A Haven of Redemptive Suffering

 

Extract from Martin Luthor King Jr's Shattered Dreams

II

“What, then, is the answer? The answer lies in our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstances even as we still cling to a radiant hope, our acceptance of finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist, but the achievement found in Jeremiah's words, “This is a grief, and I must bear it.”

You must honestly confront your shattered dream. To follow the escapist method of attempting to put the disappointment out of your mind will lead to a psychologically injurious repression. Place you failure at the forefront of your mind and stare daringly at it. Ask yourself, “How may I transform this liability into an asset? How may I, confined in some narrow Roman cell and unable to reach life's Spain, transmute this dungeon of shame into a haven of redemptive suffering?”

Some Personal Stuff

 

I've need a transfer from my current housing situation, but I've got a problem getting the medical documentation I need

The problem I have with getting the medical documentation I need to get more appropriate housing and other things is the form of treatment I have chosen and the rationale behind it.

Under normal circumstances a person suffering the kind of mental illness I am suffering has to be heavily medicated.

I believe – and there is a growing body of research to back this up – that both the effectiveness of these drugs is questionable in the long run, and that they come with a number of dangers, some of which I am particularly vulnerable to, like drug dependency.

I also believe that many of the difficulties that bring out my mental illness, and interfere with the treatment I have chosen are circumstantial, and not at all to do with my mental health. In fact I believe that the frequency and severity of events that I have been living with now for a number of years speaks for itself. It would be enough to drive anyone mad.

So, since I’m stuck here the usual psychotherapeutic way of deal with circumstances you can’t change is to change the way you process the information. When I detail what my treatment actually is, I think you’ll find much of it is about changing my thought processes and behaviours to do just this.

So what is my treatment? Well, after doing a lot of reading about conventional therapies, and having tried everything from CBT to mindfulness, to rehab, to phychologists, I decided to start from scratch on a different premise.

The premise was to allow myself to recognise that these circumstances that I can’t change are quite unreasonable, and to allow myself be angry about that. To pursue my own good health in spite of that fact. And when I looked at the evidence around what actually does work for good mental health, I found that there were no easy paths. The things that work are the basics. Sleep, good food, exercise, keeping your mind active...basically having a healthy lifestyle.

I have also had to persue this new regimen while often under duress, so I have had to think about how the fact that I am constantly triggered while going through these routines will affect what I’m doing.

So, when you are triggered, the part of your mind that thinks creatively shuts down, and you fall back into automatic routines. At the beginning this was a real problem, because almost all my automatic reactions were unhealthy. But since I have started this new routine I have been slowly building up new habits. And it’s working. It’s a slow, painful process, but it’s working.

After years of work on myself, I no longer run away and get wasted at some party whenever there’s a problem. I am rid of all my addictions aside from pot and cigarettes, which are next on the list but require a peaceful place to be to get there. I have read 80 – 100 books, and studied them, highlighting and rewriting parts of them as I go to memorise them. I have done a number of commercial pieces including a DVD cover, a large sculpture that got David Walsh’s attention, and various bits of advertising done for friends. I have also done some quite laborious storyboarding for movies and music videos.

My theory is that if I have a couple of books going, my blog to write, and a few projects going on at any one time, if I get triggered at home I can fall into which ever one of these healthy activities jumps into my racing mind from moment to moment.

But all the while, things in these flats have been getting slowly worse for me since I was at Stainforth Court. That’s not to say the incidents overall in the flats have been worse. The problem is the amount of negative attention on my flat in the general community, and the amount of agro, and outright abuse directed at it, and occasionally threats. This went from almost non of the agro involving me personally at stainforth court, to one or two people here causing me trouble (leading to getting assaulted) to now, which has all of a sudden turned into every single drug user in these blocks convinced I am a narc, which I think anyone will tell you is a dangerous and unpredictable situation. There are at least six or more flats in miles street and about the same in the livingston street flats. I am inundated with curses, loud banging, hooning, people at my door with serious mental illness. I try to put my headphones on, but even then I hear them, and it is the first thing I hear as soon as I take them off. Most nights I go to bed hearing “fuck, fuck, fuck” and wake up to the same. It’s absurd.

