Part One: Fountain House Is A Cool Place For People Dealing With Mental Health
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that with all of the bad things, there's people trying to do good things. Sometimes those people are even successful. A lot of times on this show, people are not so successful, and it's more the thought that counts. This time, they're successful. But speaking of successful, our guest today is Allison Raskin, who is a New York Times bestselling author, a podcaster, a mental health advocate, and a relationship coach. How are you today?

I really loved that that was my tie-in with all the successful people you've dedicated hours of research to. So I feel very honored to be here. Yeah. Also with us, of course, is our producer, Sophie. Hi, Sophie. Hi, it's me, British Sophie.

You have a new accent, James Stout. I mean, Sophie Lichterman. That's right. I've been watching Harry Potter films and I will speak like this from now on. No one else ever changes their accent when they're speaking to me. It's not a thing that plagues me throughout my life. Wait, do people do that? Do people start talking British to you? All the time. Yes.

I promise I will never do that because I'm incapable. Good. That has not historically been a barrier to others. Okay. Fair enough. So, Sophie is out, and this is not a permanent thing. This is just James is stepping in as a guest producer today, and we're all very grateful. Thank you. Yeah. I'm excited. We're also grateful to our audio engineer, Rory. Everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And...

Allison, when I was looking through your bio and I was thinking to myself, what topic should I cover this week? Last week, well, this week as we record this, but last week as anyone's listening, we covered people who tried to kill Mussolini. And one of those people was a woman who was far from neurotypical, who was also deeply religious, and her aim was steadied by an angel as she shot Mussolini in the nose. Her name was Violet Gibson. She spent the rest of her life institutionalized.

And I kept thinking about her, and I kept thinking about how mental health historically and currently has been handled in our society. Because I'm of the opinion that we should free Violet Gibson, except that she died 70 years ago. And I thought to myself, well, I know some people who do really good stuff around supporting people with what gets called serious mental illness. And so I started digging into it. And this week...

is going to be one of the most relentlessly positive episodes of this show to date. Oh, I'm so excited. I know. Last week was like eight people who basically died trying to kill Mussolini. We're going to 180 that. Allison, have you ever heard of the clubhouse model or its flagship fountain house? I don't think so. I think of that fountain head. That was that book, right?

I believe so. Wait, is that Ayn Rand? Yeah. So I'm assuming this is not associated with her. What a terrible thing. I could just bring out and be like, today's cool person is Ayn Rand. And it's going to be so positive. Yeah, totally. And about how she learned that she too was using the welfare system and that that was positive. No.

There is a method that has been developed by and for people suffering from what they would call serious mental illnesses. I know that the language around this stuff is very blurry and, well, actually people feel very strongly about it, but in different directions from each other, you know. And there's a short summary of Fountainhouse that comes from Charlie Segassi, who told the New York Times this in the year 2000.

Fountain House is a non-residential program for people with persistent mental illnesses. It was the original clubhouse model for psychiatric treatment, which has now been copied by many other treatment centers. Everyone who receives treatment at Fountain House is a member of the club, and the staff work for the club members, just like the staff at the Harvard Club work for their members. The members are involved in every aspect of running the house as part of their treatment.

That's the like big picture of it. Okay. I have learned to become so skeptical of all treatment until I learn more. Yeah. No, it's funny because if you just tell someone the like, while I'm doing my research throughout the week, I talk to a lot of my friends about it. And I was talking to my friends. I was like, this place is amazing. And my friend's like,

Is it? And then we're going through each of the things that could be unamazing about it. But I think by the end of this, I will sell you on this as a cool people who did cool stuff.

