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Twenty Seven A Heart Attack During the night of October 31, 1998, Uncle Mo had a heart attack and died in his sleep. The ranch hands had had the weekend off because of the holidays on November 1 and 2. Lucy found the body when she came to work the morning of November 3. In a state of shock, she called her father, who called 911. Mr. Sanderson arrived at the ranch about the same time as the paramedics and the police. As there was no evidence of foul play, Mr. Sanderson was free to arrange the transportation of the body to the funeral home, where it was decided that Uncle Mo would be cremated. The rest of the year was complicated. Uncle Mo had died without a last will and testament, which made the probate process difficult. As Mr. Sanderson was Uncle Mo’s only living relative, he became executor of the estate. Nevertheless, he couldn’t make any financial decisions until the conclusion of the probate. The first thing he did was inform the workers that they wouldn’t be paid until

To Senator Rouson's aide, I am writing to you about the expense of drug store psychiatric treatment. It is the seed of the opioid epidemic. The lie perpetuated is that there’s a way to chemically improve your life. There is no healthy way to chemically address common problems like feelings of anger, sadness, sleeplessness and anxiety. It can be dehumanizing. It’s also costly. Drug sales run into the trillions. The medications are 100$ -$200 per bottle. All people become anxious and tired and can’t sleep. They become sad and overwhelmed with their feelings and their imbalances. They’re unable to handle their emotions. The fact that some of it is true leaves the door open for people to simply perform the role of being a doctor without any information about the person. They’re putting a chemical Band-Aid on a wound they don’t address. It can be addressed. It takes knowledge about how to live happily. Any healthy human could help. There is no need for labels. Breaking a leg would not cause someone to be labeled “person with a broken leg” for the rest of their lives. These illnesses involve trauma. The symptoms are just the result. You really can’t treat the symptoms without addressing the cause. Often it’s the environment and a lack of ability to work and socialize. If there’s a problem communicating that needs to be addressed in order for the person to heal. Trauma can be healed but not from without, only from within. The person dealing with the person affected needs to know how to initiate healing in the person they are trying to understand. Without understanding there will be no result. This is where 10 minute appointments with a doctor cause them to become dangerous, incompetent and irrelevant. No understanding. We need partial support housing. The breaks are occurring more and more often to more and more people. It remains a matter of being taught not drugged. Patients could be given a lifestyle change not a drugged lifestyle. This process can amount to Identity theft which is dangerous if you're trying to establish yourself. A working community would benefit everyone. It would save money.These are the survival skills that keep violence from happening in the first place. This is why it is the seed that gave birth to the opioid epidemic. The claim was that drugs were the healer and now they have believers. It’s a trillion-dollar business that is costing us our health. For a community or society to function bonds of trust need to be established. We can put up buildings but that is not building community. If people have no way of living independently or establishing relationships they need community like a person with no legs needs a wheelchair. Mainly, it would help to be socialized and educated. Basic living, basic training. Not everyone will need to stay. Some could transition out, especially people who are suddenly disabled and need to learn how to work out new living skills. We need to be ourselves and still be acceptable. If we have anything to offer it will only come through openness and inclusiveness. Western psychiatric medicine proposed that drugs were a stand alone solution and we have the tragic results. Suicide is a leading cause of death; the second leading cause of death for youngsters. We take literally tons of pills in this country daily. The opioid epidemic and other forms of illness are caused by people masking their pain because this is the only way the system is dealing out answers. It’s also teaching people that the solution is to run away from suffering and to drug themselves. Healthy environment, healthy body, healthy mind. The doctors do not know the patients because the appointments last only ten minutes. They’re not supposed to learn anything about the patient. There is no expectation that the people's health will improve. Sister Dang Nghiem, a monastic physician taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, is an expert in the field of healing trauma by addressing it directly. Her book “Flowers in the Dark" is essential wisdom. We can learn a lot from meditation and mindfulness. Everyone living in a community could help and learn to assist: with paperwork, medical regime, eating right, healing emotions, interacting with others, learning to manage stress wisely, how to meditate and how to exercise and most importantly to work and socialize. Once these simple skills are mastered it will open doors for a life-changing improvement. To be given such negative images and drugs and to be abandoned is destructive. The drugs