Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a series of poetic diary entries before, during and after a psychiatric hospitalization in 1990. The truths it tells about psychiatric care in the United States are not only still true, but the situation has degenerated remarkably since then. In my case, I was the victim of Northern California HMO psychiatric care. The HMO model which we, in our collective greed, are fleeing to is nothing short of an outright abandonment of our most vulnerable citizens. The San Francisco police, when I once called them about a woman trying to commit suicide in front of a building I was guarding put it most brilliantly. They explained that they had attempted to save that woman before, (a woman who was literally diving into rapidly oncoming rush-hour traffic repeatedly), but that San Francisco General Hospital would only hold the woman for 48 hours and then turn around and let her go, knowing full-well that it was unsafe to toss her back on the streets. (This is the way our families and our State do budgeting, just so you know.) A homeless man I know who had been all over the world, unfortunately as a refugee in most cases, said that while hostility toward the poor and neglect of the weak were to be seen the world over, "No place on earth could equal San Francisco in the scientific torture of the poor." Even the Congresswomen who represent the Bay Area have been quoted as saying, after touring Kaiser, (which, as HMOs go is the one I most deeply detest), "This should be a model for universal health care in the future." And indeed, Obamacare itself has, as its central feature, the expansion of Medicaid to the uninsured. This inclusion of the uninsured into Medicaid will result, in California, in the enrollment of millions of people into Medi-Cal, a health care system so brutal that it is unmatched for cheapness and cruelty, even in some of the most shocking parts of the third world. The provisions, the detailed rules of Medi-Cal, were people to understand them en-masse, would shock and confound not only most US citizens, but persons from other countries who explain these provisions to actually think I'm joking. The gross and evil neglect inherent in HMOs and Medi-Cal are so strange and sickening that people in other countries can't even understand the regulations I quote to them, not due to their lack of English skills, but rather due to their inability to comprehend a culture that not only rationalized away its neglect of the mentally-ill, but also enshrines into law, formulas for care that are beyond description in the harshness and coldness and hard-heartedness. Stunningly, this is all a product of the punitive Puritanism that informs not just traditional religion, but also the meaner and colder sides of the New Age movement and virtually all of the prosperity gospel. Not even hard-core Atheists are immune to this sub-conscious abhorrence of the weak. We, as a public, are not victims of this hideous mental-health system, whose neglectfulness is really the greatest cause of all the mass shootings going on now, but rather we are co-creators of this system. It is our continual state of denial that even permits politicians to conceive of health care systems as incompetent and cruel as Medi-Cal and HMOs.