At stainforth court I was at least quite high up and away from most of the chaos. I only ever really had to deal with it as I was coming and going while I was there. The flat that I am in now in comparison, is like a fish bowl. If there are a number of people in the neighbourhood who want to express their unhappiness about me, then there is scarcley ten minutes that go by on some days when I am not hearing some sort of aweful voice or curse or otherwise. Often it is not necessarily directed at me, but it IS directed at me just often enough that every noise I hear is spiking my adrenalin.

It’s worse here now than it was leading up to my attack, because where back then it was just the one flat that I was finding threatening, now I get abuse from so many flats that I never know which direction it’s going to come from next.

It’s sending me into coughing fits that last days, and as my doctor said to me once, even smokers don’t cough like that. It’s a panic attack.

So what I need is some sort of social psychiatrist who is aware of the works of people like Loren Mosher, who believe in and can see the social affects of mental health, and are on board with me trying to find a social solution...namely, getting me way from the abusive environment and into something more suitable.

So far, I don’t feel that any of the medical professionals I have seen so far seem to hear or understand exactly what I’ve been living with, and their descriptions of my circumstance to not at all reflect what I am going through. I think to a social psychiatrist or any reasonable person really, that the cause of my distress is plain, obvious and serious.

The problem with my chosen treatment as far as putting me into another block of flats or any kind of closely bunched up housing, is that another theory I have been working on to keep myself level, is that when I am angry or sad or want to sing, or cry or yell, that I allow myself to. The theory that I have been working on is that my body and mind know what they need. Also, when I do go into coughing fits and panic attacks, it sounds quite loud and distressing. But I need to go through these things. It was my doctor that recommended me to have a shower if I need to decongest. I need to breathe. And allowing myself to go through these things have been critical to the success of my treatment. What I need is a safe environment to go through this without copping abuse or feeling like I am inconveniencing others. This is critical if I am to re-train my adrenal system to realise there is no external danger.

Unfortunately the noises I make while I am going through this would upset any neighbour. If I am moved to another block of flats and they start getting upset about the noises I am making, the whole process starts all over again and nothing has been solved.

What I need is for housing to recognise that is repeated exposure to extreme life events that has made me this sensitive to external noises in the first place, and it is the same exposure that has made my recovery such an extreme and noisey process to go through.

I am getting to the limit to how much of my lifestyle I can change while I am being triggered all the time. I think I have done quite well so far under very extreme circumstances, and what I need is a quiet, safe space where I can sometimes completely loose my na-na while my head tries to come to terms with the nightmarish conditions I’ve lived under for far too long.

I need a doctor and some other form of medical professional that understands and are on-board with all of this. Anything less is of no use to me whatsoever.

Full Disclosure

Another piece of my interview with the ABC about my experiences in public housing

If I am serious about the idea that people only look at personal responsibility and ignore external influences when judging others, I think it's important that I am honest about what I did get wrong.

It wasn't easy, but this is it. It hasn't been edited, so it's a bit rough.

https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/fulldisclosure

Drug Use and Social Income

Why do some seem to stuggle more with their drug use than others?

Well, the neoliberal paternalist model would tell us to look at failures in the individual. But is this really all that is going on?

I will make an argument that alongside a persons personal choices is a lack of social income (support networks, good will, etc) for some but not others that can often make the difference in keeping one’s head above water.

Lumpen Precariat Stuck in Micro Debt Cycles

Neoliberal paternalist views on moral worth tend to lead people to separate “those who contribute” with “shirkers”. Little consideration is given to the persons financial position as if a persons values are the primary factor in a their ability to pay, not economic disadvantage.

Those deemed to be “morally worthy” are extended special privileges such as lower prices, more credit, and often other unquantifiable benefits. Those who are already disadvantage end up being nothing more than a customer base to exploit. They pay the highest prices (despite the fact that they are in the worst position to pay) and are dealt with in a paternalistic fashion – not as equals. This often leaves them in debt. If the debt becomes too large it can become crippling. The less exploitative among dealers may put a limit on the amount of credit a person can get, but this only really serves to perpetuate the lifetime of the exploitation and can hardly be put down to purely altruistic motives.

All this serves to create a class structure not that unlike the spread of inequality generally. A lumpen underclass of people in perpetual debt, an aristocratic class that get just enough benefits to make it in their interests to perpetuate the system and a tiny elite at the top who rarely get caught and remain mostly anonymous.



