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And So it Goes

Speaker 1
You.

Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.

Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.

Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.

Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.

Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.

Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.

Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.

Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.

Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.

Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.

Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.

Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.

Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.

Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.

Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.

Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.

Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.

Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.

Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.

Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.

Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.

Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.

Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.

Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.

Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.

Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.

Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.

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Repost: Hoping This Helps Someone Somewhere

No matter how difficult your situation is, I hope you find peace.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT TO FOLLOW

NightWare Review Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

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Taking a New Course Through Berkeley Extension

I’ve signed up for Writing for Social Media: Prose That Works for Web 2.0. (external link) Starts the first week of February and runs for a month and a half. The course number is English X468. I previously took a Creative Nonfiction course through Berkeley Extension (internal link) and I liked it very much.

When I self publish I will have to do all the promoting myself, one reason I was never interested in non-traditional publishing. Still, today, mainstream publishers are helping out less and less with promotion. They expect you to bring in an audience, in fact, some publishers won’t take on a title unless an author has a certain amount of subscribers or followers on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.

Here’s the course description:

Learn to write effectively for social media, specifically blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Establish a coherent writing process; learn editing techniques; and examine the interplay among context, content and style. Classes focus primarily on workshop critiques, peer editing and weekly composition of posts and tweets. Note: This course focuses primarily on content writing and editing, not Web technology.

This is the description of the teacher:

Timothy Peters, B.S., M.A., is an experienced writer and content strategist with a focus on marketing and corporate communications for financial services and technology companies. He also has experience in corporate branding and the application of brand positioning to communications. Past projects include virtually every form of corporate communications writing: annual reports and corporate collateral, white papers, by-lined articles, website concept development, website content, blogs, and business plans. He also reviews fiction for Publishers Weekly magazine.


I’m looking forward to this. I’m too gabby on social and I know nothing about Twitter. Speaking of which, can we please drop “media” from social media? I’ve been ready to do this for two years and I am surprised our ADD society hasn’t yet taken the plunge.

Follow me on Instagram: tgfarley

https://www.instagram.com/tgfarley/

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A New Creative Nonfiction Workshop at Berkeley Extension is Now Enrolling

David Rompf is once again teaching a creative nonfiction workshop through Berkeley Extension. Instruction starts January 23d and runs through April 17th. At this blog I’ve written several times about creative nonfiction as a genre and my experience with the course.

I’d recommend the workshop to anyone considering broadening themselves as a writer. If you’re not sure you’d benefit, look through the main textbook: The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. It’s edited by Phillip Lopate and is published by Anchor Books. 1995. In many libraries. You’ll see the kinds of essays you’ll be discussing and writing about.

UC Berkeley Extension’s Voices Blog just posted a nice overview of the course, featuring comments from me and from the instructor, David Rompf. Click on the link below. I’m happy to answer any questions I can about my experience with the workshop. Just e-mail me.

Workshop: http://voices.berkeley.edu/writing-editing-and-technical-communication/nonfiction-writer-discovers-his-creativity

E-mail: thomasguyfarley@gmail.com

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Now I Get It — Understanding Creative Nonfiction

When I signed up for my Creative Nonfiction Workshop (internal link) I did not know writing by that name was a genre. It is. As today’s kids would say, “It’s a thing.”

I thought creative nonfiction a term to describe more creative and inventive ways to write nonfiction. That it could apply to newspaper reports, a legal brief, or an academic paper. To the contrary, it’s much more limited.

Check out Wikipedia’s definition below. The study of creative nonfiction really can’t help me with what I had in mind. Using literary styles and techniques when writing 500 word newspaper articles isn’t possible. The law has a stifling language and delivery all its own. And academic papers need to be written like every other academic paper.

Creative nonfiction comes into its own in medium to long form essays. When we are writing to entertain and enlighten with our particular writing style. It’s not there to deliver a clear message in as few words as possible. Creative nonfiction is out for a stroll, not for a run.

Creative nonfiction lends itself particularly well to personal essays and memoirs. It certainly doesn’t help with brief pieces, which is what I do most of. But it’s a definite style, it offers a new writing market and that should intrigue any writer.

“Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not written to entertain based on writing style or florid prose. As a genre, creative nonfiction is still relatively young, and is only beginning to be scrutinized with the same critical analysis given to fiction and poetry.” Wikipedia (external link)

There’s even a magazine devoted to it:

https://www.creativenonfiction.org (external link)

I welcome your thoughts.

creativenonfiction

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My First Literary Review Submission

Update: 10/19/2016. Essay rejected.

I’ve made my first literary review submission. It was to the prestigious Bellevue Literary Review (external link). My essay is in the personal memoir genre, something entirely new to me. I was introduced to this field through the Creative Nonfiction Workshop that I took recently. (internal link) My essay is broadly on the topic of mental health.

