October 26, 2024

I just read an article blasting Trump for wearing more makeup than Kamala and was reminded about how Jennifer Senior first called him a preening narcissist, by Hal M. Brown, MSW


I just read this in RawStory: 

'He's not actually masculine': Trump blasted for 'wearing more make-up' than Kamala Harris


That article begins:

Donald Trump isn't actually masculine, but he is using men's fears against them in his presidential campaign, an expert said.

Liz Plank, the author of the book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, appeared on MSNBC on Saturday to discuss the gender gap in the current presidential election and how men are looking at the candidates.

It goes on to say:

"Can we talk about masculinity, right? Trump is putting on a performance of masculinity. Because he's not actually masculine. This is a guy who spends more time with his make-up artists than with his own advisors. But even setting aside that he probably wears more make-up than Kamala Harris, masculine men aren't afraid of women. They're not afraid to debate women. Masculine men don't have meltdowns on stage because a woman that they didn't like asked them a question that they didn't like. Masculine men aren't manipulated by people who give them compliments." 

This reminded me of Jennifer Senior writing a column on April 5, 2020 when she was still at The New York Times. She's now at The Atlantic.

I added Bart and Homer to the illiustration below. Read on to see why.


“That news conference was, to me, the most frightening moment of the Trump presidency. His preening narcissism, his compulsive lying, his vindictiveness, his terror of germs and his terrifying inability to grasp basic science — all of it eclipsed his primary responsibilities to us as Americans, which was to provide urgent care, namely in the form of leadership.

Screenshot2020-04-06at6.04.36AM.png

She begins with a link to the website started by Dr. John Gartner, the founder of Duty to Warn who was producing a documentary about Trump (right) at the time.

Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial. The American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics expressly forbids its members from diagnosing a public figure from afar.

Here are the excerpts specifically addressing how Trump’s psychopathology manifests itself and is endangering human life and the institutions of society. I’ve bullet-pointed them:

  • First: Narcissistic personalities like Trump harbor skyscraping delusions about their own capabilities. They exaggerate their accomplishments, focus obsessively on projecting power, and wish desperately to win.
  • Second: The grandiosity of narcissist personalities belies an extreme fragility, their egos as delicate as foam. They live in terror of being upstaged. They’re too thin skinned to be told they’re wrong.
  • What that means, during this pandemic: Narcissistic leaders never have, as Trump likes to say, the best people. They have galleries of sycophants. With the exceptions of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, Trump has surrounded himself with a Z-team of dangerously inexperienced toadies and flunkies — the bargain-bin rejects from Filene’s Basement — at a time when we require the brightest and most imaginative minds in the country.
  • Meanwhile, Fauci and Birx measure every word they say like old-time apothecaries, hoping not to humiliate the narcissist — never humiliate a narcissist — while discreetly correcting his false hopes and falsehoods.

That OpEd was the second time Jennifer Senior used a reference to Trump’s narcissism in a title: President Trump Is Unfit for This Crisis. Period. His narcissism is a grave danger to our health.

  • But every aspect of Trump’s crisis management has been annexed by his psychopathology. 
  • But it is true that all eyes are on him. He’s got a captive audience, an attention-addict’s dream come to life. It’s just that he, like all narcissistic personalities, has no clue how disgracefully — how shamefully, how deplorably — he’ll be enshrined in memory.

Jennifer Senior came up with another gem which applies to Donald Trump’s personality.

Unfortunately she had to demean the bumbling but basically good hearted Homer Simpson who is nothing like the evil malignant narcissist Donald Trump by referencing one of his classic aphorisms. 

This (blaming others) sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”

Not all pathological grandiose narcissists are preening narcissists obsessed with how physically attractive they are, or want to believe they are and think others envy them for their good looks. This is more like Narcissus from the Greek myth. Trump combines the characteristics of Narcissus being obsessed with his appearance with believing he is not only the best looking but the greatest in everything he does.

Earlier today I posted this blog:

LA Times and Wash. Post endorsement of Harris would have made no difference, their non-endorsement helps Trump,

LA Times and Wash. Post endorsement of Harris would have made no difference, their non-endorsement helps Trump, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 


Never-Trumpers are enraged that the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post owners overrode their editorial boards and wouldn't let them endorse Kamala Harris for president. Staff members on both papers are expressing both outrage and dismay. 

