May is the month for end-of-the-year luncheons, and they have been coming fast and furious. Because many Floridians head north in the summer, civic clubs want a last shot at members and guests. Some guarantee good attendance in May by giving annual awards.
It was not the end of the year for the Athena Society – that’s a dinner in June – but the speakers on May 1st were particularly interesting. May is Mental Health Month (something I did not know), and Dr. Marsha Lewis Brown of Northside Mental Health addressed that issue locally, while Dr. Gail Ryder, vice president of BayCare Behavioral Health, took more of a national focus. She quickly traced the problem historically, from the days when families hid their mentally ill in basements and attics, when society isolated them in asylums or forced them to toil in poorhouses.
It was not uncommon to be beaten, chained, or starved, and no one saw this as a problem until young Dorothea Dix came on the scene. She found her first victims when she went to teach Sunday school in the jail at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Horrified to discover ill-fed women held in filthy cages by a jailer who judged them incapable of feeling, she also soon observed that many were sane -- or at least would be if they were free to live a normal life.
State laws at the time, even in liberal Massachusetts, allowed male family members to imprison female ones simply by declaring them hysterical. Many women who objected to their husbands’ vices found themselves deemed mentally ill. After discovering this and other abuse, Dix traveled the state for two years and uncovered more cases. She presented the facts in a written “memorial” to the legislature in 1843. Its details on 958 “insane paupers” is considered “the first piece of social research ever conducted in America.”
Legislators in other states also listened, and by the time of her 1887 death, Dix had established herself as the international pioneer of mental health hospitals. Her work preceded the academic fields of sociology and psychology by decades – and it’s ironic to think that she would not be hired by such today because she lacked the credentials to do what she did.
She also spent part of each year lobbying in Washington for an especially innovative idea. The federal government then owned billions of acres of unsettled land, and she proposed that Congress set aside a block to be sold and that the revenue from it be used for mental health. Her bill passed in 1854, but President Franklin Pierce vetoed it: this was an issue for the states, he said, not the federal government. Dix pointed out the contradiction: while claiming that land grants for humanitarian purposes might be unconstitutional, presidents and congressmen had no problem giving millions of acres of land to profit-making railroads.
But Dr. Ryder did not spend as much time on history as I have. Instead, the salient points that I took away were:
• One in five American adults exhibits signs of mental illness.
• Autism, the mental illness that affects the youngest, can be turned around with good treatment. (I know that personally: a school-age friend who is better now looked at a picture of herself and her family when she was autistic and said, “I wasn’t there then.”)
• There’s good news, as President Obama designated this the “year of the brain,” and the National Institutes of Health is spending more money on pure biological research.
• Scientists are beginning to drop the longtime hypothesis that chemical imbalance is the major cause and instead are looking more at circuit dysfunction. Drop the pill popping, they say, and think a computer on the fritz.
• Imaging is the important new thing, as scans of the brain allow researchers to find the problem without surgery – and sometimes even to solve it without surgery. For example, Dr. Ryder reported that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain has cured severe depression.
• In January, Obamacare will treat mental problems the same way as physical ones – hooray, hooray. We all will be safer and happier.
Dr. Brown told us that institutionalization has vastly decreased: the nation had 550,000 beds for the mentally ill in 1960, and only 40,000 now. Cruel memories from One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest aside, that is not entirely good news. Dr. Brown says that it is budget cuts, not philosophy, that means only 15% of the local need is met. There is an especially unfortunate gap between ages 18 and 25, when most schizophrenia begins, but presumably Obamacare’s new mandate will improve treatment for twenty-something patients with that dangerous disease.
Both she and Dr. Ryder ended on a positive note, stressing that patients can and do get better. They urged the audience to pay attention to any signs of mental illness, especially depression and suicidal tendencies, as the earlier the intervention, the greater chance of a cure. And let me get your attention by again using the highly relevant slogan of the 1970s: “Support Mental Health Or I’ll Kill You.”
* * *
Well, I’ve used half of my space and only wrote about one speech, so next week, I’ll do those at the award ceremonies of the Hillsborough County Bar Association and the League of Women Voters.
Anyone who went to the Convention Center for the annual lunch sponsored by the Hillsborough County Commission on the Status of Women would have to agree that women’s issues clearly are on the political radar. I think every member of City Council was there, as well as most of the county commissioners, legislators, and constitutional officers. Chaired by Plant City’s Yvonne Frye, it was an excellent event. (Plus the food and service were better than elsewhere.)
