By the time of this reading, David Gonzalez will have participated in a hunger strike against what he identifies as oppression in the mental health system. The strike by five psychiatric survivors and a social worker began on August 16 in Pasadena, California, organized by Support Coalition International (SCI), a coalition of some 100 psychiatric survivor and human rights groups.
SCI's press release states, "[The hunger strikers] charge that the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry are medicalizing an ever-widening spectrum of human emotion and behavior for financial gain and self-interest, and are willing to deceive the public while they too frequently stigmatize, humiliate, and harm their clients in the process.
"The government gives virtually total support to a quick-fix, pill-pushing model of mental health at the expense of alternative, less invasive ways of helping people in emotional distress," asserts David Oaks, hunger striker and Executive Director [of SCI].
"The hunger strikers will subsist on a liquid only diet until the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), and The Surgeon General prove [that mental illness is biological in origin]." To summarize SCI's position, the root of all psychiatric evil is the mistaken belief that bad genes or faulty brain synapses cause mental illness.
David Gonzalez is known as the creator of the website www.cinemaniastigma.com. He has documented the harmful stereotypes manufactured by Hollywood about people with mental illness. He played a key role in the passage of New York, New York 2 legislation to provide housing for the homeless, mentally ill. David was the first peer advocate to work at Kings County Hospital and he was the first mental health consumer to win the 1999 National Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award of the National Association of Disabilities. He is now an employment coordinator for New York Works, the experimental program that enables Social Security recipients to return to work.
David Gonzalez lives with manic depression. He experiences hypomania, enabling him to work the equivalent of two jobs and be an activist to boot. But when depressed, he has tried suicide several times and was hospitalized repeatedly between 1984 and 1995, when he and his wife divorced. (David is the father of two children.) He began his recovery at South Beach Psychiatric Center, where he found the staff "professional and ethical."
David used drugs and alcohol to deaden the pain of his illness. Entering a facility for the mentally ill, chemically addicted (MICA) was the next step in turning his life around. When he completed the program, he received training at the Howie the Harp Advocacy Center. Said David, "I became a peer advocate because the most disturbing part of my road to recovery was the oppression, the institutional oppression." Not only was he mistreated on several occasions, including a psychiatrist who threatened to lock him up for good, but he also witnessed abuse of other patients. Although he succeeded one time to work through the grievance system, he failed on other attempts and was often punished for his efforts.
Said David, "This is what attracted me to the hunger strike. It wasn't so much the call for objective evidence on biology as the underlying issues of incarceration, labels, ECT, and restraint in solitary [confinement]. The humiliation and the assaults. I was humiliated trying to resolve my grievances."
David draws a parallel between critics of violence by the mentally ill, such as doctors Sallie Satel and E. Fuller Torrey, and media use of movies about people with mental illness. Claimed David, "Satel and Torrey use a few high profile cases of violence by the mentally ill to generate fear of the mentally ill in general." Likewise, the media uses violent portrayals of the mentally ill in the movies to buttress the case that isolated examples of violence by the mentally ill are actually part of a pattern. Passed over the objection of virtually the entire mental health community, Kendra's Law is one of the results.
David should know about the connection between stigma and the cinema because he has been studying it for the past five years, ever since he realized that incidents in the news often reflect the movies he had been collecting for years. For example, the famous Daily News headline, "Get the Crazies Off the Streets," mimics the movie "The Crazies." In fact, the fictional movie about mental illness is a sub-genre of the horror flick. Only very recently have such movies turned positive, as in "The Prodigy" and "A Beautiful Mind."
Just as hysteria about the mentally ill is the stock and trade of grade B movie-makers, such hysteria has infected mainly the tabloid press. But David claims that even a paper as respectable as the New York Times has its lapses, such as in 2002 when a cartoonist portrayed the uncertainty of life in the city by worrying whether his daughter would be raped by a mental patient.
Surprisingly, only in the last few years has the New York Times, with such reporters as Erica Goode and Clifford Levy, taken a more enlightened approach to mental illness. As recently as the late 1990s, the Times was filled almost exclusively with the same lurid tales found in the popular press.
David has spent more than $5,000 on his hobby, collecting movie memorabilia and maintaining his website, www.cinemaniastigma.com. He said, "If I told you how much time I spend on this, you would think I'm a certifiable loony. It's a full-time job on top of my paid, full-time job. I really think this is a form of discrimination bordering on racism. I've personally experienced what it's like to be stigmatized." He mentioned two people he befriended who walked away from him when they learned of his mental illness.
This doesn't mean David has only had bad social experiences. He loved his job as peer counselor at Kings County Hospital, where he was the first consumer employee. David emphasized, "The staff was hesitant at first. They weren't sure I was competent and feared I might snap. But after a couple of months they embraced me. For example, I was allowed to sign patient charts without a co-signature by a professional. It was very empowering. My ability to share my experiences was liberating for the patients. I was a discharge planner, finding people places to live. I also participated in clinical meetings. I tried to be fair."
In one case, he argued against the release of an involuntary patient because he thought the patient's anger was explosive whereas the rest of the staff merely thought the patient was acting out. The hospital discharged the patient and eventually that person killed someone.
His current job as an employment coordinator for New York Works allows him to provide a wide array of services as he works with employers and potential employees.
Another success story was his involvement with New York, New York 2, the legislation that provides housing to the homeless, mentally ill. Because finding a supported apartment with the Institute for Community Living (ICL) was crucial to David's recovery after several years on the street, he believed passionately that others should have the same opportunity. He threw himself into organizing for passage of the bill in 1998. As the coordinator of NY/NY2's speaker's bureau, David traveled to agencies around the city and "the consumers came out," according to David. He was part of a coalition that included the Coalition for the Homeless, Institute for Community Living (ICL), Urban Justice Center, and Community Access among others.
And wouldn't you know it that David served as the second elected president of the ICL Alumni Association. His good buddy Lennie Weitzweig, a job counselor at Mt. Sinai Employment Services, was the first president. Lennie summed up David's approach with these words: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. David has always been one to stand up."
Said David, "I hope people don't focus on the hunger strike. The reason I'm doing this is human rights. Even a lot of psychiatrists can identify with what we want to accomplish. I believe in my heart everyone can identify with what we're doing. I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm anti-abuse. Under the guise of mental health, meds and ECT are being forced on people. If they feel these things are good for them, it's their right."
Added David, "My gripe with Sallie Satel is that she gives us no rights in decisions on treatment. I told the strike organizers I'm doing this for human rights not against bio-psychiatry. I want to be low-key. I don't want a media circus. I'm doing this to purge myself. I want to give people with mental illness choices, decisions to make about treatment. Too few people have these choices now. A statement needs to be made to get people's attention. My convictions give me strength. I live this."