The people at the bottom are the most likely to have sanctions imposed on them for a range of reasons, not least getting caught by the police for possession, but also from the parternalist neoliberal state who will punish the drug user for not staying on top of their budget and will impose sanctions and behaviour modification techniques in an attempt to make the person more market compliant.

If the police or the government need to be seen to be “cleaning up the streets” it is often a member of the second tier that gets caught, but rarely if ever is it the people at the top of the supply chain. Each tier protects the tier above it, leaving the whole system undamaged by police interference.

Neoliberal Paternalist Arguments Against Charity for Drug Users

It is often said that if you give charity to a drug addict that you are enabling them and feeding their addiction. This is just another neoliberal paternalist argument that fails to take into account externalities in a persons life.

The argument goes that you are better off giving to charitable organisations who will make sure that the money is used to benefit the client in a healthy way. In reality this means behaviour modification, sanctions and punishments which often leaves the most in need breached, punished and deprived of support.

This argument of coarse does not hold up unless the organisations themselves are adequately funded, which they are not.



In the struggle against addiction it is wise to keep the addict population at least well-fed and in secure housing. It is tough enough tackling withdrawal symptoms under the best conditions. How much harder would it be to face if you are also malnourished, poverty stricken and in an insecure environment to boot. Instead of addressing these basic social, psychological and biological barriers, the neoliberal paternalist state will instead use a system of sanctions and punishments likely to both drive the addict further into poverty and also make it more difficult to stay off the drugs themselves.

This is where inequality in the real economy has an effect in the black market economy, because while the lumpen precariat at the bottom are dealing with all that, many of the people in the black market “aristocracy” (I’m rethinking this word, in the black market economy, far more profits go to the top than in the real economy, making even the second tier a difficult and unstable place to be financially) are also part of the aristocracy in the real economy.



They often have a support network with their families and with each other to make sure that when things do fall through, at least their basic needs continue to be met. They can crash with the family, with a friend. They might receive a bailout from their parents or a debt cancellation from a friend.

They or people in their support network may own property, and due to their extra social income they have a lot more latitude to re-organise their lives. They have more privacy, which gives them an edge in their illegal activities, as does property ownership.



For these reasons it is often hard to distinguish these people from non drug users. They make an effort to conceal their addiction, and thanks to their support network it is often enough to make them undetectable, even as parents and respected colleagues.

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html;/discussion

Public Housing: Giving Housing Tasmania an Ear-Full

A small part of my email to Housing Tasmania

"It is simply not good enough for Housing Tasmania, Tasmania Police, the State Government and Hobart City Council to be passing the buck on this in a continuous loop. If you are having trouble meeting basic human rights I shouldn't be the one running around in circles to no avail. Perhaps they should be coordinating with each other to get something done. There are other pro-active options you could have taken. Although they do not complain because they do not want to be involved, there are witnesses, and I have told you often who they are. You could have verified it with a simple phone call if it were in your interests to validate my claims. But I feel it is more in your interests to try and poke a hole in my story to let yourselves off the hook. Perhaps if all those organisations cannot protect peoples basic human rights you should all be going on strike for more funding, telling the world that you don't have enough resources to protect peoples basic human rights.

Just know that whatever you do now that my life and my brain is already irreparably ruined because of your decade long series of service failures in my case."

Extracts from 'Disciplining the Poor' + Gentrification Rant

“Give me liberty or death.”

~Patrick Henry

Before anyone suggests that this book refers to America and is not at all relevant for Australia, I’ll start with this…

“Our telling of this story has focused on low-income Americans. It would be a mistake however, to imagine that the developments we have described matter only for this group.”

There was another reference in a related book that references Australia in particular. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m having trouble finding it.

Moving right along...‘Disciplining the Poor’ is about how neoliberal paternalism has affected social welfare policy. We have been using the same guiding principles to reform our own welfare system now for decades.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Here’s a few samples from the book.

It’s hard to cover complex issues by taking quotes from the book out of context, so I have tried to put them in some sort of order that makes sense without having to read the book. This is really only to give you an idea of the general themes.

Once again, please excuse the zeds...they’re American. :)

“Neoliberalism is an effort to extend the reach of market logic, applying it as an organizing principle for all social and political relations.”