I hope so, because I have a I have a master's in psychology and mental health in the world of it. And a lot of what I advocate about is how we don't have access to enough resources. And so if there actually is something out there that's working, that is better than the horror, that is most inpatient treatment, then I am very excited to hear about it. OK, yeah, no, I will be very interested to hear what happens.

your take on all of this is. I mean, there's a reason that I picked this topic for you is because I'm curious your take on this. Fountainhouse has been around since the 1940s, and it is going strong and it is growing these days. I know several people who work there, and I've been hearing about it for coming on about 15 years now. And so this week, I've got the usual bunch of sources like news articles, academic papers, and studies that

But I also have, as one of my sources that I can't really share because I didn't record it, is the notes that I took during a 90-minute call I had with someone who's been working there for a very long time with a social worker. But to dive into it, according to the National Institute of Health, about 20% of Americans are living with AMI or any mental illness. About 6% are living with a serious mental illness or SMI.

This is defined as one that, quote, substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities. And I found this really interesting. I don't know. You probably have a lot more understanding about the different definitions of these sorts of things. I'm curious. The thing that was really interesting to me about this definition is that this is, of course, a social definition. This is from the social model of disability. It is...

An SMI is not an SMI because you see things or hear things that other people don't experience or that you have mood swings, but rather it's defined in this way by how those experiences interfere with your ability to function in our society.

Yeah, I sort of think of it as like there are people that will I tend to use the word like chronic mental illness. So people that will always need either need to be in therapy or need to be on medication their whole life and need extra support lifelong. Right.

And then I think there are other people that maybe will have flare ups where they will need that treatment, whether it may be in and out of therapy, on and off medication, depending how well they're doing. And so I guess like I sort of in my head divide between those two. But I also think that like mental health and mental illness is so important.

unique to each person and the way that it shows up that like there is this desire to put people in buckets but ultimately we all deserve and can benefit from mental health care. I agree and one of the things that we're going to be talking about as this goes on is that there's so many things that the folks who are neurodivergent who work with Clubhouse there's so many things that they've like learned that we can learn from instead of just assuming that we have like things to tell them or whatever you know. Yeah.

There's an awful lot of ways to deal with and conceptualize neurodivergence. There are people, for example, who embrace mad pride. There are people who refuse to be assimilationist, who refuse to find their way back into mainstream society. There are people who are anti-psychiatry. There's people who are into what is not anti-psychiatry, but is what is called democratic psychiatry. And there are people who know how to spell the word psychiatry. But I learned this week that I am not among those people.

Yeah, I can't. I had to spell that word 80 times. I failed. And I can't do psychology, which is really embarrassing. Oh, and that's your degree. I know. It's not good. It's okay. I don't know how to spell bourgeoisie. I'm getting closer. I can spell bourgeoisie about...

40% of the time. And that is a vast improvement. I wouldn't even know where to start with that one, to be honest. It goes bow, urge, and then from there I kind of lose the plot. That's it.

James, can you spell bourgeoisie or psychiatry? They're probably spelled different. Yeah, I actually use all of them. I can spell bourgeoisie. Okay. Maybe I speak French, so maybe I have a little step up in that regard. All right. That would do it, yeah. I can't even spell like bureau because it comes from a French word. Yeah, they continue to attack us with their spelling. Yeah.

And they don't even use them. Anyway, give back the vowels. Not using them. From each according to a bill. Anyway. So the clubhouse model is one method of how to deal with mental health. As my friend put it, and I paraphrase that here, it's like biodiversity. There isn't a single best tree in nature. But instead, the forest is stronger when there's a lot of types of trees. And...

I like this metaphor for it because it's also true about neurodiversity in general, right? Like, there's a lot of arguments that people have been making that, you know, in a society, having people with neurodivergence can actually be very positive for that society. Oh, definitely. But it's also true in terms of the field of mental health. There is no single magic bullet. There is no single modality that is the method by which all people, you know, should conceptualize of their mental health and work on their mental health. But...

This is one way, and it's a way that I find really inspirational that I think that the listener might... God, I hate using the word inspirational about something like this. Ah, it's a dangerous word. But I really... Exciting. Yeah. I am excited enough about this that I will dedicate two episodes of my show in a week of my life. The story starts in the U.S. in the 1940s. It starts in two cities, in Detroit and New York City. And we're going to start in New York City.