For example this is a portion of what Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote:

I love The Washington Post, deep in my bones. Last month marked my 40th year of proud work for the institution, in the newsroom and in the Opinions section. I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today, with the tragically flawed decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential race.

You can read what she had to say without a subscription here.

Columnist Karen Tumulty, who joined the staff of the Post in 2010, wrote "Refusing to endorse a candidate, The Post wounds itself" She begins by noting the irony that "At a ceremony Thursday night in New York City, two of our Post Opinions colleagues received their Pulitzer Prizes for their courageous and tenacious work spotlighting the dangers of authoritarianism. 

She concludes with the following:

Editorial boards exist to make judgments and to speak for the institution. If this change in policy regarding presidential endorsements was a stand on some long-ignored principle of our past, why did the newspaper wait until just 11 days before the election to announce it?

Our current owner has emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the front page of every edition of The Washington Post. With this decision, those words now stand as an indictment of ourselves.

When I read about this at first I thought "so what" because the vast majority people that read these publications are voting for Kamala anyway.

Then I changed my mind. While an endorsement of Harris wouldn't have changed a vote this decision accrues to Trump's benefit. If he hasn't already done so he can spin it his way by saying that even the liberal press won't endorse "Came-a-la" because she's too liberal for them. He can rant on about how they see she's a communist and a fascist who will destroy our beloved American Democracy.

Ali Velshi just now on MSNBC in discussing this noted that Tim Snyder, the author of "On Tyranny"  calls what they did "anticipatory obedience"... I looked it up here.

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

It appears that the owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, may be a Trump supporter. We do know that he's friends with Elon Musk who like him was born in South Africa. The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos (who also owns Amazon) may or may not be a Trump supporter but he is clearly hedging his bets.

Both of them have given Trump more than a boost. They have given him a gift which, unlike a financial donation, doesn't have to be reported. 

If Trump wins look for him to try to exert pressure on them to "Murdochize" their papers. He could try to get them to squash unfavorable coverage of him or even fire staff who don't tow the line of his MAGAzation of the country. Could we see Tucker Carlson as the new editor-in-chief of The Washington Post? Their editor-at-large has already resigned over this. The editor of the LA Times and two other editors also resigned.

I have no doubt that Trump wants to control the media and that if he's president he will attempt to do this. These decisions have only served to whet his appetite. The dictator wannabe who admires Hitler for having loyal generals (even though some tried to kill him) if he knows anything about NAZI history is aware that there was no free press in NAZI Germany or the countries they controlled.


Who knows what the Supreme Court which gave the president immunity might do to reinterpret and the gut protections of the press granted in the First Amendment? 

Here's a review of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Some have raised the question of whether the Free Speech Clause and the Free Press Clause are coextensive, with respect to protections for the media. A number of Supreme Court decisions considering the regulation of media outlets analyzed the relevant constitutional protections without significantly differentiating between the two clauses. In one 1978 ruling, the Court expressly considered whether the institutional press is entitled to greater freedom from governmental regulations or restrictions than are non-press individuals, groups, or associations. Justice Potter Stewart argued in a concurring opinion: That the First Amendment speaks separately of freedom of speech and freedom of the press is no constitutional accident, but an acknowledgment of the critical role played by the press in American society. The Constitution requires sensitivity to that role, and to the special needs of the press in performing it effectively.But, in a plurality opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: The Court has not yet squarely resolved whether the Press Clause confers upon the ‘institutional press’ any freedom from government restraint not enjoyed by all others. The plurality ultimately concluded that the First Amendment did not grant media the privilege of special access to prisons.

Several Supreme Court holdings firmly point to the conclusion that the Free Press Clause does not confer on the press the power to compel government to furnish information or otherwise give the press access to information that the public generally does not have. Nor, in many respects, is the press entitled to treatment different in kind from the treatment to which any other member of the public may be subjected. The Court has ruled that [g]enerally applicable laws do not offend the First Amendment simply because their enforcement against the press has incidental effects. At the same time, the Court has recognized that laws targeting the press, or treating different subsets of media outlets differently, may sometimes violate the First Amendment. 

Further, it does seem clear that, to some extent, the press, because of its role in disseminating news and information, is entitled to heightened constitutional protections—that its role constitutionally entitles it to governmental sensitivity, to use Justice Potter Stewart’s word. 

Reference.

