night issue-based advocacy group for current and former clients to become better issue-based advocates. Recent speakers include the Deputy Chief of Staff to City Council Speaker Corey Johnson as well as the Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly Member Andrew Hevesi on the role of the city and state governments in advocacy.
A Tenant Advisory Group not only helps Supportive Housing tenants, however; the approach also enhances the residence itself. In particular, the process helps ensure issues in the residence are addressed by residence staff and senior leadership in a way that respects the priorities and preferences of the tenants. Advisory Group members become trusted peers in each residence, and can represent the needs of neighbors who don’t feel motivated to self-advocate. The elected tenant leaders also provide a valuable and personal perspective to staff that they cannot access otherwise.
In this framework of engaging and empowering supportive housing tenants, a planning group held a Tenant Advisory Forum at Fountain House at 425 West 47th Street in Manhattan. The forum—the first in a series—focused on starting a Tenant Advisory Group and empowering tenant advocacy in Supportive Housing. Supportive Housing providers currently doing tenant advisory work—Community Access, Urban Pathways, and Breaking Ground—discussed barriers to creating tenant advisory groups, provided examples of best practices, and suggested resources for Supportive Housing providers interested in establishing groups.
In our next Forum in the Bronx there will be more audience question and answer sessions and chances to network. There will be new speakers and new ideas. Bring your questions and thoughts, and as you learn from us we will learn from you. Please just then say to join the planning group working on creating citywide tenant advisory councils reach out to Carla at crabinowitz@communityaccess.org 

Pullout: “…the process helps ensure issues in the residence are addressed by residence staff and senior leadership in a way that respects the priorities and preferences of the tenants.”

From Locked Wards to Locked Cells

From Locked Wards to Locked Cells
By Carl Blumenthal
New Book on Mental Illness Behind Bars
We all know jails and prisons—not hospitals—are the largest providers of psychiatric care in the U.S. And that folks with mental illness are treated like s__t in these places. The truth is punishment for crime and recovery from mental illness mix as badly as a cocktail of psychotropic medication.
So why should we read Alicia Roth’s new book, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness? 
There are so many ways that penal institutions fail our peers, you need a spreadsheet to keep track of them. Roth is the kind of investigative reporter who balances statistics, laws, policies, and history with how these abstractions reflect the messed-up lives of real human beings. 
There is Bryan Anderson, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, who spends his life savings helping people because God tells him to. When the voice says, “You’ve got to blind yourself,” Anderson gouges out his eyes while in jail. Miraculously, he becomes a peer counselor despite his trials and tribulations.
Troubled by mental illness since age six, Jamie Wallace murdered his mother at 16 and killed himself in prison at 24. According to Roth, hospitals, courts, and prisons all failed him. 
Kyle Muhammad was arrested 18 times in 35 years and hospitalized even more. “One gets the impression that every time he finds some stability in his life—a job, an apartment, a community-based treatment program that works—his illness is once again neglected, or he has a run-in with the law, and he ends up in the hospital or jail—or both.” 
Twenty-three years in solitary confinement hugely messed up Brian Nelson’s head. The prison medicated some of his symptoms but never recognized how severe his PTSD was. When he's finally released after a lawsuit over prison conditions, Nelson finds that the only psychiatrist who understand him works with victims of torture. 
At 16 Keith Vidal was so depressed his mother feared he would harm himself. When he picked up a screwdriver, she called the police to prevent that from happening. Two officers arrived and wrestled him to the ground. Unfortunately, this tactic didn't satisfy a third cop who shot Keith to death.
These stark tales are part of a larger, more complicated story of living with mental illness behind bars. Complicated, because Roth is a reporter obligated to understand everyone's point of view.
As a sympathetic interviewer she gains the confidence of prisoners and corrections officials alike. Maybe that's why she doesn't witness any abuse. Neither between guards and prisoners or among prisoners themselves. Nevertheless, she can’t ignore the reality that the chances of mental health recovery and prison reform are as likely as inmates and guards walking into a Hollywood sunset holding hands. 
Ultimately, Roth’s view of what prisons look like is a hive of cells where all the bees are dysfunctional. Given how little control inmates have over their minds and bodies, she’s fascinated by the many forms of protest; especially the ingenious ways they mess up the guards and their cells with their feces.
Roth discovers the ultimate purpose of mental healthcare is to make prisoners well enough to survive their incarceration, and the resources to accomplish even this rarely exist. She is skeptical that improved inpatient units in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York jails she visits will ever serve more than a fraction of the sickest inmates. 
Thus, to offer the reader some hope, Roth turns her attention to breaking the link between mental illness and crime before it's too late. She touts crisis centers, where those arrested get help before arraignment; crisis intervention training (CIT) for police to reduce conflict with those they call “emotionally disturbed persons”; mental health and drug courts to divert low-level offenders to treatment; and forensic assertive community treatment (FACT) for keeping people at home rather than in jail.
Alicia Roth is a keen observer, sympathetic interviewer, and dogged researcher. She recognizes the bind corrections officials, mental health care providers, and inmates with mental illness are caught in. Why? Because society prefers to keep all actors in this tragedy far off the stage of “normal” life. But Roth is still an outsider no matter how concerned. 
On Rikers Island, she meets Dr. Elizabeth Ford, once the head of Bellevue Hospital’s prison psychiatric ward, and now mental health director of the jail. In a recent City Voices review of Ford’s book (in the summer 2018 edition) about her time at Bellevue, I described what an adept observer and devoted practitioner she is. Ford notes every detail of what happens on the unit and still manages to do the best for her patients against overwhelming odds.
In her next book about the prison-hospital complex, I hope Alicia Roth will profile more folks doing good inside and out of those forbidding walls.

