Rage And Counter-Rage

Yesterday we had a community meeting at the Union Hotel, the subsidized apartment building where I live. The meeting was facilitated by the building manager and the social director. Anitra and I and one other tenant brought up an ongoing complaint, and about half the meeting consisted of the five of us discussing the complaint while others present just listened in. The complaint was this: when any one tenant in the building repeatedly disturbs the peace of his neighbors (we couldn't name names, and we were talking about more than one loud disruptive tenant) the management doesn't do anything to relieve the disturbed.

To clarify that, lets say Jack lives in 101 and Jill lives in 102 (there are actually no apartments 101 or 102 in my building.) Say Jack screams and rages and stomps his floor, 24-7. Say Jill is a child abuse survivor (like me) who has PTSD and not only can't sleep through Jack's rages but also has flashbacks because of them. Say Jill complains every single day about Jack's behavior.

The result of all those complaints will be no relief for JIll. None whatsoever.

After enough complaints, under some circumstances, the management will approach Jack and try to help HIM with the difficulties HE is having managing his behavior.

But no relief for Jill.

Jack has to be accommodated, of course, because his disruptive behavior is due to mental illness. That's why any intervention with Jack is presented as "helping" Jack deal with HIS problems. I understand that.

What I don't understand is how the needs of Jill get tossed aside and she never, ever, gets relief, even though her needs are also the needs of a person presenting mental health problems.

One of the things I said during the meeting was that it really galls me that, all the time that the building manager and social director talked about what they could try to do in these situations, each and every time the word "help" was used it was in the context of helping the Jacks. Never would they speak of "what can we do to help the Jills?"

A point I didn't raise at the meeting, but a sore point for me, and one they're going to hear about sooner than later, is that these people aren't even mental health professionals.

Ironically, we were told earlier in the meeting about nurses who have begun visiting the building that could provide some medical assistance to tenants. It occurs to me that the building management wouldn't dream of trying to act as medical nurses to anyone in the building presenting a significant physical complaint. But upon their own assessment of a serious mental health problem of a tenant they will presume to act as if they were psychiatric nurses.

So, we have a situation in the building where one of the Jacks is a paranoid schizophrenic who has delusions concerning other tenants persecuting him, and who therefore harangues other tenants in the halls and in the community room and in the lobby. And the management steps in when people complain of being harangued, and they try to "help" this Jack.

But instead of getting better, he gets worse. Could it be that the "help" he's getting is just feeding his disease?

I think so. I think the man's acting-out from paranoid delusions serves the purpose of calling attention to himself. The "help" is the attention he gets. They're just encouraging him by demonstrating over and over again that if he acts out he'll get rewarded with exactly what he wants, to be the center of attention at all times. They also reinforce his belief in his delusions, because he knows that the management is intervening with him in response to the other tenants complaints.

The Jacks need a place to live too, and I wouldn't propose evicting them. But the methods now being used to address these kind of problems are totally unacceptable. DESC has to find a way to address the needs of people who have PTSD who have been placed next door to disruptive people.

They're the ones who are suffering the most. For all we know the paranoid schizophrenic is as happy and blissful as he's ever been in his life with all the attention he's getting, but the people who live next door to him are undoubtedly not happy from having their lives destroyed by constantly being subjected to screaming harangues, and they are grievously unhappy to realize that the DESC management can't even bring themselves to talk about helping them.

Which makes them (us, I'm one of them) feel like were just part of the fixtures around here. We aren't even shown the compassion that animals would be given under the same circumstances.

Return of OoMM

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. This one is a month old; I was too sick to think of posting it here at the time. The hiatus was due to the 9 month hiatus of the Union Hotel Newsletter. -- wes]

It's been nine months since we've done one of these newsletters. I'll have to get nine months worth of complaints out before I can get back to normal.

First, I have the flu. I'm convinced that one of the reasons I get the flu twice a year instead of the normal once is I ride buses.

Have you ever thought about why it is so dangerous for you to ride in a car, sitting down, unbuckled, that the government is justified in ticketing your driver for it, but when it comes to bus riding it's OK to have people not only not buckled in, but standing? How does this situation come about? Could it be that when it comes to buses in King County, it's the government that's really driving?

So follow the connections, please. The government operates the bus system. Your excuse that "I didn't use my seat belt because it was inconvenient" translates nicely to the governments excuse, "We didn't put more buses on the road because we needed to spend that money on more cops to give people tickets for not buckling up."

So if you ride the buses every day, and you're not so obviously handicapped that the driver makes some other victim give you their seat, you are going to be standing in the aisles along with all the other human cattle, and someone behind you is going to sneeze on your neck, and there's your flu.

OK, that was one complaint. The next one is like unto the first.

When the city announced that there was going to be a Fire Department facility at 4th and Washington, was it just my imagination or did they not say anything at all to lead us to expect big bay doors and an emergency response team? I heard "offices, a communication hub, conference rooms."

The same city that tries to shut down night clubs in this area on the grounds that they're too loud for us poor residents, goes and plants an emergency response facility one block to our Northeast, when we already have Fire Station #1 a block to our Southwest? What next, at all compass directions?

Why don't they just install 52 separate fire engine sirens in our 52 individual rooms, set to go off randomly 52 times a day? Obviously they think this is all for our own good.