Why stop there? The Supreme Court could decide that a president has the right to interpret the Constitution any way they want to if Trump wins. They could also say he can suspend the entire Constitution. After all having a dictatorship is not compatible with having  a working Constitution. Does anybody think Trump wants the Constitution to restrain his dictatorial ambitions?



Excerpts from NY Times endorsement which begins as follows:

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

The endrocement concludes:

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

 

Yesterday's blog: It's getting down to the wire and you've bet everything you have on one horse

Also these recent blogs:

"A LETTER FROM MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS ON TRUMP’S DANGEROUS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY" was published as an ad in The NY Times,

Fox News - Don't call this dignified wonderful gentleman a fascist because it may provoke another assassination attempt,

.About Hal M. Brown




Hal Brown
Hal Brown

October 25, 2024

It's getting down to the wire and you've bet everything you have on one horse, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 


It's getting down to the wire. We all know what I mean by this but where did that saying come from? Gary Martin, a writer and researcher on the origins of phrases and the creator of the Phrase Finder website looked into this here.

He wrote:

‘Down to the wire’ is a commonly used expression these days, but whenever I hear it I think ‘what wire?’, so I thought I’d look into it.

The earliest examples that I can find of ‘down to the wire’ in print are from educative pieces about viniculture, in which gardeners are advised to tie their vines ‘down to the wire’. I’ve also heard it used to describe car tyres that were on their last legs and had the underlying canvas and wire thread showing. Those aren’t of course the source of the phrase, which it turns out has more to do with horses than horsepower.

People have bet on horse races for centuries and the outcome of these has always been of close interest to punters. Before the days of electronic measurement and photo finishes the method adopted in the 19th century to decide the winner of a close race was to string a wire across the track above the finishing line.

Let's take this horserace analogy further. Say you were forced to bet every cent you had, that you mortgaged your house, emptied the college fund meant for your children, and  had to bet it all on one particular horse or another. If your horse loses you and your children would be homeless.

Let's say further that the odds on each horse winning were 50/50.

Let's also say that despite these odds you know that one horse has been given outlawed performance enhancing drugs. 

Going beyond this I'll add that the bookies are involved in a mob that is betting heavily on the other horse.

Not only that, suspicious looking people were seen hanging around the racetrack stables.

How I feel....


I live in a continuing care retirement community where the residents are almost all very liberal have taken to wearing simple name badges imprinted with drawings showing what they are interested in like cats or books. I had a special one made to show how I am feeling. I will wear it until the election. If Kamala wins I may have a little ceremony and use my heat gun to melt it. If Trump wins I am afraid I will keep wearing it.

You probably recognize the figure. It's the man in the famous Edvard Munch paintings and prints "The Scream."

If Kamala wins I'll go back to wearing my badge with the background of Dali's famous painting The Persistence of Memory, often called the melting clocks painting.


From Wikipedia:

The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch.It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Adès wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun.

I had a Zoom discussion with a columnist for a well known progressive website last night for his upcoming podcast (I'll post a blog about that when it is available) and one of the things I talked with him about was what both of us will write about if Kamala wins. I suggested I might try science fiction short stories but noted that I find writing good fiction far more difficult than writing (hopefully) good essays. In a way this is like painting a good abstract or surreal picture as opposed to painting a realistic one which while taking talent I don't think takes that much creativity.




About the author of Hal Brown's blog


About Hal M. Brown and the history of the Mason Mental Health Center in Mason, Michigan

 I am an 80 year old retired Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW, Massachusetts), who was a psychotherapist in private practice in Michigan and Massachusetts and a community mental health center director in Michigan. I was also a cranberry grower along with my late wife Betty and a member of the Ocean Spray cooperative.

I am currently living in Portland, Oregon. I moved here in 2014, four years after Betty died at the age of 65. 

 :::::::::::::::::

This is me at my home office in Middleboro, Massachusetts about 30  years ago. A relection of one of our cranberry bogs is i the window. 


Something about me:
I received my Masters in Social Work from Michigan State University in 1971 and was a psychotherapist until my retirement. My main salaried work experience was with one of the best community mental health programs in the country, Clinton-Eaton-Ingham Community Mental Health Board headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. I always had a private practice along with my salaried job.  

RIP: 

My friend and colleague Mel was one of the original Three Musketeers as we sometimes called ourselves, the first staff therapists who worked together when the Mason Mental Health Center opened, died in 2022. Mel and I worked closely together along with Mary Louis, MSW to literally build Mason Mental Health Center by constructing walls to make offices out of large rooms in our building and we put together a program serving the previously poorly served small town and rural areas of the Ingham County where most of Lansing is located. 