“Neoliberal governance privileges economic freedoms at the expense of political freedoms as well as democratic values such as universalism, egalitarianism, promotion of an active citizenry, and conceptions of a public good (W. Brown 2006).”

“It’s most prominent leaders in the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, emphisized the need to liberate markets by reducing regulations and taxes, scaling back workers protections, and giving multinational corporations greater latitude (Harvey 2005). Similar themes animated the “Washington Consensus,” which used organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to force governments in the global South to deregulate their economies (Stiglitz 2002; Peet 2003).

In all these developments, neoliberalism looks very much like a resurgence of laissez-faire, focused on “rolling back” state involvements in the market (Somers and Black 2005; Wacquant 2009). As forms of market fundamentalism, however, the two diverge in significant ways. Laissez-faire doctrines presume that market relations emerge as natural modes of human interaction when people are freed from the distortions of the state. Neoliberalism holds, instead, that functioning markets are not natural outcomes that emerge by default (Klein 2007). Markets must be actively constructed; market behaviors must be learned; and once learned, they must be deliberately extended to new arenas. Neoliberalism treats market rationality as a normative ideal to be pursued through the applications of public authority and uses it as a pre-eminent standard for evaluating institutional designs and individual behaviors throughout society.

Thus, rather than limiting the state, neoliberalism envisions the state as a site for the application of market principles.”

“Chapter 8 explores the marketization of poverty governance, revealing how privatization and the “business model” have turned service provision into a site of profitable investment and a tool for servicing employer needs. Chapter 9 turns our attention to competitive performance systems, analyzing how pressures to meet numerical benchmarks motivate perverse motivational responses, discipline frontline workers, and ultimately promote tougher approaches to governing the poor.”

“...poverty governance today operates as a cascade of policy choice points where relationships between higher- and lower-level actors tend to be structured in consistent ways. A common logic defines each link in the chain from national lawmakers to state officials to local boards to contracted providers to senior managers to frontline case managers to welfare clients. At each step, actors below control information needed by actors above and hold discretion by setting benchmarks, controlling resources, monitoring performance, promoting particular discourses and frames, and deploying rewards and penalties. In this sense, the contemporary system is guided by a consistent governing logic that applies to public officials as much as the poor themselves. Neoliberal governance prioritizes freedom of choice for lower-level actors, yet it works through a panoply of tools to maximize the chances that these actors will “freely choose” courses of action preferred by agenda-setting actors above.”



“The campaign to remake poverty governance attacked the existing regime on many fronts. Critics derided the prevailing approaches to crime and welfare as too soft and permissive to bring social order and self-sufficiency to poor people’s lives. Entitlements sustained an endless cycle of poverty by discouraging work and rewarding irresponsible choices (Murray 1984). By failing to enforce social obligations, welfare made the poor into second-class citizens, ensuring that they would not merit the respect of their fellow citizens or be able to shoulder the burdens of civic and political participation (Mead 1986, 1992). Reformers promised that the new regime would do better. Tougher criminal laws would bring peace and progress to poor communities. Welfare reform would place the poor on a work-based path out of poverty and allow them to flourish as self-sufficient, responsible members of society. Poverty would decline; social and economic well-being would improve; the poor would become full and equal citizens, earning the esteem of others as they became competent participants in public life.

In the years that followed, disciplinary poverty governance was declared a stunning success…In this chapter, we take a critical look at such appraisals.”

“Poverty governance has changed dramatically, yet there is little evidence that disciplinary approaches have led the poor out of poverty or hastened their civic incorporation. To the contrary, as we will see, neoliberal paternalism has produced a system that is less responsive to the poor, even in times of dire need, and more likely to enhance their civic marginality.”

“Reformers claimed that tough new policies would move the poor into the ranks of respected and engaged citizens. We show that nothing of the sort has occurred. Paternalist welfare policies do not advance civic and political incorporation or strengthen American democracy; they do the opposite.”
~Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording & Sanford F. Schram, ‘Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race’

With that in mind, here is a little rant I did last night regarding homelessness, gentrification and the increasing marginalisation of the poor.

https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/a-very-scary-picture

And just for an outro...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zRQijCN5w

Haha! Just listened to it and you can barely hear it. I'll upload a fresh one later today.