Pullout: “These stark tales are part of a larger, more complicated story of living with mental illness behind bars…the chances of mental health recovery and prison reform are as likely as inmates and guards walking into a Hollywood sunset holding hands.”

Ward Stories: Poetry

Ward Stories
Organized by Dan Frey, Editor in Chief
Four poets are featured in this Summer 2018 edition of Ward Stories. The themes discussed in these poems reflect some of the experiences felt throughout the mental health community: falling through the cracks, getting back up, healing yourself, a friend’s betrayal and mood swings. 

Escape
By J. David Scott

Your floor is my floor
Having walked upon the cracks
And fallen through where I now linger,
I often look up and wonder what it's like
To never use my feet again,
To never ever run again,
Just to fly away.

The Every Day Healer
By Gracelynn

I heal myself 
Not because I received a prestigious degree
Or trained with the yogis and great healers of the world
But by the innate healing ability all of us possess
To Every Day
Bring my mind, my heart, my body
To a place of presence
To a place of harmony with the Divine
Of which we are all a part.
To a place of Love.
Day by day
I choose to heal
And become Health itself. 

Untitled
By Anna Santacroce

Sister forsythia. Dichotomous dicot flower.
Psychotic psychiatric flower.
Schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type).
I live alone.
I often write.

For my friend with megalomania:
I hope for the best for you.

I often wonder if you remember your words and actions,
Adverse to the lying.

I don't have the same illness.
I must confess.
Do you remember after your tantrums and uses of myself and others?
Or do you just do that lying?

You see yourself in others.
To paint (me) as yourself.

You apply sadism to see myself in your world.
I am not always sure if we are yours.

In your megalomania you imagine a world to target.
Then you lie about it.

Like this personal monopoly.
Gets scarier by the day.

You paint these sadistic pictures to reflect yourself.
Is it love you have ever felt?

Mood Swings
By Ted Walner

The pendulum swings up
The pendulum swings down.
Riding on this ride we go.
As we approach everywhere
One moment utterly depressed.
The next phase in euphoria land
Feeling immersed in these emotions
Takes me nowhere.
I cling and I climb.
I hurt and I love.
One minute blue
The next moment as happy as can be.
Truly, the meds help.
But they don’t terminate my emotions. 
Swinging on this chandelier
Flying through all types of peril.
I look up, I look down
And nowhere would I like to be.
As I shift 
As I ride
As I fall 
I lean to some and hope they are there for me. 
Yes, hoping this perilous ride ends.
And…
I am smoothly sailing.
Hoping I find that happy medium.
Hoping I find that calm in the storm
And am stable once again.