Technically, we're going to start in Orangeburg, New York, which I've never heard of, but it's near New York City. So I'm just going to call it New York City. And if you're an Orangeburg listener, I'm not really sorry. I don't know what to tell you. I'm from New York. I've never heard of that. Yeah, great. Yeah. So it doesn't even exist wherever you are. The whole burg of orange. I bet they're Dutch. Oh, yeah, almost certainly. Anyway. A lot of Dutch. Yeah. Yeah.

At a hospital now known as the Rockland Psychiatric Center, it was known at the time as the Rockland State Hospital, is where we're going to start. This place was fairly new at the time. It opened its doors to patients in 1931. It did all of the bad stuff. It did all the shock therapy and early 20th century psychiatric inpatient stuff that isn't pleasant to think about. And it was one of the largest psychiatric care facilities in the country.

Orange is the New Black was filmed at the former children's wing of the place, at least in part. So if you want a sense of what the place looks like, the answer is a prison. For children. Yeah. In the early 1940s, a bunch of patients there started a social club. They pretty much just started this as a way to hang out with each other. And they wound up changing the face of mental health across the world.

But like a lot of revolutionary ideas, it started with some people just hanging out. They met in what was called a club room. And this process was facilitated by one of the doctors. One of the things that's very hard about any history, and listeners are probably tired of me complaining about this, is that history gets boiled down to like what one guy did, you know? And...

So I got the one guy's name. Well, there's other one guys later in the story. But so I couldn't tell you exactly how much this was the patients being like, no, we want to meet. And a doctor being like, fine. Or a doctor being like, hey, I will make you all meet. I don't know. Right. Where the germ of the idea began. Right.

But the process was facilitated by one of the doctors there, Dr. Hiram Johnson, and one of the volunteers there, a woman named Elizabeth Schermerhorn. You're from New York. You ever heard the name Schermerhorn? I don't think so. Ever taken the G train?

There is a stop. Here's where I admit that I'm from Westchester, New York. Oh, I see. I apologize. You're from Orangeburg. It's confusing because the name of the state is also what we call the city, but I'm from right outside the city and I'm terrified of public transportation. Fair enough. Well, when I lived in New York City, one of the subway stops that I stopped at every day was Hoyt-Shermerhorn.

That's named after not Elizabeth Schermerhorn, but she's from one of the important families. If you look this stuff up, you're going to run across a lot of websites called American Aristocracy, things like that. And Beth, I have no idea if she went by Beth, but I like the name Beth, so we're going to call her Beth, was the first woman to volunteer in the male wing at Rockland. And so she's actually...

I mean, she's like putting her privilege on the line in a kind of interesting way. This is an era of like social reformers and things like that. It's a thing that a lot of upper class women were into, you know? The idea behind this clubhouse from the facility's point of view was that, all right, look, all of these people have lost friends and family because of the stigma around their mental health and the fact that we stole them away and put them in a children's prison and are shocking them, but whatever. You know, they've lost some friends. It would be good to replace that with new ties, especially before folks are discharged, right?

And it was consciously modeled after that new at the time idea, Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, interesting. Yeah, which is a...

I've got to cover AA and NA and all those things at some point. I have thoughts around it. Yeah. It's complicated. I haven't done a ton of research about it, but I have a lot of friends who've dealt with it in positive and negative ways. The success rate is shockingly low from what I've heard. Fair enough. Isn't it higher than basically everything else, though?

That I don't know. Okay. But it's, yeah, I don't know. I do know the success rates of the clubhouse models, and I did not do, I did not side quest into AA. After a bunch of the folks from this social club were discharged, they indeed started a social club. It gets called a self-help group, which is true, but as best I can tell, they more consciously started their group as a social club, like the old English gentlemen's clubs, not strip clubs, but like where rich assholes get together to be rich assholes with each other. Mm-hmm.

