I have always believed in having a plan, a next step. Call it a goal or an objective. I believe in a tomorrow that begins with right now.
More than half a decade has passed since the completion of my last six-year plan. For better or worse, it is time to begin a new narrative that will echo with the voices of my distant but not forgotten past: re-visited and re-imagined.
Today’s plan for tomorrow returns to my core belief in the creation new knowledge and the elimination barriers within our culture that arm us with fear and oppressive judgement. Lived experience reveals that this is no simple task. Gatekeepers, experts, and so-called experienced professionals are one of many obstacles that exist to challenge and suppress our drive to live to this ideal.
So, in keeping with the lived experience I have accumulated from distant pasts I destine a plan organic and ripe with hope of success.
Functionally my plan is a partnership between the university system, our mental health delivery system as it exists today, and a cross sectional collaboration across New York state to circulate a narrative of recovery for the purpose of disarming a language of ableism.
It begins with Full Community Access and Integration: Dislodging Lockdown From Treatment. Systematically we will Introduce new knowledge to mental health treatment through a deep belief that care needs to exist beyond the confines of a locked unit in a psychiatric warehouse. It is time we charge our university system with the task of envisioning full community integration and system wide ward closures of our state psychiatric facilities.
In partnership with the office of mental health, social work and psychology departments will draft and propose the viability of Ward Closure Teams that will plan, assess, and implement the dismantlement of locked long-term care units across the state and identify gaps in community care and access at the local level.
Distilled down to its most basic premise, my plan begins with a belief in change, functions through dialogue, and is realized by our capacity to want more for ourselves.