As newly credentialed therapists we made up in enthusiasm and caring for our clients what we lacked in experience. We provided clinical supervision to each other and with nobody to tell us not to try new approaches we learned and grew as therapists from our successes and thankfully very few failures.

Much credit is due to the program's supervisor, the late Ben Perri, PhD who didn't have much more clinical experience than we did, for having the wisdom to hire the three of us and allowing us the freedom to learn and grow.

In those early days we didn't have time limits for how long we could see clients and, when appropriate, could we could see them more than once a week or partner with another therapist and do co-therapy. We weren't held back by the rules of insurance companies or Medicare and of having to use check-lists that pigeon-holed clients into a set of problems and making a list observable goals. We just treated our clients as we'd want to be treated ourselves: as real people with real feelings. 

The rules were relaxed in another important way at that time. I had much more leeway in who I hired and promoted. For example Marilyn Braman was our van driver and Jackie Lawrence was one of our secretaries. Neither had college degrees but both demonstrated such rapport with clients that when I had an opening in the day treatment program I promoted them to be mental health workers, basically aides who did pretty much the same thing the credentialed staff. I hired Jim Mueller as a therapist in day treatment even though his BA was in philosophy. He went on to get his MSW at Smith College which has the best clinical social work program in the country. Notably I hired Linda Ward who had a BSW to design and run the day treatment and aftercare programs. A year or two later that job would have required at least a masters degree. She put together a program that turned out to be a model program emulated by other programs around the state.

We also saw many outpatient clients for a token fee of $2.00.

. 

The History of Mason Mental Health Center

by Hal Brown 

(click images to enlarge)

The original staff in 1971
Top row: Mel Scherpinesse, MA; Ben Perri, PhD (Director); Hal Brown, MSW
Bottom row: Mary Louis, MSW; Barb Hollenbeck, and Ellen Martinson; our secretaries.



Tom Helma, MA, was the second director

From its inception at the very beginning of the era where public mental health services were generously funded, the Mason Mental Health Center was a barometer of the value government placed on providing high quality outpatient mental health services to people in locations that were easily accessible. 

The Mason program itself was a branch office of a much larger program located in Lansing, Michigan. The town of Mason had a population of 5,500, but the rural area it served had a population of over 35,000. We ran one day a week clinics in three outlying towns in the corners of the county (Leslie, Stockbridge, and Williamston), and brought our services to an underserved population.

Why are these Mason Mental Health staff members smiling?

While our work was serious we always found time to relax among ourselves.  



Click to enlarge (that's me in the striped shirt)



During the heyday of publicly funded mental health our program continued to grow. The staff increased and we moved our building to one with twice the space, and then increased our space there two-fold. We were able to provide service on a sliding fee scale and generally could see clients for as long as they needed therapy. Our paperwork requirements were minimal, and there was no such thing as managed care. 


We called these one-day-a-week clinics satellites, and operated three of them.
Mine was in Stockbridge, Mel Scherpinesse ran one in Williamston, and Mary Louis
was in a tiny town called Leslie. These clinics were the first to close as budgets
were cut in the mid-1980's. 


From 1971 to the day it closed in 1989, Mason Mental Health increased its physical size. In the building above, located in downtown Mason, we added a day treatment program and doubled our size. Then after there was a "sick|building" scare, when about half the staff began to suffer eye irritations, we were forced to move to a large building (below) on the outskirts of town.


We began by occupying half of the new building, but eventually took over the other half. The day there was a meeting where my bosses decided to close the center, we actually had a carpenter converting a small office to a file room.

Read about our dubious distinction (click to enlarge):

We were one of the first offices to herald the epidemic of so-called "sick buildings." While I never got any symptoms, I observed both staff members and visitors have their eyes turn red and swell nearly shut after a short time in the building. Thousands of dollars were spent to see if there were any toxins or irritants present. Specialists were brought in from the state health department, Michigan State University and from two private firms. The Center for Disease Control even reviewed all the findings. All that was ever found was a minute amount of formaldehyde in the air, less than would be expected from any building where people smoked cigarettes.

Regardless of these scientific findings, we were forced to move to the temporary quarters in an old house near downtown, pictured below. The new tenants of the building never had any health problems.



