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67 3 Mental Health Client Action Network (MHCAN), Santa Cruz, California Bonnie Schell The Mental Health Client Action Network (MHCAN) is a drop-in center in Santa Cruz, California, run by adults diagnosed with major mental disorders who want to create a healing place for themselves and their peers. Our program began in the 1970s as part of an anti-psychiatry political group and evolved through four historical phases to become a contractor providing consumer-operated services for North County Mental Health in Santa Cruz, California. In the first phase of consumer organizing, adults who had been diagnosed with major mental disorders met together informally in the community as members of the Psychiatric Inmates Rights Collective (PIRC). Their energy stemmed primarily from anger at the formal mental health system, with the certainty that consumers could treat patients in a more sensitive, respectful manner. I was angry because when medication mistakes were made or when my friends were physically and emotionally abused in the hospital, providers never apologized. I also took exception to the practice of routinely handcuffing persons in front of their neighbors when police took them to the hospital for observation. PIRC’s focus changed significantly in 1991, beginning MHCAN’s second phase of development, when the group decided to attend a national consumer conference, Alternatives, in Berkeley. Raising funds to attend the conference required collaboration with non-PIRC members and the mental health system in Santa Cruz. A third phase began after the conference, when MHCAN split from PIRC and cooperated with county mental health services to start a consumer-operated drop-in on site at the county clinic. Consumer leaders approached and retreated and bargained for their own drop-in center with their own rules, with the result OnOurOwnFinalPages.indd฀฀฀67 4/16/05฀฀฀6:10:07฀PM 68 On Our Own Together: Drop-In Centers that MHCAN moved away from the clinic and achieved consistency in its program and staff. MHCAN, in its fourth phase, is now a nonprofit organization and operates a stand-alone community drop-in that provides mutual support to others, including those who are homeless and those not receiving services. Figure 3.1 lists what clients of mental health services find when they arrive at our community-centered drop-in. The fourth and most recent phase of our development was initiated by MHCAN’s selection to participate in the federal Consumer-Operated Services Programs (COSP) Multi-Site Research Initiative in 1998. As a halftime research staff person, I was put on a steep learning curve to make reports, hire non-consumers for research staff, look at factors which attracted consumers to the drop-in, record their participation, and evaluate our program. Participation in the research study equipped MHCAN as an organization to take charge of its own well-being and survival. The remainder of this chapter describes more fully these four phases of MHCAN’s development. Phase I: Anger and Certainty (1975–90) The most vocal group of town radicals met monthly in John Stuart’s rented front room in a big house in downtown Santa Cruz, a California beach town with a population of fifty-five thousand. Jane Kysor’s blue VW station wagon, covered in anti-psychiatry stickers (“Housing, not Haldol!”), brought six people, all outpatients of the public mental health system. Other members came by bus, calling themselves “ex-patients.” Both the ex-patients and the outpatients living in board and care homes called themselves “survivors,” meaning that they had survived mental health treatments. At a typical meeting, the first item of business was for all to “check in,” reporting on how their lives were going. Then Jane would list the needs in the survivor community—who needed clothes or shoes, who wanted to be visited in locked facilities, and when hearings about conservatorship of a person were scheduled in Superior Court. This was the PIRC, formed in 1975 by former mental patients, aided by students in a community services class at the University of California at Santa Cruz. PIRC members were later to be present at the founding of MHCAN. PIRC took an anti-psychiatry position, contrary to the biological-medical model of mental illness, that left them unlikely to be funded by state and county traditional services. PIRC’s specific purpose was to educate the public about abuses in the traditional mental health system, to promote the civil rights and liberties of those institutionalized, OnOurOwnFinalPages.indd฀฀฀68 4/16/05฀฀฀6:10:07...

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