The review publishes twice a year so it will be months and months before I find out if they like my piece. How does one handle such a wait? As always, by continuing to write. Right now I continue to work on my second book proposal. To do research for it I am driving today to Sandy Valley in Clark County, a remote bit of agriculture in Nevada. If this book proposal is accepted I will be traveling all over the state.

I am also learning Adobe’s InDesign, as cryptic and powerful a page layout program as you’ll ever find. But that’s a subject for another post. Keep writing.

“Bellevue Literary Review is a unique literary magazine that examines human existence through the prism of health and healing, illness and disease. Each issue is filled with high quality, easily accessible poetry, short stories, and essays that appeal to a wide audience of readers. Because of the universal themes, many readers feel a personal connection to the BLR and find reflections of their own lives and experiences.”

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Final Thoughts on The UC Berkeley Extension Creative Nonfiction Workshop

I’ve completed the workshop. A new session begins soon. The workshop (internal link) was enjoyable and I stretched myself as a writer. I’d recommend it to any writer, especially those writing personal essays or memoirs. It is to those two things the course particularly relates. My only complaint is that the course description is all too encompassing and that it promises more than it delivers.

“Learn to apply the techniques of storytelling to nonfiction prose pieces, including personal essays, features, commentaries, reviews, reports, journal entries and memoirs. Together, the instructor and other participants form your audience, offering support and critical feedback about your pieces. Weekly class discussions and writing assignments focus on story principles—such as plot, tension, scene and dialogue—that increase the readability of your work and form your material into publishable pieces.”

In reality, the course helped me little with the law office blogs I write or the 500 word newspaper articles I pen. It may help later with my magazine articles. In my writing I seek simplicity and clarity. Nuance and complexity, however, were the watchwords in many of the essays we studied. There was nothing on writing less or more simply.

I don’t want to seem negative. The course reinforced my thinking that I have already found my voice as a writer. I found out many ways I did not want to write. And the instructor feedback was extremely valuable. Class member comments were interesting, although we were all trying to be so polite that I think it muted warranted criticism.  You should definitely look into this workshop if you are a beginning writer and want to develop your personal essay skills.

Would this course lead to being published? I’d say you have a better chance but I really don’t know the memoir market. With encouragement from the instructor I am going to try to have a literary magazine publish one of my essays. But this is a new field for me and I am not terribly hopeful since I understand the market is so crowded. Best proceed with caution, applying yourself to the task of getting better. This workshop can help you with that.

Details: Creative Nonfiction Workshop, English X482, David Rompf, Instructor. Cost? Around $600 plus books. Six writing assignments, five of which are 750 to 1,000 words. Final essay is 2,500 to 3,000 words. Instructor responds thoughtfully to all his e-mails. Criticism after each writing assignment.

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Update on the Creative Nonfiction Workshop I’m Taking

I’m near completing the Creative Nonfiction Workshop I’m taking through U.C. Berkeley Extension. (internal link) While it has had no immediate applicability to the newspaper or magazine articles I write, it is always good to try different things.

We write in class in two ways: 1) a short amount in a writer’s forum about essays we’ve read in the textbook, and 2) a longer amount as our writing assignments. Here are the subjects of those assignments. Lengths range from 500 to 3000 words, with the longest essay the last:

  1. A profile of yourself as a writer, “[E]xplaining as best you can where you’re coming from and where you hope to go.”
  2. An essay about the essential roles you play in your life.
  3. An essay on an experience you had as a child that remains puzzling to you.
  4. A profile of someone interesting, either living or dead.
  5. A book review of a non-fiction book approved by the instructor.
  6. A 2500 to 3000 word personal memoir.

The course is founded squarely on the personal essay. I don’t see the market for this as I have no hope Harper’s or The New Yorker would ever publish my memoirs. I do not concentrate on literature, an extremely crowded field, and instead on pieces that apply directly to people’s lives.

My newspaper articles inform people about community life. My Rock&Gem articles act as an introduction to a gemstone and as a travel guide my readers might use. My previous technology pieces were interesting to anyone fascinated by the history of communications. It would take tremendous effort to interest someone in why my pet beagle once bit my hand. Or how I was bullied in third grade because I wore glasses.

I don’t mean to disparage the course. I have read many essays I would not have ordinarily read and I’ve written on topics I would not have otherwise written about. All writing practice is good. Our last assignment is a monster, a 2500 to 3000 word personal memoir. It’s due July 29th and I will need every spare moment this month to complete it. Wish me luck.

PersonalMemoir