s.e. smith

Published at Truthout, January 2012

Socially, this means that in counties where many people are living below the poverty line, local governments are ill-equipped to provide meaningful public assistance to low-income residents. Mendocino County, for example, has slashed its mental health services, particularly in Coastal Mendocino, and has gutted its library program. All three counties have problems with basic infrastructure like road maintenance, keeping parks and recreation centers open and wastewater treatment. These services are normally funded by tax dollars, but with an untaxable black market, counties have nowhere to turn.

Read more at Truthout

Published at AlterNet, July 2011

One option for public sector unions, says Tharp, may be turning to lawyers prepared to drill down through regulations and union contracts to determine whether it’s possible to take the matter to court, an option that such unions are no doubt considering. That would be much easier to do with public support, which requires changing the way members of the public think about public sector unions, pensions, and benefits.

Media reporting on the pensions crisis discusses “broken promises” to public employees, but a pension is not a promise, it is a legal obligation. Failing to accurately define public employee pensions, and what cuts really mean, results in a lack of understanding among the general public about what pensions are and how they work. This creates a situation where sentiment against public employees generates support, or at least acceptance, of pension cuts, because people do not understand what is actually happening. Wage theft is something that has the potential to affect all employees, and tolerating it creates a slippery slope and makes it that much easier for the next step. Social Security cuts, for example, are also on the table.

Read more at AlterNet.

Published on Tiger Beatdown, March 2011.

The claim is often made that society needs to be protected from people with mental illness when in fact, the situation is just the opposite; we need to be protected from society. In no small part thanks to attitudes about mental illness, again, particularly surrounding women. The pathologisation of women’s emotions and lives results in extreme danger for many women. The diagnostic disparities (what is post traumatic stress disorder in a man is borderline personality disorder in a woman) contribute directly to the stigma experienced by mentally ill women; not for nothing are women with emotions who aren’t afraid to voice them accused of having histrionic personality disorder. Not for nothing do young women with depression and suicidal ideation shoot themselves in mall parking lots instead of seeking help.

Read more at Tiger Beatdown.

Published in Comment is free, January 2011

While speculating about the mental health status of the shooter, people also reinforced social attitudes about violence and mental illness, asserting that violence is an expression of mental illness and that mental illness makes people violent. The belief that mentally ill people are a danger to others persists – despite the fact that mentally ill people are actually 11 times more likely than the general population to be victims of violence, according to a Northwestern University study. People with “severe mental illness” are responsible for an estimated one in 20 violent crimes, a rate much lower than the general population usually supposes.

The media were initially more reticent when it came to drawing conclusions about the circumstances of the shooting. National Public Radio even posted a condemnation of speculation, after an initial slip-up where they prematurely reported the congresswoman’s demise. After years of substantial work on the part of the mental health community, a growing number of media outlets have turned to a more responsible journalistic approach when it comes to situations where mental illness may be involved.

Read more at The Guardian.

Published at FWD/Forward, August 2010.

From the start, the oil spill has disproportionately impacted people of colour. Many of the cleanup workers were people of colour, and BP also used primarily nonwhite prison labour in oil spill cleanup and tried to hide it. Now, with the spill cleanup winding down, waste from the spill is being dumped on nonwhite communities even as these communities struggle to recover economically from the impacts of the spill. They can look forward to leaching of oil and chemicals from their landfills  in the coming decades, and reports on the ground also indicate that the waste is already poorly controlled, with oil slicks and tarballs showing up around communities being used as dumping sites.

Read more at FWD/Forward.

Published at FWD/Forward, July 2010.

The report documents cases of people who did not understand what deportation meant and lacked the ability to comprehend deportation proceedings; one subject asked to be deported to New York, for example. Some interview subjects had intellectual disabilities or untreated mental illnesses that made it functionally impossible to understand what was happening, while others were in extreme emotional distress and had difficulty comprehending the proceedings, let alone communicating. At least two cases included US citizens wrongfully subjected to deportation proceedings. One North Carolina native had bipolar disorder, was unable to understand the case against him, and could not represent himself in court, so he was deported to Mexico. Another, a US citizen since childhood, would have been deported if it weren’t for the actions of an attorney with the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Centre.

Read more at FWD/Forward.