Political Quotes

“I studied Maslow and Freud and Jung and all of the great psychiatrists and behavioral scientists of our time, and I studied psychology because I wanted to try to understand human behavior more. I went into community mental health, psychiatric social work, because I learned very quickly that the environment and the social context in which a child or a human being lives really that context impacts their life, their behavior and their mental health. So mental health is a question of just that; it is a question of health. For too long it has been stigmatized, and it has been neglected. In the early 1970s, when I was in graduate school, I actually founded a community mental health center; and it was called Change, Incorporated, and it was in Berkeley, California. I founded that center so that we could destigmatize and remove the artificial barriers about mental health for primarily low-income African American residents of that community. That mental health center survived for 10 years, but this was in the early 1970s, and we had a hard time raising money then for resources to provide the intervention and the counseling. What we saw, though, during those 10 years was the psychologists, social workers, counselors, made an enormous difference in the lives of children and families through intervention, through quality mental health services.”