Madness: Heroes Returning from the Front Lines: Baltic Street AEH, Inc.: An Unlikely Story of Respect, Empowerment, and Recovery

By Joanne L. Forbes BSN,MA

Instead of being defeated by madness, the Baltic Street Advocacy, Employment, and Housing staff in New York City built an agency that understands how to help those diagnosed with mental illness. In Madness: Heroes Returning from the Front Lines, author Joanne L. Forbes shares the story of Baltic Street AEH, one of the oldest and largest peer-run organizations in the United States—a unique agency whose success stems from knowing what it takes to come back from madness and how to show others the way.

With more than forty years of experience in the mental health field, Forbes delivers a critical, yet sensitive, look into the psychiatric world through the eyes of those lured out of madness. The stories narrate how people escaped the cycle of repeated hospitalizations, lack of social support, poverty, stigma, and despair to build lasting relationships, homes, marriages, children, and contentment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483433233

Book preview

MADNESS:

Heroes Returning

from the Front Lines

Baltic Street AEH, Inc.:

An Unlikely Story of Respect, Empowerment, and Recovery

Joanne L. Forbes BSN, MA

Copyright © 2015 Joanne L. Forbes BSN, MA.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3322-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3324-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3323-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015909568

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 06/30/2015

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1   A Tangle of Madness

Chapter 2   Early Days—Discovery and Knowledge

Chapter 3   Building Hope

Chapter 4   Steps to Recovery and Building Bridges

Chapter 5   Bridgers Help Span the Darkest Waters

Chapter 6   Housing—Respect, Empowerment, and Inclusion

Chapter 7   Recovery—Acceptance and Personal Meaning

Chapter 8   Advocacy—Empowerment, Rights, and Personhood

Chapter 9   Working and Giving Back

Chapter 10   The End is Only the Beginning

Endnotes

This book is

dedicated to all the current and former staff of Baltic Street AEH, Inc. (Baltic Street Advocacy, Employment and Housing, Inc.) It is their courage, hard work, and dedication that make Baltic Street AEH the wonderful, effective agency that it is. Some staff died along the way and certainly way before their time, and we will never forget them or the contributions they made.

PREFACE

The idea behind this book had been on my mind for many years. From the beginning of Baltic Street to present, I had the good fortune to watch and participate in its development. I was trained as a psychiatric nurse with a BSN degree from Wagner College, a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from New York University, and postgraduate studies in psychiatric rehabilitation from UMDNJ. But the staff and customers of Baltic Street were the ones who really taught me what I needed to know to partner with people who were searching for a way to get back their lives after encountering mental illness. Every time I attended staff training at Baltic Street or attended a holiday party, I would think, Everyone needs to see this. The healing, courage, laughter, and camaraderie displayed by folks who life wanted so badly to defeat was encouraging because life didn’t defeat them. They overcame and grew and prospered and built an agency that understood, really understood, how to help others with mental illness to move forward and to grow and prosper. Over the years, staff has left behind the cruel cycle of repeated hospitalizations, lack of social support, poverty, stigma, and despair to build lasting relationships, homes, marriages, children, and contentment.

As special and heroic as they are, they really aren’t different from most people in other places with similar struggles. Their stories needed to be shared so others could recognize themselves in their telling.

So with the support of the board of directors of Baltic Street, the board chair, Marion Schaal, and I visited every program area of Baltic Street, and we pitched the idea for this book and asked staff what they thought. They unanimously voted to go forward with the project. We asked for volunteers, and before long I was revisiting places in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island with tape recorder in hand. The staff had editorial power. The book needed to reflect the stories they wanted told. It needed to reflect what they, together, had built and sustained—a place of hope, healing, and recovery that has lasted for years and will continue to flourish into the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a lifetime of exposure to people diagnosed with mental illness and the dedicated staff who spent their life’s energy in the New York State mental health system attempting to help them.

Without the leaders of the psychiatric survivors movement, whose brilliance, charisma, and courage demonstrated that there was a different way for people stricken by madness to heal, none of this would have been possible. It was their advocacy that opened the eyes of so many of us trying to do the right thing with the wrong paradigm.