Therapists Toni Warley-Mansion, Sue Austin, Rikki Schoenthal, Hal, and Kathy Hill (secretary) show snacking during a break.

Kathy Hill and therapist Barb White
Above: Barb White and Linda Ward. My office was in the alcove on the right behind the black shelves with a curtain for a door.

Interestingly, we suffered no drop-off in client referrals while we occupied this building.

The rooms upstairs had no doors when we moved in, so we constructed and installed plywood doors ourselves. Day Treatment moved to the basement of the Farm Bureau two blocks away. For privacy we always had the radio blasting. Office space in the area was scarce, so for three months we had no idea when (or if) we would move. Despite the fact that we were working under trying conditions.

The Vienam Vets program:

Even though in 1978 Dr. Charles Figley (about) wrote Stress disorders among Vietnam veterans: Theory, research, and treatment around the country Vets suffering from PTSD had no place to go for specialized treatment.

In 1982, the Mason Mental Health Center was one of the first programs to receive a grant from the Veterans Administration to operate a program to treat Vietnam veterans suffering from delayed post traumatic stress disorder. In fact, I believe we were one of only two community mental health centers to receive such a grant. Eventually the VA itself opened outreach programs themselves all over the country, and programs like ours were phased out.

Our program began in November of 1981 without any involvement with the VA. Not a veteran myself, I had been working with a few Vietnam combat veterans in therapy. They were involved in a Vietnam veterans' organization and they were contacted by the local PBS television station, WKAR in East Lansing, MI, to put together a group to take phone calls at the station after they aired a special on post Vietnam stress syndrome. 

They suggested that my colleague and I be resource people available, not to take calls, but to assist those vets who were. The phone calls began to pour in after the program and I decided on the spot to offer a group at Mason Mental Health for any vets who wanted to attend. A few nights later 25 showed up for the first of many vets groups, and spin-off groups for spouses of vets. Many of the vets were seen in individual and couples therapy.

That was how we did business in those days. If we saw a need, we tried to met it.  We did it because it needed to be done. The real heroes of the Vietnam veterans programs were the clients themselves. They hung together and helped each other through tough times as they dealt with inner demons. 

One man in particular went on to be appointed to the Governor's Agent Orange Commission where he distinguished himself, until he succumbed to a nasal cancer that was probably caused by agent orange. I am certain he would give me permission to publish his name as he made no secret of having been part of the Mason Mental Health program as a client. I still have to maintain his confidentiality, but those who read this and were part of the program will know who he is. 

I would have liked to keep the program independent from the VA, but I knew that I needed to hire a Vietnam veteran who was also a professional psychotherapist, and there weren't many of them around. So when VA funds became available I wrote the grant and we were able to hire the first of several dedicated therapists. 

Unfortunately, the VA took over much of the control of the program and while it continued almost until Mason Mental Health closed, our relationship with the VA was never very good. They insisted on approving clients before we saw them, even for first time emergency sessions that we were willing to do for free. We had to attend regular meetings at a VA center 60 miles away, and our vets therapists ended up having two supervisors, myself and the VA therapist who, like me, wasn't a vet himself. I hated having to navigate ponderous bureaucracies and he seemed to thrive in one of the biggest bureaucracies in the government. 

Mason Mental Health's Day Treatment program, as befitting a rural  program,
had a large vegetable garden. They not only sold fresh produce to local supermarkets;
but donated vegetable to the local food bank.


The staff pictured are Steve Polzin holding a watermelon, Barb White in the
lavender blouse, and coordinator Linda Ward, seated in front. To protect
confidentiality, client's faces have been covered with cutouts from a magazine.


















































State State Representative Debbie Stabenow (mentioned in the article above) was a big supporter of the program. She is now a United State Senator from Michigan.

Mason Mental Health's day treatment program developed into a model  treatment program under Linda Ward who was hired in 1979.

Linda Ward came on board and developed a humanistic program where the emphasis was on relating to the clients with empathy and warmth, while working with them to establish mutually acceptable and realistic goals. Staff were always willing to reach out to clients during times of crisis and physically go to where the clients needed them to be, whether it be a group home or the public library where one of them might be having a panic attack. 

