I know a man who was on the cutting edge of the art world in the sixties when he was stricken with Schizophrenia. He makes amazing, multi-media pieces that my more educated colleagues inform me are more than passingly relevant to the contemporary art scene. These works of art grace the walls and clutter the closet of the small room in a run-down house in the bad section of town that he shares with a dozen mental health clients. When he knows you very, very well and is feeling particularly safe with you, he'll show you one or two pieces and try to explain to you what it means to him to make them. From what I can make out, essentially, they mean to him that there is a reason to stay alive.

I once watched a Tibetan monk on his knees for hours pouring colored sand into an intricate and ancient pattern for a museum installation that was to last for three days. Four days later, he returned to wipe the mandala away. He made no comments to any of us. We made no comments to him. There was just the sand, and then there wasn't.

When the main character of Sideways realizes he's just a "handprint on a skyscraper," and that even this very sentiment is nothing new, he despairs that he is a failure to the world, a mere Middle School teacher, because his book will never be published. When his lover reads the book she sees right into his soul and asks him why he cares if it is published or not, since "so much of him" is in the book. This is of course the problem; he keeps submitting the book for publication because he wants the whole impersonal commercial intellectual world to value who he is, to tell him he's more important than a mere Middle School Teacher, and to love him in that safe detached way that only the Public can achieve.

I know a poet who hasn't written in a year because he wasn't accepted into the MFA program he desired. The rejection letter stopped him from being a student. His need to be approved by the admissions committee at that program has effectively stopped him from being a poet.

And I'll just drop a line to affirm that people who read your story care about you and think you are special, and I am one of them.

You are special because of everything that is unique about you and every experience you have had, whether it be joyful or painful. And the next few months are probably going to be painful, so remember two things: 1) This too shall pass. You are going to come out of this on the other end as a whole person. This is not going to break you. 2) What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Even the pain you are suffering now is at work reshaping your conscience, your spirit, your identity. It is part of what makes you special, even though it hurts and even though you would not have wished it on yourself or anyone else. In order to find out how you have been changed, though, you have to speak about your experiences and be heard by people who can understand you.

May you have peace and may you come to know your own strength and your own unique and infinite worth.

In my opinion, from the inside (though rather peripherally so, so take this with a grain or five of salt), we're lagging behind other organizations in condemning the administration's torture policy and establishing concrete consequences for members who participate in it because:

1) We are less secure about ourselves and our role in the medical community. We are not medical doctors, unlike psychiatrists, and tend to be lower on the totem pole in clinical settings. Also, our work is usually based on social rather than hard science which, at least in my experience, tends to make us a bit sheepish and tentative in the shadow of those other organizations. This also makes us vulnerable to the scientific equivalent of fuzzy math, which less ethical individuals can hide behind to protect their well-paying government jobs and political connections. Ahem.

2) The degree to which a psychologist who is not working in a clinical setting with obvious patient/doctor relationships is really a healer versus a researcher, assessor, or some other type of independent agent is very unclear (and sometimes it's not so clear even where there is a patient/doctor type relationship). The APA is not solely comprised of people dedicated to the betterment of humankind through a healing relationship with an individual.

3) The APA is afraid of losing influence as an organization both in the psychological community (as the article points out), and in the culture of the current political elites, who would probably not blink an eye if the opportunity to support an alternative organization came around; we've made some decisions as an organization that, to say the least, conservatives do not like. But we do very much want to stay in their good graces enough to be the exclusive licensor of therapists working in government facilities, hence reserving the cushiest positions for those who have attended our sanctioned schools and passed our sanctioned exams, now don't we? Ahem and ahem.

These are by no means excuses, but they may help to explain some of the chickenshit-itis that we seem to be displaying. That and I wonder about how many of us are Democrats (myself included) and are hence getting rather too used to chickenshit-like behaviors in general.