I have learned so much from all the tireless researchers and scholars who took what people diagnosed with madness were saying and translated it into irrefutable research and literature that will now educate the next generation of professionals, families, patients, and the public.

Neither Baltic Street AEH nor this book would be possible if it weren’t for the special people who had the vision and willingness to write that first grant with me to fund peer-run services: Dana Anthony, Marge Morsey, Marion Schaal, and Rick Sostchen. The first staff that got the agency up and running, Isaac Brown, Ed McGrath, Rick Sostchen, Janice Jones, and Dana Anthony, probably still don’t realize the magnitude of what they contributed to create the largest peer-run agency in the United States.

Creating this book was a team effort. It would not have come together without the willingness of Baltic Street staff to share their stories and without the encouragement and support of the Baltic Street AEH board of directors and the Baltic Street Mental Health Foundation. It certainly would not have been finished without the ongoing support of my husband, family and friends. Finally, to my main support, critic, and editor—you know who you are—I owe a huge debt of gratitude for inspiring me and keeping me on the path.

Every life has a story and a lesson to be learned.

Each one, teach one.

CHAPTER ONE

A TANGLE OF MADNESS

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind.

There was something so pleasant about that place.

Even your emotions had an echo

in so much space.

(Lyrics by Danger Mouse and Cee Lo Green, from Crazy by Gnarls Barkley)

Presented to you in these pages are stories about people, places, and things. The people come from all walks of life. The place is an agency called Baltic Street Advocacy, Employment and Housing, Inc. (Baltic Street AEH). The narratives contain lessons, journeys, insights, and proof of something called recovery. These stories need to be told, but not for the usual reasons. The usual reasons are that the stories are unique and interesting. However, these stories are being told because beyond being unique and interesting, the hope is that within these pages you will catch a glimpse of yourself or someone you know.

If this book found its way to you, it’s because it was meant to find you. Please know that, without question, there is something here meant just for you. The real question is what will you do with it once you find it?

To understand the people you will meet within these chapters and to grasp the things they might teach you, it is important to understand the place that has embraced them and allowed their stories to be told. To understand Baltic Street AEH, it is necessary to acknowledge the events that led up to this point. The people, the place, and even the things are embedded in what has been known as the consumer movement.

The entire history of the consumer movement is a story for another book. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that the consumer movement refers to the groundswell of individuals who had been hospitalized psychiatrically and who had, as a result, organized and become outspoken about the horrors and injustices of the mental health system throughout the United States. Originally known as psychiatric survivors, their initial demand was to move away from being called patients. So they were called clients for a while. To underscore the idea that they were in charge of their treatment, that they needed to be listened to and treated with respect, they began calling themselves consumers—as in consumers of mental health services. As the consumer movement grew, it became politically adept, powerful, and focused on issues both large and small.

One goal among many was an effort to lessen the stigma associated with all things psychiatric. As groups of individuals all over the United States rallied behind this movement, leaders emerged. They were vocal, charismatic, and radical. It was hard to hold onto outdated beliefs about mental illness in the face of articulate, intelligent leaders and the thousands of individuals who supported them.

So the consumer movement can be quickly understood in part as a demand by survivors of the mental health system for recognition, and an action to right the multitude of wrongs they identified. In response to the advocacy and political action undertaken by the consumer movement in the state of New York, that same archaic, degrading mental health system conceded that the consumer (or customer—even one plagued by madness) is always right. If that thought was not entirely palatable to the powers that be, then at the very least the mental health system could agree that consumers/customers have opinions on what is helpful and what is not.

Pioneers like Dr. Ed Knight,¹ Ike Powell,² Howie Vogel,³ Peter Ashenden,⁴ Howie the Harp,⁵ Joe Rogers⁶ (all ex-patients or psychiatric survivors), and many others were public in their criticism of the mental health system. They were clear in their demands that consumers be included in all efforts to change the mental health system to one that actually helped people instead of marginalizing, stigmatizing, and frequently brutalizing them.

Consumers continued