And I think this difference matters a lot because most of what we're going to talk about, about the organization and the methods they started, is that these are members, not patients and not clients. It is their club. I'm very strict about I never use the word patient. I always use the word client. That makes sense. Because it helps fight the uneven power dynamic. Totally. Okay, then I think you're going to like this. Okay.

It's not going to start off strong. It's going to start off interesting. Eight members of the Rockland group got together with former patients from two other hospitals and their friend, Beth Schermerhorn, who probably didn't go by Beth. They formed a group called We Are Not Alone, or WANA. I don't know if they said WANA, but it's W-A-N-A, and I want to call it WANA. Hey, WANA. Anyway, whatever.

They formed this in 1944 while meeting on the steps of the New York City Public Library. They met, like AA does, wherever anyone would have them, including at another kind of space that influenced them that is messy as hell, settlement houses. We've talked a little bit about these. Have you heard of settlement houses, either of you? Yes. Okay. I feel like most people haven't, and that's good. I...

I feel like I have. Now, of course, my OCD is like, have you? Are you misrepresenting yourself? Oh, no, I'm not going to put you on the spot and make you define it. I believe you. We've talked about them a little bit on the show before. These are like progressive era, turn of the century places where people from more privileged classes would volunteer to help the less fortunate, which is...

There's a lot to critique there, but they also were involved in a lot of things that did a lot of good. And so it's like complicated. Most things are. Yeah. Especially when you do a history podcast about people you've decided are cool. A number of times I've had to later be like, oh, dear, get three quarters of the way through the research and be like, never mind. These people are terrible. Yeah.

WANA, they start going back to Rockland and putting up flyers and passing around a bulletin to the patients there. They, like everyone that I've ever covered on this show, basically run a newspaper. That is what people did back in the day before podcasts. And they believed that their breakdowns could be a source of power. In the bulletin they ran in the 40s, they wrote an article called How WANA Started. And it said, quote, and it was all men who started it, so that's why it's going to be very gendered language here.

The idea which had drawn the men together in the hospital was that the mental breakdowns were in some cases simply psychological crises, which, if properly understood and successfully passed, might mark the beginning of a new and better way of life. They came to realize that other individuals, perhaps society itself, were disturbed by the same conflicts which had led to their own breakdowns.

They felt that in their difficulties they were not alone, and that the very crises through which they were passing might, by deepening their understanding and broadening their sympathies, serve to unite them more closely with, rather than divide them from, the rest of humanity.

I love that. One of the things I found most shocking in school was that group therapy is as effective as individual therapy, which you wouldn't assume that it is. But like you get you get something out of group therapy and seeing other people's experiences, learning from their experiences, sort of modeling your behavior about around other people in the group. There's so much that comes from community. That makes sense to me as a.

I'm a very hermit person in my daily life, but I like stubbornly acknowledge that actually we kind of need each other and we kind of need like the sense of purpose and community that we can build with each other, you know? And isn't that annoying? I know. But you know what else is annoying? What?

pivoting to ads in the middle of a podcast. It's really annoying. You did it flawlessly, though. Thank you. Yeah. And now you too can be annoyed or pull your phone out of your pocket, find the little forward 15 seconds button and press it till you hear the music again. Here's the ads.

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And we're back.

And about once a week, I think to myself, I'm glad that I have a job that seems to have not gotten mad at me about the way that I disparage her advertisers yet. I was going to say, as a fellow podcaster, I can't believe you're allowed to even acknowledge that you can fast forward through that. The only negative feedback I've ever gotten is my mom, who thinks that the advertisers will cancel on us if I keep being rude about them.

No, I sort of figure that because I'm like a radical podcast and we're like, Cool Zone Media is this radical network, that it's like, unfortunately, it's like, it's the sugar that helps the poison go down. Like, I think the advertisers are like canny enough to know that I, anyway, this is my darkest worry is that I'm secretly helping them by talking trash on them. Yeah.