As it does every year, the commission added three women to its Hall of Fame, which is located in the Convention Center. Two of the awards were posthumous, and the only living person was Senator Arthenia Joyner. Arthenia gave another of her stem-winding speeches, as she has been comfortable at the microphone since the days of the civil rights movement. She is proud to have been arrested twice: in 1969 while demonstrating for educational equality in Tallahassee, and later in Washington. Even though she then was an elected official, she was arrested with other high-ranking African Americans for protesting apartheid in South Africa. History has proven her right on both issues – as well as many more.
The first posthumous award was for the late Nancy Ford. Attorney Linda Hanna nominated her, as Nancy was a mentor to her and countless other young women in the days when we struggled for a place at the public table. Nancy’s daughter, Cjo Ford, accepted the award, and I was pleased that both she and Linda emphasized Nancy’s commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It failed in the Florida Senate by 21-19, with one Tampa senator abandoning his campaign promise to support it. And recently, when I was speaking at a judicial forum, a young man -- who nonetheless was old enough to practice law -- innocently asked what ERA stood for.
The nominator for the second posthumous award was attorney Shirley Arcuri, president of the League of Women Voters. Accepting it was 159-year-old Eleanor (Ella) McWilliams Chamberlain –as portrayed by Dr. Susan Dellinger. Susan wrote a long white nineteenth-century style dress, with a flowered hat and a purple sash proclaiming “NAWSA.” That was the rally-time wardrobe of members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Tampa’s Chamberlain was its Florida leader. She organized support for women’s right to vote all across the state and represented Florida at the national convention in Atlanta in 1895. Her husband, Fielding Chamberlain, also worked for the cause, and the Atlanta Journal featured the couple on its front page.
Other states won the vote for Florida women in 1920: like the ERA, our legislature refused to ratify the federal amendment that granted women the vote. Fielding Chamberlain had died by then, and Ella concentrated on “Mothers’ Pensions,” an early version of what became Social Security. She lobbied in Tallahassee for that, and back home in Tampa, she assisted the needy, especially African Americans, during the Great Depression. Ella Chamberlain died in 1947 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. My friends and I plan to have a picnic on her grave one fine day. You come, too.
doris@dweatherford.com
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
It was not the end of the year for the Athena Society – that’s a dinner in June – but the speakers on May 1st were particularly interesting. May is Mental Health Month (something I did not know), and Dr. Marsha Lewis Brown of Northside Mental Health addressed that issue locally, while Dr. Gail Ryder, vice president of BayCare Behavioral Health, took more of a national focus. She quickly traced the problem historically, from the days when families hid their mentally ill in basements and attics, when society isolated them in asylums or forced them to toil in poorhouses.
It was not uncommon to be beaten, chained, or starved, and no one saw this as a problem until young Dorothea Dix came on the scene. She found her first victims when she went to teach Sunday school in the jail at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Horrified to discover ill-fed women held in filthy cages by a jailer who judged them incapable of feeling, she also soon observed that many were sane -- or at least would be if they were free to live a normal life.
State laws at the time, even in liberal Massachusetts, allowed male family members to imprison female ones simply by declaring them hysterical. Many women who objected to their husbands’ vices found themselves deemed mentally ill. After discovering this and other abuse, Dix traveled the state for two years and uncovered more cases. She presented the facts in a written “memorial” to the legislature in 1843. Its details on 958 “insane paupers” is considered “the first piece of social research ever conducted in America.”
Legislators in other states also listened, and by the time of her 1887 death, Dix had established herself as the international pioneer of mental health hospitals. Her work preceded the academic fields of sociology and psychology by decades – and it’s ironic to think that she would not be hired by such today because she lacked the credentials to do what she did.
She also spent part of each year lobbying in Washington for an especially innovative idea. The federal government then owned billions of acres of unsettled land, and she proposed that Congress set aside a block to be sold and that the revenue from it be used for mental health. Her bill passed in 1854, but President Franklin Pierce vetoed it: this was an issue for the states, he said, not the federal government. Dix pointed out the contradiction: while claiming that land grants for humanitarian purposes might be unconstitutional, presidents and congressmen had no problem giving millions of acres of land to profit-making railroads.
But Dr. Ryder did not spend as much time on history as I have. Instead, the salient points that I took away were:
• One in five American adults exhibits signs of mental illness.