are being administered to 5-year-old children and teenagers who gain 100 pounds from the side effects. This is devastating on more than one level. It is a dangerous identity theft for someone so young. The side effects are absurdly negative and expected to be damaging. Drugs that are bad for the body are bad for the mind, it's one system. Healthy environment, healthy body, healthy mind. The money could be addressing the basic needs of those who won’t survive a disabling condition but instead will be trapped in low cost lives living isolated and broke but disabled by the arrangement that is trying to help. It is preventing them from developing and becoming self-sufficient. These are people who are struggling daily with tasks that are easy for others. People who can’t survive in the mainstream because of a condition would be grateful to have the opportunity to live in a self-sustaining community. These basics are denied to people who need them the most. It is mostly set up so that people either work in the mainstream or not at all. Clinton put in legislation that allows us to receive a certain amount. There are those of us who would need help with finances, taxes, stability, health and training to establish what the highest level of ability would be. It seems like we are trying to establish the lowest level of functioning instead. This is expensive in the long run for everyone. People are forced to become dependent. We can strengthen every level of society and everyone will have more money. Education is economical. In a central location the paperwork could reflect the fact that people are earning a legal amount to subsidize themselves. The government is paying people to stay sick instead of paying them to match funds and giving them an incentive. Few people are so completely disabled that they cannot work at all. If people were in a special needs community the pressure would be lessened. It would overcome many of the obstacles in place making it difficult; being unable to overcome a medical situation, needing to eat right, relate to people, get suitable training and employment, transportation, being only able to work from home, or being unable to work full time at all times. We need transition centers where people can live and work and heal. Although there might be medical care for weeks or months or longer this transition center could be self supporting. Enormous amounts of money are wasted on ineffective treatment centers for various kinds of addiction.These people also can be filtered through a transition community while working to serve the community and heal. We can't afford to continue to refuse to acknowledge injuries because they are not visible. There is a way to address them. The resources are too spread out to be accessed in an effective way. Vocational Rehabilitation could be incorporated. We need to know how people work, what they can do and more importantly how they interact with people and with themselves. These people are in situations that could be physical, cognitive, temporary as from an accident, or long term from birth. The line for money could be drawn to cultivate the health of individuals who need to be brought up to the level of functioning that other people already have. They can be separated into people who move back into the community with support and people who are actually disabled. Disability money should never disable anyone. We don’t need doctors; we need teachers. The monastics of Plum Village provide solutions. They study neuroscience and psychology in depth. They have refined their teachings to make them usable and accessible to everyone. They are highly educated teachers with solutions that involve internal change giving the responsibility to the patient. Harvard has recently opened a School for Public Health to teach people using these same techniques. A community like this could be a refuge for people in the larger community. This unilaterally open environment could be established as a basis for the integration of other communities. We need to establish a social intimacy that is threatening to no one. Disregarding the need for social contact and development as well as the need to address communication issues is a mess. Without a social network, the situation reaches climactic proportions before a haphazard barrage of chemicals is applied to correct an episode without finding a cause. The fear-based perception that diversity is a threat is crippling the minds of the general public. There is no discrimination like the given disregard and mistrust of the disabled. Medical professionals who are in this type of healing need to be able to speak from their own experience. They need to be healed themselves or willing to take part in that process. It has little to do with science or medicine. We all need to do this continuously. It creates balance in the individual and harmony in the community as a whole. President Kennedy was able to act. The legislation he signed into effect was to initiate community for people who need to address the mental health issue. We all do. It is now a necessity and has become urgent. Mental health awareness month is May. Hopefully we can be well prepared in 2023. We can arm ourselves with experience and wisdom instead of book knowledge. I hope you will be part of the new movement for self directed change. Put the responsibility on the individuals involved and give people a chance to heal. It would probably save billions if you think about money and lives if you think about people. Very respectfully, a loyal constituent.