How Much Will Government Do to Shelter the Homeless?

How Much Will Government Do to Shelter the Homeless?
By Ted Walner, Peer Advocate, Baltic Street AEH, Inc.
Plan in Discussion to Step-Up Housing Relief
Approximately 20-25% of the homeless population suffer from some form of mental illness. One can see the homeless trying to survive on the streets of New York. We pass them and feel very sad to see human beings in this condition.
There are several reasons why the mentally ill become homeless. Many of them have difficulty taking care of themselves and managing household responsibilities. They also push away friends and family that might be able to help them. Half of the mentally ill also suffer from substance abuse. They try to self-medicate and become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Their situation makes it difficult to find employment which would lead to residential stability.
Supportive housing is an effective way of combating homelessness among the mentally ill. It costs the state more than $40,000 per person in ER stays, psychiatric hospitals, shelters, and prison, whereas it costs about $17,277 per person to provide supportive housing. With housing, mental health treatment, physical care, employment, and peer support are provided. This support system helps people stay in their homes.
The government has provided a lot of programs for the homeless mentally ill. In February 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This includes 1.5 billion dollars for homeless prevention and re-housing. In 1990, former Mayor David Dinkins and former Governor Cuomo signed the NY/NY I agreement to provide housing. Later, in 1999 and 2005, NY/NY II and III agreements were established. These programs have provided housing and social services to single adults and families.
Governor Cuomo discussed his plans to spend $20 billion over the next five years on 100,000 permanent housing units. He said that within New York state, thousands of additional units would be created that provide social services as well.
Mayor de Blasio also discussed his plans for the Fiscal Year 2017. His budget includes funding for 15,000 units of supportive housing over the next fifteen years. He is allocating funds for shelter repairs, and adding additional beds for homeless youth. He is also expanding domestic violence shelters and providing services for homeless veterans as well.
We are making progress, but there is a lot more work to be done. Hopefully, we will continue providing cost-effective solutions that are both moral and humanitarian. If we continue to provide support, perhaps one day this homelessness problem will end.

Black, Christian and Mentally Ill

Black, Christian and Mentally Ill

By Robyn Carrothers

In case you haven't noticed, I'm African American. My people did not ask to come to this country yet it was built on their blood, sweat, tears and backs. I'm proud of the sacrifices that my ancestors made. Therefore, I stand on their shoulders and strengths.

I'm a Christian. I believe you have to accept Jesus as your personal savior. I attend a good church. The people there are very friendly and giving. They also support you when it's needed. They are also very caring. I've gotten a lot of support and love there.

I'm also mentally ill. Yes, I said it. That's the part that gets to everybody. I have to take three pills a day to remain stable. If I don't, I will be in serious trouble. Not to mention, I've been in the hospital five times because of it.

Okay, you think I'm a hot mess and full of contradictions. I am not supposed to be black, Christian and mentally ill. Black and Christian, yes, mentally ill, no. So there is a taboo with that.

Being black and mentally ill is something that black people shy away from. In the black community, some consider it to be weak or retarded. If the illness pops up, yes, they'll say we're crazy. Sometimes, families will not support you. Whispering and talking about it won't make it go away.

In the Christian faith, it's either you get delivered or you're not trusting God. Yes, I would like to be healed. This is my cross to bear. This is the thorn in my flesh. If God chooses to heal me, then that would be good.

These three qualities together seem like a contradiction. Some people will say there is nothing wrong with you. You just need one good piece (if you get my drift). Others feel, this is something you will grow out of.

I try not to think about what people or my family think. My family had a hard time with it at first. When I got a correct diagnosis, they were relieved. Many people feel that I want attention when I have a mental breakdown.

The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter if you're black or Christian. What matters is how you and the people around you take it. Some can be supportive, others will say, “Go away.” I'm not weak, but I'm going to be okay with the support of my family, church, friends and peers.

So I'll hang in there along with this illness, trusting God and hoping this will encourage someone to hang in there, too.