Because the town of Mason was uniquely accepting of our clients, many of whom lived in group homes there, a hallmark of the program was its success in involving our clients in community life. Jackie Lawrence deserves much of the credit for this. She began working for the program as a secretary, but before long it became obvious that the clients were drawn to her and vice versa. She had an extraordinary knack for outreach, politics, and community relations. As soon as we had a vacancy, I hired her as a mental health worker and she was an energetic anchor for the rural aftercare program in Ingham County.

By the end of 1988, the fate of the Mason Mental Health Center, was all but sealed as the
tri-county program faced a $1 million budget cut for the coming year. In 1989 it was closed.

When Mason Mental Health Center was closed in 1989, it was replaced with the smaller Mason Rural Outreach Program (or Mason ROP) with Linda Ward as its coordinator. Along with Jackie Lawrence, Nancy MacKenzie and Lois Duling, the program moved into the downstairs of a small, rundown, house across an alley from the business section of Mason.  The Mason ROP has earned accolades as one of the most innovative programs in the state of Michigan.

While the aftercare population of the rural part of the county receives excellent care, easily accessible public comprehensive mental health service became a thing of the past when the Mason Mental Health Center was closed. All of its outpatient clients with the exception of a few children, who were still served by a part-time therapist, had to drive into Lansing for service.

I transferred to be the director of a similar program in one of the other three counties that made up the tri-county mental health program. This county was the same size as the area that the Mason Mental Health Center served, but the program there and in the second of the three counties, survive to this day because each is in a different county than Lansing.

I later learned that Mason Mental Health Center was sacrificed in order to save a few jobs at the main outpatient clinic in Lansing.


Staff

Mason Mental Health Center, Mason, Michigan

1971 - 1989 

Supervisors

Ben Perri, PhD
Tom Helma, MA
Hal Brown, MSW

Support Staff

Joy Beights
Lois Duling
Jean Emerick
E. Fuller
Kathy Hill
Barbara Hollenbach
Ellen Martinson
Pat Oakes
Sue Stone
 

Treatment Staff

Susan Austin, MSW
Jane Bell, OTR
Marilyn Braman
Shirley Brown, MA
Cindy Carlson, MSW
Maureen Chaisson, MSN
Keith Dedrich, MSW
Patricia Foreman, MEd
David Fugate, MA
Clark Etterman, MSW
Normand Gilbert, MA
Gail Gingrich, MSW
Molly Gee, MSN
Claudia Gostine, BS
Donald Healey, MA
Beverlee Kagan1, MSW
Barbara Katz, MSW
Jackie Lawrence
Mary Louis, MSW
Nancy MacKenzie, BRT
James Meuller, BA
Joan Penfield, BSW
Michael Pierce, MSW
Steve Polzin, MSW
Toby Powell, MSW
Gwen Reid, BA
Mel Scherpenisse, MA, PhD (died Mar. 24, 2022)
Rikki Schoenthal, MSW
Nancy Spaninga, BA
Michael Teixeira, MA
Barbara Thiebeau, MSW
Becky Thompson, MSW
Linda Ward, BSW
Toni Warley-Mansion, MSW
Penny Wepfer, BA
Barbara White, MSW
Margo Winkler, MSW
Jean Zugger, MSW

(some of the above staff have since earned higher degrees)

Medical Staff

Luther Goldschmidt, MD
Malcolm Johnston, DO
Alex Lebedovych, MD
Gerald Osborne, DO


Footnotes:

1. Beverlee Kagan passed away in Florida in 2002

This is a list compiled from memory. If I left someone off, or spelled a name wrong, I'm sorry. 

I'm always interested in hearing from former staff as well. In fact, I just ran into a Mason Mental Health Center therapist who I hadn't seen in over twenty years at a seminar. With 1,000  attendees, he ended up sitting directly behind me in the first workshop. Neither of us knew we were both living in Massachusetts.

It was my chance encounter, and delightful reminiscing, with him that led me to dig up these old photographs and put together this brief illustrated history of Mason Mental Health.
 

 

More about me:

 

In addition to practicing psychotherapy, I was the supervisor of two rural mental health centers, a clinical supervisor, and a field instructor helping to train clinical social workers from both Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. I've presented workshops at several state and two national conferences on a variety of clinical topics.  I also particpated in research conducted by Dr. Norman Kagan in a training method called Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) and made several training films with a real client.

Due to budget cuts the Mason Mental Health Center was closed and I was moved to a sister satellite center in St. Johns, the Clinton County Counseling Center. This entailed driving nearly an hour to get to work, quite a change when my office was five minutes from home.