Hopefully it wasn't like a Reagan coin again or something. Yeah. When we would do branded deals on branded videos on our YouTube channel and we were just like, guys, we need this money. And people were like, get your money. Yeah. Secure the bag. I think transparency is the way to do it. It's like because we're all going through the same thing. We're all trying to survive in a society, you know? Exactly. Yeah. And also...

Also trying to survive in a society where the people from Juana and they needed a board of director for legal reasons. The ins and outs of charitable organizational structure from before the 501 C3 thing is beyond the scope of this podcast. I fell down that rabbit hole and then I was like, I don't want to fall down this rabbit hole. It only applies to the first like five years of their existence.

Elizabeth Schermerhorn was the first president of the board of directors. And she helped them find their first building on West 47th Street, Hell's Kitchen, which is a cool name for a neighborhood. It was a two-floor house with a fountain on the back patio, thus the name Fountain House. And it's across the street from the much larger Fountain House of today, which is also on West 47th Street in Hell's Kitchen. Oh, wow. At first, this was basically a pool table in a rundown building.

It was a social club and basically a drop-in center. Then they got some funding in 1949 from the National Mental Health Act, and they started hiring professional staff. And this is one of the keys to what makes the Clubhouse model so effective at building the agency of its members. They are the ones who hired the staff. They're like, hey, we need some help. Come help us. And

I want to say it went really well at first. It did not go really well at first. It went really badly at first. Fountainhouse was then and now completely non-political. At no point has it been painted as any kind of utopian visioning of a better society. And its advocacy work has never expanded beyond the single issue of mental health and the rights of people suffering from illness. But when Fountainhouse was foundering, something happened here that I think is indicative of larger political problems in the U.S. today.

From its start, Fountainhouse was into voting. It used Robert's Rules of Order and all that shit. And so it started factionalizing. I'm going to compare this later with the consensus model that they work on today, just so you don't think, like, what is Margaret into if she's not into voting? Anyway, it started factionalizing. Soon enough, there's two factions, and they're fighting over really petty amounts of money because they're not, like, super well off right now, right? Right.

They're, like, fighting over, like, $20, $30 and having endless arguments about it. Are they living there or this is just a place you would go to? No, it's a place you go to. Almost all of them are living in boarding houses on that street, though. Oh, okay. Very local. Yeah. Then, that's one of the things that's interesting about, like, Manhattan in particular. It's, like, a hyper-local place. Like, there's a... Like, one of the newspapers I looked at about this was, like, the West 42nd Street paper. You know? Like...

But it's such a high population density that it kind of makes sense. It's probably like the same as an entire town somewhere. Right. I think way too often, one of the things that floats into my head fairly often is I think about how the language Finnish has about 5 million people who speak it, or it did like 20 years ago when I first started thinking about this. That's half the population of New York City, right? It's wild. Yeah.

My fact that I think about all the time because I just learned it is that there are more people in California than in all of Canada. Yeah, that makes sense to me, but that's still wild. Isn't that wild? Yeah. I've had to look up how many people speak Catalan now. 9.2 million. It's the same as the population of New York City. Yeah, and twice the number of Finns. Yeah, and yet they are still chained within Spain. Yeah. Sad. And...

So they're arguing over $20 and $30. Soon enough, okay, so there's the fellowship, which is basically the members, and then there's the board, which is the people who are doing the fundraising. And you have to, in order to be the equivalent of a nonprofit before nonprofits existed, you have to have a board, much like today.

And those people wouldn't recognize that they're someone suffering from mental illness if you're on the board or people that... The board isn't... Who identify as mentally ill on the board as well. I don't believe there is at that point. However, these days, the members and the staff, like many of the staff used to be members and things like that. Oh, okay. But at the beginning, I'm under the impression that the board is largely like well-meaning rich people. Mm-hmm. And...