Here we go...a version without the backing track. It's much clearer. Sorry about that.

https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/scary-picture

Stainforth Court: closing the door (Part 2)

Second part of my interview with the ABC about my old residence, to be aired on ABC Radio National on Saturday the 9th of March at 1:30pm.

Part 2:
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/stainforth-court:-closing-the-door/9566304
You can find Part 1 here:
https://nathaniel-opinion.blogspot.com/2019/02/stanforth-court-trauma-centre-part-1.html

Gentrification Is Big Business

Salamanca Lawns: Once a Vibrant and Diverse Local Community

For a long time there I gave the Australian public the benefit of the doubt and assumed that gentrification was just a by-product of urbanisation. I was wrong.

It never crossed my mind that it might actually be spoken about in explicit terms. I always saw it as an unfortunate consequence of progress, not something people specifically set out to make money from.

Today, I learned I was Wrong.

When I Googled "gentrification Australia" I was really looking for articles of some of the social consequences of gentrification like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/09/indigenous-people-are-being-displaced-again-by-gentrification-aboriginal-redfern-west-end-fitzroy

But what I found on the top of the list was investment advice like this:

https://propertyupdate.com.au/the-six-stages-of-suburb-gentrification/

And this:


https://propertyupdate.com.au/identify-a-gentrifying-area-and-capitalise-on-its-growth/

I particularly like this one's lovely tasteful expression "drab to fab"
https://www.realestateview.com.au/blog/2018/03/gentrification-in-melbourne/

People not only know it's going on, gentrification is big business, and business is booming.

I was sitting having a cigarette in town with some of the homeless people the other day and the security guard came over. He was very young and was treating these full-grown men like kids at a festival. One of them had just had a family member die and was clearly fed up with being moved on and pushed around, and asked the guy to just leave them alone this time as he'd had a hard day.

The security guard took issue with this and decided instead to press his point. Now before all this there really was nothing going on. These people were just quietly keeping to themselves in a place where they have always gathered for decades.

One of them pointed out the Aboriginal references in some of the art installed there and said "do you know what that means!? It means we've always been here."

I took the young man aside and asked for a private word. I told him that I myself had once worked doing what he's doing and that while appreciated that he was just doing his job, that there was zero chance of there being an incident before he showed up, but that if he kept pushing there was every chance he could create one and that sometimes it's just best to leave things be. I said if you just give them a moment, they'll sit and chat for an hour or two then they'll be on their way. No drama.

I managed to convince him to give them a break, but he didn't look to happy about it. I don't think they should have someone so young doing that job. Someone a little more mature and respectful is called for in a position like that.

This young man was far too inexperienced to even grasp that he is on the front lines of gentrification in Hobart - a conscious and deliberate push to make a profit from the destruction and dispersion of our communities.

I went up to him after and tried to appeal to his better nature and remind him that people in that position have experienced and are experiencing things that we would find hard to imagine. He was straight up convinced that on the contrary, he knows "plenty of people who have had just as hard times or worse" that don't break the law.

So that means he not only knew what the problems were that these guys face but also people that face worse (he must have a special kind of omniscience!). That's big assumption for a young man. But he was unconvinced. So I just reminded him that his job doesn't pay him enough to get himself in the kind of trouble he was about to get himself in and that he should be more careful pushing people who are having a very hard time. I saw him later and he had a pretty grim look on his face.

I was a bit concerned with how it would have looked to the others me taking the security guard aside, but I saw the group the next day and they were all smiles.

I hope it all works out.

Public Housing: Why I Sometimes Put Myself At Risk

https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/why-i-put-myself-at-risk

The Just World Phenomenon:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-just-world-phenomenon-2795304

Stanforth Court: The Trauma Centre Part 1

Interviews with myself and other residents of Stainforth Court on ABC Radio National.

Stainforth Court: the trauma centre

My Interview With ABC Radio National - Earshot

I did an interview with ABC Radio National awhile back. It was part of a series of interviews with reporter Emma Lancaster about life in public housing.

I will also be talking about a range of social and economic issues related to poverty.

I will be referencing a few of the books I have been reading (I don't know how muh of that will make the cut. I'm hoping some of it makes it in,I haven't heard the final edit myself).

The documantary is in two parts and will be aired on the following dates:

Saturday the 2nd of March at 1:30pm
Saturday the 9th of March at 1:30pm

It will also be available as a podcast on the ABC website after it has aired.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/