 As the new supervisor I was supposed to remedy some major problems about which heads of all the agencies in the county had been complaining. I discovered the problems were worse than described to me and when I tried to address them by jumping in and initiating major changes without getting permission in advance I got into difficulty with the higher-ups at the main office.

This was after I discovered that the program was held in lower regard by the heads of the other agencies in the county than I had been told. 

The steps I took unilaterally without clearing them with my superiors led to a temporary suspension, which I fought with a lawyer and eventually won a pyrrhic victory and was returned to run the program under untenable circumstances. It was so bad I wasn't allow to work in my office even doing clinical supervision with staff with the door closed. If was seeing a client I could have closed the door of course but the entire time I was there the admissions staff refused to refer clients too me.

When the opportunity presented itself I resigned and my wife and I moved to Massachusetts to take over her family cranberry farm. I kept a small private practice with a home office.

Here's how the Lansing paper described what happened at the Clinton County Counseling Center.


All the heads of the country agencies wrote me glowing recommendations when I left.



I was in general adult practice where I worked with patients who were businessmen and women, construction and trade workers, housewives, professors, college students, farmers, techies in the electronics and computer industry and executives.

I also had considerable experience working with with police officers and correction officers in both individual and couple's therapy. 
Because I spent 20 years as an auxiliary police officer in two cities I learned about police stress, I published the number one website on the subject, Police Stressline.  I began the website by posting articles I originally wrote for a print Massachusetts police magaize called Police Log. Some of the online articles were picked up and published in print police magazines. Read Daily Kos article about my police experience.



 

My Massachsetts office was very private. It was at home with its own waiting room and entrance, overlooking the cranberry bogs which, until the summer of 2006 when they were sold, were owned by my wife and her family. 
My late wife Betty and I were Ocean Spray grower-owners and we published one of the first websites to have a major impact on an entire industry, Cranberry Stressline. Because it brought together growers from across the country when there were problems with the management of Ocean Spray the website was credited with promoting a proxy war which resulted in the election of a new board of directors and the firing of the CEO, Robert Hawthorne.
As a therapist I worked with people with anxiety, depression and relationship problems, with people who are compulsive, irritable, anxious, and those who suffer from self-doubt and self-esteem problems. I also worked with people who were struggling with more existential questions such as who they are and what their life was all about. 
I always believed therapy should be a partnership between client and therapist, and that the basis for good therapy is trust, and that it was my responsibility for seeing to it that clients weren't spinning their wheels fruitlessly while I sat back and wait for them "to get it on their own," while I had a pretty good idea where they had to go to resolve their problems. 
I didn't have any particular "brand" of psychotherapy that I practiced, especially since the type of therapy I provided depended on the client's needs and desires. Generally for symptom reduction alone, therapy that gives a client support and encouragement, and helps them better understand self-defeating behaviors and change them, is the most effective. 
My understanding of personality dynamics comes from being trained in psychodynamic and psychoanalytically oriented therapy in the master's program at Michigan State University in the early 1970's. While I did not have post-graduate training in this area (I am not a psychoanalyst), I had considerable experience in providing therapy that was aimed at helping clients gain insight into themselves and how their family of origin influenced who they are.
I also blended what is known as cognitive-behavior therapy into my approach as needed. Basically this helped the client to recognize and change their self-defeating thoughts and behaviors. Whether focused on behavioral change or not my approach to my clients was always informed by my understanding of psychodynamics.
I have discovered over many years that it's the personality of the therapist, their ability to listen, and the connection he or she makes with the client that dictates success or failure in therapy. I tend to be suspicious of any of the "therapy of the month" flavors of treatment often touted in best selling books and by their authors on talk shows.

My own understanding of the incredible power of the mind to protect a  person from the memories of abuse, especially prolonged childhood sexual abuse, came working intensively with a number of clients who I was the first clinician to recognize were suffering from what was at the time called multiple personality disorders(now called dissociative identity disorder). The hallmark sign of this disorder is that the person experiences amnesia for significant persons of time. This occurs when another personality, or alter, is in control. This would be the subject of another article.

Other online activities:


I was a weekly columnist for the website Capital Hill Blue for several years. I also had an online column called The Eclectic Digest which was publshed in two large daily papers south of Boston, The Brockton Enterprise and The Patriot Ledger.


Here's a blog about my late wife Betty and my life growing cranberries.

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