There's a trove of letters from this time of various people from the fellowship writing to the board to like complain about one another being like, ah, John did this, like, you know, and, uh, and do all their petty faction fighting. Right. And slowly late 1940s, early 1950s, the board starts quitting. They, they wanted to help, but they weren't helping. And so some of the money was drying up and Fountainhouse was in trouble. And, uh,

How they solve this problem later, the factionalization is through consensus. And we're going to talk about that later near the end of the episode. But we'll get to that. In the early 1950s, it's not doing so great. Enter a man with a good all-American name.

His name is John Beard. Ah, yes. That's a strong name for a strong man. I know. I know. I hope he has a beard. I did not look up photos of him. How embarrassing if he didn't, right? I know. What if he couldn't grow one? Like, that would be... Yeah, the rest of his family is famously... I don't know how to pronounce this word. I've never said it out loud. Hairy.

I just say it must just be so annoying because every single person, if he didn't have a beard, would be like, where's your beard, John Beard? And that would get tiring. I know. Maybe I would like shave every day on purpose to spite those people if I was John Beard. Just have a mustache only. Yeah, totally. Oh, that's when you're mad at your family. You have a mustache. Or you style your chin hair into a second mustache that also looks like a curly mustache.

Oh, yeah. Like a double-decker. Yeah. People do that? I've never heard of anyone doing that in my life, but I'm now imagining it. And listeners, tweet your double-decker mustaches to Margaret. Well, that's the nice thing about, like, I mean, I haven't had a beard in a very long time. I paid someone a fair amount of money and went through a lot of pain about that. But...

You know, the nice thing about shaving is that you can do whatever you want while you're shaving. Oh, I love it. Yeah, no, it's great. Yeah. Sometimes you can do it like if you've got nothing really, you know, no video calls for a day, you can just do like I like to do the stars, you know, where you go sideburn becomes a star. Do that about once a month. Hell yeah. Starburns. Yeah. Later, there's a woman with an even more all-American name who's going to help out. Her name is Mary Smith.

I don't know. This sounds suspicious. I'm getting suspicious over here. The fact that it's the 1940s and 50s, like, yeah, just think about it in that context. Okay. There were only five names. It's like Wheel of Fortune. You spin it and you get a generic name. Yeah. I mean, I'm named Margaret and approximately everyone from before about 1960 is named Margaret. So we're going to hop over to Detroit where I'm sure there's people named Margaret and Mary and John.

The largest psychiatric institution in the country was in Detroit at that time. It was called the Eloise Asylum. It is mostly known today as a haunted house.

At its peak. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about the deinstitutionalization and all that a little bit later about how all these things have shut down. And I suspect you're going to know way more about that than me. So I'm probably going to tag you in during that. But... I don't know that much. I just know we didn't handle it great. Yeah. That seems to be like good idea poorly executed was my like quick takeaway. Yeah. Or like, but then what? Yeah, exactly. Which...

The clubhouse model is one of the things that is a then what? Yeah. At its peak, this asylum, Eloise Asylum, was fucking gigantic. It had its own zip code. It had 10,000 patients. It had 2,000 staff. And it was on 902 acres. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. The conditions there were, like, not great. They were bad. There was lobotomies and electroshock and just all the stuff. Whenever you imagine a bad asylum...

This is one of them. And some of the employees there were like, oh, conditions here, they're like, not great. This seems like a bad thing we're all doing, right? And so they decided to do something about it. And instead of doing it in like proper cool people who did cool stuff form, they did it in like scientist form, which is related but a little different because their test subjects are people. A psychiatrist there named Dr. Arthur J. Pierce and a social work graduate named John Beard

We're like, all right, let's figure out how to make this better. And most of the stories I've seen mostly trace John Beard's perspective on this rather than AJP on it. But he worked with about 200 schizophrenic patients, and he thought the thought that 100% should not have been half as revolutionary as it was, which was...

What if I treat my patients like they're people? Ooh, intriguing, huh? Groundbreaking stuff. I know. At the time it was groundbreaking. It's just like in the 1950s, right? Yeah. Yeah. We're in the 1940s and early 50s at this point. Yeah. Yeah.

