Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009

TTT NOV 18: MENTAL ILLNESS: Not So Far from Home As We May Think

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NOV 18: MENTAL ILLNESS: Not So Far from Home As We May Think

Victims of mental illness have never had an easy time of it. It’s difficult enough coping with the demons that haunt their minds and distort their dreams and world view. Delusions and demons of illnesses such as clinical and bi-polar depression, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can lead them to engage in self-destructive behavior – addiction, suicide and violence toward the ones they love most. In worst cases, they take it to the streets where, when confronted by law enforcement, they have died at the hands of police officers ill-trained to deal with mentally ill men and women, war-torn veterans and mothers, abuse victims and chemically unbalanced brains.

Cops have killed too many of these victims. Society fears them, sometimes for cause, more often unnecessarily. In the past, we simply warehoused them with little in the way of adequate treatment – counseling and proper medication; with the closing of state institutions, we now leave many of them to wander the streets, homeless, jobless and refuse to fund the relief – treatment and acceptance - they so desperately need and deserve. The shooting to death of Barbara Schneider by Minneapolis police officers several years ago, spawned an organized community response to cease such callous overreaction and a foundation in her name. One response has been the creation of crisis intervention team training.

This week, _TTT’s_ ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN talk with three of the Barbara Schneider Foundation’s principals about where the movement is taking us.

GUESTS:

• MARK ANDERSON - Executive Director, Barbara Schneider Foundation l and the Mental Health Crisis Response Institute

• CHARLES JENSEN - Mental health advocate with Barbara Schneider Foundation; 12 years homeless; arrested 89 times, including seven felony arrests

• PATTI KRESSLEY - police officer(13 years); MA, counseling psychology; Instructor, Argosy University

• “RUTH” - Mental Health Consumer

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Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009

TTT Nov 11: GOVERNING THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS: Who's in Charge? Who Should Be?

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NOV 11: GOVERNING THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS: Who's in Charge? Who Should Be?

The departure of two urban school superintendents in the same year, both Bill Green in Minneapolis, and Meria Carstarphen in St. Paul after a relatively short time in their positions, not to mention the continuing issue of achievement gaps, resegregation, state vs. local funding bases, teacher contracts and accountability, the politics of central office control vs. site-based management alternatives raise very serious questions over the best constructs for K-12/P-12 school governance.

Why have charter schools with their far less restrictive covenants become so popular among public school parents, despite data that show little or, in some cases, less academic success than traditional public classrooms? Is something much more fundamental at play here? Is the inadequate funding and public attention paid to K-12 education at all connected to the separation of education, in general, from all other aspects of the social contract and public policy? Did we create a mess of monsters with the creation of the independent school districts, essentially segregating education from all other aspects of life in our communities?

TTT's ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN examine those questions and query representatives of school boards, parents, teachers and policy observers as we begin a conversation about where school governance should go to make education the truly important and integrated system most everyone sees as grooming every next generation of citizens and leaders.

GUESTS:

• PAM COSTAIN - Minneapolis School Board member; former Chair

• ELONA STREET-STEWART - Vice Chair, St. Paul Board of Education

• LAURA BLOOMBERG - former Deputy Director, HHH Center for School Change; Director, Center for Integrative Leadership (HHH Institute/Carlson School); fmr school board member, Mahtomedi Schools

• MARY CATHRYN RICKER - President, St. Paul Federation of Teachers

• DENNIS SCHAPIRO - former Minneapolis school board member; Founder, Jola Publications; Editor/Publisher, Public School Montessorian

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Wednesday, Nov 04, 2009

TTT NOV 4: WOMEN IN THE MILITARY

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NOV 4: WOMEN IN THE MILITARY: Trauma Inside and Out

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More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female soldier said, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine."

Those words from the leaf of a stunning book, The Lonely Soldier, by Helen Benedict, and describing the still-burning issues that shame our military and civilian attitudes toward women serving in the military - both highlighted in two coming performances of At War with Women, starring and about Chante Wolf, in St. Paul – one on Veterans Day(Nov 11) at Hamline University's Sundin Hall, the other Friday the 13th at Macalester College’s Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel - revealing the traumas women soldiers and veterans suffer in and after combat and military service.*

PTSD - combat and otherwise - are often no different from those of the military men we hear about all the time, themselves often forced to suck it up rather than seek assistance for their nightmares and the violence memories trigger with little warning in the middle of the night. Add the dimensions of sexual predation and humiliation by combat comrades and the recipe is disaster.

TTT's ANDY DRISCOLL and LYNNELL MICKELSEN talk with a woman veteran, author Helen Benedict and another advocate in search of deeper and wider understanding of the plight of women in the military.

GUESTS:

• CHANTE WOLF - US Air Force Veteran, Persian Gulf War; Veterans for Peace activist and Photographer

• HELEN BENEDICT - Author, The Lonely Soldier (nonfiction); The Edge of Eden (fiction) - both about military women/families

• ESTHER OURAY - Director, At War with Women; Associate Artist/Puppeteer, Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre; advocate for art working on peace and justice issues.

*No website is available for this beyond the play venues

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