"The Awakening of a Constituency"From the National Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project Self-Help Manual
"The Awakening of a Constituency"Do you believe we are separate and apart from mainstream America? Other people have felt separated, too. Women, and people of color, come immediately to mind.
Like us, they have been separated all the same with false, misleading images created about them by other people.
Many of us have felt this way about our illnesses. It isn’t exactly like being diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, or any other physical illness.
People talk openly about those medical problems. After all, these are typical, physical illnesses Americans understand. Most of them openly suffer from one or more of these themselves.
Our mental illnesses and the many names given to them are rarely discussed openly. Almost all of us have experienced the atmosphere of doctors, family members, relatives, and even friends c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y whispering about these illnesses to us and about us. Like our illness was something to be ashamed of, and to be kept secret.
So to say that we and our mental illnesses have been mostly misunderstood would be an understatement. We have been demonized.
It is no wonder.
The mass media and the entertainment industry present distorted news reports and totally exaggerated and utterly false portrayals of us as people to be frightened of; a groups of dangerous "maniacs" and "psychos". It is understandable then why the American public fears us. They make us want to hide our illnesses from then, and far too many of us have obliged.
Many of us are still in hiding, or in denial of our illness, or both. We are not residents of one of the politically correct closets to "come out" of. Hence, we perpetuate our victimization by these people, consequently victimizing ourselves even more.
The first challenge others have had to overcome to change their circumstances was changing the way they see themselves. They needed to define themselves in a positive way as individuals, and as a group of people, before they could change the false, misleading images given to them by others.
The twentieth century has been 100 years of civil rights movements. From women to African-Americans to the young, each group’s arrival has been started with a focus on access to the vote.
For women, the suffrage movement that began this century, and obtained the right to vote for half of America’s population, led to a growing drive toward equal rights that continues to this day.
Today, without the women’s vote behind a candidate for public office, election victory is nearly impossible anywhere in our country. They had to stand up and speak out to achieve this influence and power.
No one just gave women the vote back in 1920. They had to fight for it, and their struggle, like that of people of color, continues.
For African-Americans, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s began with eliminating the barriers to the voting booth. Once completely denied the vote, the landmark legislation of the 1960s removed discriminatory devices. Since then, an African-American has been a strong contender to represent each of the two major political parties in pursuit of the Presidency, and more people of color are being elected to high political office.
Voting rights for women, people of color, the poor, and those whose rights have been abridged, or not realized (like people living with mental illnesses), were not secured until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended state voter qualification tests. It took the ratification of the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964, which did away with federal poll (voting) tax requirements in federal elections, and later in state elections by a ruling of the Supreme Court in 1966, before race, creed, color or gender discrimination was forever banished from voting.
No one needs to pay to vote in America today, or to pass any kind of literacy tests. If you can sign your signature with an "X", you can vote.
That, however, was not the end of it. In the 1960s, thousand of young men were going off to a foreign land called Vietnam. Because of the law that required voters to be at least 21, many of the young men fighting and dying in Vietnam couldn’t even have say in choosing the elected officials who were setting the policy putting their lives in jeopardy. In 1971, the 26th Amendment was ratified, lowering the voting age to 18.
Although many of the new young voters never even went to the polls to vote, historians frequently credit the 26th amendment with hastening the end of the war in Vietnam.
Today, anyone 18 years old, a citizen by birth or naturalization, is now eligible to vote.
The only Americans not eligible to vote today are convicted felons, and their voting rights are only suspended during the time they are serving their sentence, including parole, but not probation.
Besides Americans under 18, the "mentally incompetent" are the only other people deemed not eligible to vote.
You might imagine that’s us.
Wrong.
Some of us, and many prejudiced and stigmatized against us, might like to believe we are "mentally incompetent," but mental competency has nothing to do with mental illness.
While this is contrary to the public opinion of the uneducated, and those who would like to see us remain powerless, dependent, and out of sight, it is the truth.
Mentally ill persons are not "mentally incompetent."
To be "mentally incompetent," an individual must meet a very narrow definition of the law. An individual has to have been declared "incompetent" by a court of law which appoints a legal guardian or conservator and charges that individual with overseeing the individual’s financial and life choices.
To avoid any confusion, court decisions and orders for involuntary mental hospitalization or institutionalization have nothing to do with mental incompetence, nor is being determined dangerous to yourself and/or others, and committed for treatment to a private or public mental institution.
Anyone still has the right to vote, regardless of any of these court actions. While hospitalized, you simply need to be registered to vote, and request and complete an absentee ballot, which is a ballot people fill out and mail to the city or state voting authority instead of voting at their local district voting site.
A staff person with the New York State Board of Elections, where registering mental health patients in New York’s state hospital system has been underway for many years, told me that when they first began asking mental patients to register to vote, "we received hundreds of letters from patients, thanking the State of New York, the Governor, and even God for the right to vote."
The fact is we always had the right to vote. No one had ever thought to ask us to use it before.
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, and corresponding state laws, was brought about as a recognition of this fact. There are many disenfranchised groups lacking opportunities to register to vote, and the NVRA sets a public policy course to right this wrong.
The NVRA has targeted these heretofore ignored constituencies, compelling the social service and government agencies which naturally play a role in their lives to present opportunities for them to vote.
For example to register 18-year-olds to vote the state Motor Vehicles Department is natural agency to capture their attention. Most young people apply for a license to drive. Now they are offered a registration to vote at the same time.
For poor, mostly unregistered voters, state Welfare offices now offer voter registration when people apply and re-apply for food stamps annually.
We are another natural constituency of potentially unregistered American voters the NVRA had in mind.
They were right. We have great potential as an important constituency of consequence. We are over 42 million voter eligible American adults, according to 1996 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates.
Specifically, NIMH reports:
The NVRA is aimed at government agencies – including state mental health departments. Mental health departments should, through the non-profit agencies they license and fund, generate opportunities for voter registration for the mentally ill which never existed before.
But as consumers, we cannot let government agencies and/or providers be the only sources of voter registration opportunities.
In New York, for example, it took the vigilance of New York City Voices and the Morningside-Westside Bulletin, mental health consumer advocacy publications, to examine the non-profit mental health provider list sent by the state Office of Mental Health to the state Board of Elections as the NVRA voter registration agency-sites. They found that major gaps existed in the types of mental health agencies required to promote voter registration which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Tens of thousands of us would not have had the opportunity to register to vote for the 1996 general election.
Due to these mental health consumer groups’ involvement, the New York State Office of Mental Health has agreed to expand their list to include all non-profit mental health agencies and services they fund and license.
We cannot expect, nor should we, that state voter registration authorities are able to know when one of their state mandated agencies, like a Department of Mental Health, is providing them with an incomplete list of mental health provider sites required to promote our voter empowerment.
This is also our job. It is our responsibility if we are to awaken ourselves and become the voting constituency of consequence we can be.