National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Inc.

an educational foundation and advocacy organization serving mental health consumers and professionals

President’s Message: Protect the living, and future generations- use our rights to freely organize and to speak our hearts and minds, to take back our nation’s values of mutual responsibility! 

In the January 2005 Coalition Report, I made these assertions:

   “…the steady, unrelenting and open, as well as sneak, attacks on America’s health care systems   have been continuing for decades. The onslaught on all fronts only picks up momentum, the momentum of a wealthy juggernaut moving for more and more profits, moving against all activist resistance and moving over our nation’s people. 

• Americans wanted these 2004 elections to be a genuine national debate and to be a referendum on health care. Lord knows, it was not!
• Americans had wanted the 2002 elections to be a referendum on health care. They were not!
• Americans hoped the 2004 primaries would be a genuine national debate on health care. They were not!

The time for the real referendum on health care is still with us, and the health care reform movement can make it happen.”  

However, a long-standing Coalition member, a seasoned fighter in our movement has written to us that the real challenge facing mental health and substance abuse care professionals at present is our unwillingness to engage in the battle for hearts, minds, and dollars, i.e. the political process, that would take back talk therapy from what the National Coalition is insisting is the highjacking by the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries (see our position stated in the flyer in this issue of the Coalition Report).  

This declaration of the “unwillingness to engage” by professionals has been echoed by many other advocates. Is this true?  

I think that avoidance, and “getting by” – rather than “unwillingness” – make up the basic posture to which many Americans retreat. I think the posture of avoidance, and “getting by,” is the same one adopted by the great majority of our colleagues and our fellow Americans – all of us health care consumers! 

As some of us believe: Identification with the aggressor is everywhere around us. 

In his1948 appeal to us all, Wilhelm Reich distilled his analysis of “the mass psychology of fascism” into his hard-hitting little book, Listen, Little Man!  His words introducing this “talk” to the “Little Man” in each of us, so strikingly illustrated by William Steig, I think desperately need repeating now: 

          “…It is time for the living to become hard where hardness is needed in the struggle for its safeguarding and development; in doing so, it will not lose its kindness if it sticks to the truth courageously. There is hope in the fact that, among million of industrious, decent individuals there are always only just a few pestilent individuals who cause murderous mischief by appealing to the dark and dangerous impulses…and lead them to organized political murder. There is only one antidote to the germs of emotional plague in the mass individual: his own feeling of living life. The living does not ask for power but for its proper role in human life. It is based on the three pillars of love, work and knowledge.            

            He who has to protect the living against the emotional plague has to free speech as we enjoy it in America at lest as well for the good as the emotional plague misuses it for the bad. Granted equal right in the expression of opinion, the rational finally must win out. This is an important hope.” 

More than ever we need to keep organizing, and to keep fighting for all health care in order to be fighting for mental health and substance abuse care (for a clear essay on how all of social insurance is interconnected, see the Rekindling Reform Position statement in this Coalition Report issue). 

We need all your active support in donations, volunteering for committee work, membership recruitment and very wide distribution of information about all work.   

We need to speak the truth to power, to speak out on real human values, not the “values” of “free markets,” of “strong defense,” tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of the “million of industrious, decent individuals.”  

Thanks to everyone for all you do to protect the living, and to take back our nation’s values of mutual responsibility, a shared caring and responsibilities to one another – the common good to which our nation  - in its founding -dedicated us all. 

Dave Byrom 

     Please see the articles in the Coalition Report issue, and on our website, for our projects and campaigns, for the proactive, for the policy offensives.  

     The National Coalition is, and will, fight on to preserve quality care and patient choice, privacy, and decision-making power. We are continuing our extensive networking and collaborative projects with many health care and social justice organizations, as well as with many organizations of mental health and substance abuse professionals from all practitioner disciplines. We are determined to expand our Campaign to Inform America of what systems of real mental health and substance abuse care require. And we remain dedicated to replace Managed Health Care, with a pro-patient, pro-quality, pro-consumer system accessible for all. 

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