• Autism, the mental illness that affects the youngest, can be turned around with good treatment. (I know that personally: a school-age friend who is better now looked at a picture of herself and her family when she was autistic and said, “I wasn’t there then.”)
• There’s good news, as President Obama designated this the “year of the brain,” and the National Institutes of Health is spending more money on pure biological research.
• Scientists are beginning to drop the longtime hypothesis that chemical imbalance is the major cause and instead are looking more at circuit dysfunction. Drop the pill popping, they say, and think a computer on the fritz.
• Imaging is the important new thing, as scans of the brain allow researchers to find the problem without surgery – and sometimes even to solve it without surgery. For example, Dr. Ryder reported that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain has cured severe depression.
• In January, Obamacare will treat mental problems the same way as physical ones – hooray, hooray. We all will be safer and happier.
Dr. Brown told us that institutionalization has vastly decreased: the nation had 550,000 beds for the mentally ill in 1960, and only 40,000 now. Cruel memories from One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest aside, that is not entirely good news. Dr. Brown says that it is budget cuts, not philosophy, that means only 15% of the local need is met. There is an especially unfortunate gap between ages 18 and 25, when most schizophrenia begins, but presumably Obamacare’s new mandate will improve treatment for twenty-something patients with that dangerous disease.
Both she and Dr. Ryder ended on a positive note, stressing that patients can and do get better. They urged the audience to pay attention to any signs of mental illness, especially depression and suicidal tendencies, as the earlier the intervention, the greater chance of a cure. And let me get your attention by again using the highly relevant slogan of the 1970s: “Support Mental Health Or I’ll Kill You.”
* * *
Well, I’ve used half of my space and only wrote about one speech, so next week, I’ll do those at the award ceremonies of the Hillsborough County Bar Association and the League of Women Voters.
Anyone who went to the Convention Center for the annual lunch sponsored by the Hillsborough County Commission on the Status of Women would have to agree that women’s issues clearly are on the political radar. I think every member of City Council was there, as well as most of the county commissioners, legislators, and constitutional officers. Chaired by Plant City’s Yvonne Frye, it was an excellent event. (Plus the food and service were better than elsewhere.)
As it does every year, the commission added three women to its Hall of Fame, which is located in the Convention Center. Two of the awards were posthumous, and the only living person was Senator Arthenia Joyner. Arthenia gave another of her stem-winding speeches, as she has been comfortable at the microphone since the days of the civil rights movement. She is proud to have been arrested twice: in 1969 while demonstrating for educational equality in Tallahassee, and later in Washington. Even though she then was an elected official, she was arrested with other high-ranking African Americans for protesting apartheid in South Africa. History has proven her right on both issues – as well as many more.
The first posthumous award was for the late Nancy Ford. Attorney Linda Hanna nominated her, as Nancy was a mentor to her and countless other young women in the days when we struggled for a place at the public table. Nancy’s daughter, Cjo Ford, accepted the award, and I was pleased that both she and Linda emphasized Nancy’s commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It failed in the Florida Senate by 21-19, with one Tampa senator abandoning his campaign promise to support it. And recently, when I was speaking at a judicial forum, a young man -- who nonetheless was old enough to practice law -- innocently asked what ERA stood for.
The nominator for the second posthumous award was attorney Shirley Arcuri, president of the League of Women Voters. Accepting it was 159-year-old Eleanor (Ella) McWilliams Chamberlain –as portrayed by Dr. Susan Dellinger. Susan wrote a long white nineteenth-century style dress, with a flowered hat and a purple sash proclaiming “NAWSA.” That was the rally-time wardrobe of members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Tampa’s Chamberlain was its Florida leader. She organized support for women’s right to vote all across the state and represented Florida at the national convention in Atlanta in 1895. Her husband, Fielding Chamberlain, also worked for the cause, and the Atlanta Journal featured the couple on its front page.
Other states won the vote for Florida women in 1920: like the ERA, our legislature refused to ratify the federal amendment that granted women the vote. Fielding Chamberlain had died by then, and Ella concentrated on “Mothers’ Pensions,” an early version of what became Social Security. She lobbied in Tallahassee for that, and back home in Tampa, she assisted the needy, especially African Americans, during the Great Depression. Ella Chamberlain died in 1947 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. My friends and I plan to have a picnic on her grave one fine day. You come, too.
doris@dweatherford.com
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.