What's New with Me

These are notes on my struggle with mental illness and with Asperger's syndrome that is not a form of mental illness but a disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, including other disorders such cognitive disability, developmental disability, etc

Later, I may describe the nature of my two mental disorders – bipolar and agoraphobia with panic disorder as I've learned from being involved with therapists for thirty years.  Right now I just get my thoughts down on paper.  I have a blog, which according to my computer is called David Duboff, Lifetime Social Worker and Member of Occupy Wall Street.
When it was constructed five years ago I thought it was entitled Housing and Mental Health because those were the two primary areas I had been working with for over thirty years as a community organizer and then as a social worker.

The purpose of mentioning I have a blog is that I want to use it as a journal of some sort, and possibly take my psychotherapists’ suggestion to write a memoir about my struggle with mental illness which would be cathartic and possibly even of some interest.  As a Socialist, I have   always believed my life has been a struggle subsumed within the wider struggle for a better world.
 

My immediate experience is to get help understand the nature of the stress I've been under here at Plymouth court as I realize I will probably have to live in a nursing home for the rest of my, life, the anger I've developed and how I take it out on this place, which includes the fact that with Asperger I have to tolerate living in an institution with strict procedures.  This, it seems, is just a part of a work involving using the mental system for my benefit, being an integral part of that system as it helps me help other mentally ill people, while struggling to be a radical at the same time.
 

Since I  first became mentally ill thirty years ago (or perhaps even before that) I have always felt that self-determination for the mentally ill is essentially the same as for any other group of people who have been denied their civil rights and, in many cases brutalized, because of barriers of what’s considered “normal” behavior, gender issues, issues of color, etc.  One thing I continue to think about is whether being politically radical in terms of fighting for more and better housing for the mentally ill, poor and homeless people, along with human services, is part of a broader popular struggle for democratic socialism.