Tooting From Greater LA - IIl

This is my housemate, Paul Cumming, with his Advocate of the Year Award, presented at a luncheon at the NAMI CA conference held yesterday in Torrance.

Paul has been a tireless advocate for years, working quietly behind the scenes, a champion of people with fresh ideas, a defender of those with no voice, and an unrelenting thorn in the side of those who wish we would all go away.

Significantly, three of the featured speakers at the conference - Tom Wootton (author of The Bipolar Advantage), Kathi Stringer (quality improvement innovator), and Gene Johnson (founder of Recovery Innovations) - owe a lot to Paul.

Paul is the frequent flyer point man for Network of Care, an innovative mental health web resource that is helping millions improve their lives.

Tooting From Greater LA - II

I'm at the NAMI CA conference in Torrance. Above is a seven-second video I shot last night on my iPhone.

That's Nathaniel Ayers you're looking at and listening to. Nathaniel Ayers is "The Soloist," whose life is recounted in Steve Lopez's book of the same name and in a movie of starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

Mr Ayers was a cellist attending Julliard when he experienced a major psychotic break. He wound up in LA's notorious Skid Row where he lived homeless for more than two decades. Mr Lopez, a columnist for the LA Times, discovered him on the streets playing a violin with two strings. What began as a reporter-subject relationship developed into a bond far greater. Steve was able to convince Nathaniel to move into public housing, but had some lessons of his own on how delusional thinking doesn't just apply to those with mental illness. In the end, Steve had to learn to accept Nathaniel for who he was rather than what he would like to turn him into.

Anyway, here we were, sitting down to dinner, when Nathaniel, with no introduction, got up on stage and started playing. Adlibbing. Very much Bach-inspired, but very free form with no breaks for a good 30 minutes.


After dinner, we were told we were going to view an incompleted and shortened documentary, "The Chorus," about life on LA's Skid Row. I braced myself to be bored out of my mind for the next hour, only to encounter the most incredible experience ever from nine years of attending mental health conferences.

The documentary followed six or seven Skid Row residents for several months. Gradually, we got to know these individuals and identify with them. We laughed, we cried, we got outraged, filled with hope, were swept off our feet and hit in the gut.

Then the lights came on and the people responsible for the video and some of the cast, along with Nathaniel Ayers, got up on stage. The image here is from my iPhone. I hope I get the name right here. This is Linda, who was also an extra in "The Soloist" and one of the star attractions in "The Chorus." She is belting out - and I mean really belting out - a Gospel tune.

The documentary is simply too good not to find a distributor. When it comes out, trust me, "The Chorus" is a must-see. As I said, the documentary and the live cast and crew experience, together with Nathaniel Ayers, constituted my most incredible experience in nine years of attending mental health conferences.

Tooting From Greater LA

I’m in Torrance, CA - part of greater LA - for a state NAMI convention. A brief recap:

Yesterday, Thursday, 1:30 PM: I arrive at the hotel after three hours of freeways and head straight to a pre-conference leadership training session where advocate Kathi Stringer is rocking the house on a topic called quality improvement (QI). Kathi comes from the aerospace industry, which is big on not having airplanes fall out of the sky. The mental health industry, by contrast, has much lower standards, or no standards.

Basically, if we were to hold our treaters and providers accountable to their own rules - ones already written into law and into contracts - we could change mental health advocacy entirely and actually get things done.

I met Kathi a year ago via my good friend Paul, who is also at the conference. I join up with Kathi and Paul and others in the afternoon. It’s 10:30 PM by the time I feel I better excuse myself for the evening, but it’s midnight when I finally retire.

This morning, 8:15: I run into Bettie Reinhardt at the Starbucks in the hotel lobby. Bettie is the executive director of NAMI San Diego, which is the gold standard for local NAMIs throughout the US. All the credit goes to Bettie. She will be stepping down in January, after 17 years of service. Several months ago, thanks to Bettie, I joined the board of NAMI San Diego.

Bettie and I make sure we’re at least a half an hour late for the opening session, which makes us just in time for the keynoter, Tom Wootton. Tom is the author of The Bipolar Advantage and the Depression Advantage. Back in 2006, I actually spent a week in Chicago with him as he made presentations. Tom is a paradigm-shifting thinker and a brilliant presenter, though his ideas can run ahead of his audience, which he acknowledges.

His main thesis is that the term “disorder” is accurate only in the sense that we lack the skills to manage our “condition” (not illness). Tom’s counter to “Bipolar Disorder” is “Bipolar in Order.”

A PowerPoint of a Ferrari goes up on the screen. A Ferrari has a stable platform so you can go around corners, he explains. But if you try to follow it in a mini-van with stuff loaded on top, you will flip over. Both vehicles are stable in the garage, he goes on to say. But I don’t want to be stable in a garage, he concludes. I want to be stable while I’m driving.

If we better learn how to manage our behaviors, he says, so we are not simply reacting, we can lead great lives within a wide range of emotions.

This is a far different message than what our doctors and therapists tell us, and certainly what NAMI audiences are used to hearing. Tom gets a positive reception. But he also says things such as, “depression can be a beautiful experience,” and I see some faces visibly recoiling.
After the talk, I say a quick hello to Tom’s wife, Ellen, who has been instrumental to her husband’s success. Later, another quick hello to Tom. I’ll catch up with both later in the conference.

More later ...