They are not victims. They're not just test subjects, although he is running tests on them. But the tests he's running on them seem to be like, what happens if I put a piece of candy under their pillow in the morning? How does it affect their day? And like, what happens if I take them to really nice restaurants? Things like that. But they are also people with agency and they're people who could help.

One of the core ideas of the modern clubhouse model is that we have a human need to be needed. Yes. So Mr. Beard, who's not a doctor but a social worker, which is great because I think being Mr. Beard is even better than being Dr. Beard, although it's a toss-up. Yeah, it's close. Yeah. One day, he was like, as the origin story goes, you know, all these things kind of become apocryphal over time. But the way it's told is he asks the patient, hey, do you know how to get to the library?

And so he followed the patient to the library and he got the patient's help finding some math books and then got the patient's help with some algebra problems. Because John and Arthur and lots of other people, including presumably the patients, were well aware that madness wasn't the only part of these people's personalities. And a lot of like clubhouse model stuff is around like find the strength or find the healthy part and like focus on that.

So they developed what became known as Activity Group Therapy, or AGT. They would organize picnics. They would solve math problems together. They started, like, painting and woodworking and play acting. They would do normal shit together, staff and patients.

And this is interesting to me because in my head, I don't know a ton about it. I mean, I read about it and I read a whole bunch about it for this. But I don't know like a ton. I don't know everything in and out about asylums or psychiatric institutions. I want to call them asylums because even though I struggle to spell asylum, I don't struggle nearly as hard as I struggle to spell psychiatric. But it's hard because why am I telling anyone this? Because you don't see my script. None of you do. Well, James can see it.

I could see it, yeah. But I did do spell check. I see an Asliam here. Yeah. Yeah, anyway. Put that out to the listeners. When I think of like movies and stuff around psychiatric institutions, there's like two versions. And it's really polar, right? There's the hell house prison. And then there's the like people painting in the garden. Right.

It seems like this is the difference is AGT. Like, I don't know enough. This is not what I specifically focused on. But there is a night and day difference about how people's experiences in these places can be. And that night and day difference is real. And it was based on work that people have done. And also, if you're there willingly or not. Totally. Makes a big difference, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

In the early 1950s, John Beard went to New York to present some of his work on the Eloise Aslium, as James is pointing out that I have it spelled here. And while he was there, Elizabeth Schermerhorn and a bunch of other women from Fountain House came and gave him a tour. And I'm pointing out they're all women because, like, my friend who I talked to was like, hey, you know who's left out of this story? The women who did all the work. And so...

Anyway, well, that was bound to happen at some point in the story. Yeah, totally. But Elizabeth and Mary deserve as much credit as John and actually just John. While he was there, he got a tour. And then after he left, the women were like, we really need this guy to come back. He like this is the guy who's going to who knows this stuff. We we want this guy involved. But he didn't want to leave his work at Eloise. And he was a very like Detroit guy. His whole family's Michigan, you know.

But he was thinking, it would be nice to do the work I'm doing, but outside of the hospital setting, because you have the, well, captive audience that makes a lot of things very hard. So Elizabeth and the other women at Fountain House started calling him every Sunday. And they would call him to give him, like, status reports. But really, it was just to try and sway him to come to be director at Fountain House. And so in 1955, he agreed.

He moved to New York and he became the director of Fountain House and he had a little apartment on Times Square. And he spent a while studying the place, figuring out what wasn't working about it. And he provided about half of the solution. He said basically, "I think the dysfunction here is because of the system you've created."

The building was falling apart. The people were burned out. There was no money. And so he presents a radically new version of Fountain House. It's sort of a coup, to be honest, by the board, right? Because what he does is he shows up and he changes the locks on the building. And he makes everyone reapply for membership. Everyone is invited to reapply. But he's like, we are starting fresh. And...

A few people wrote the board and we have their letters being like, I'm not going to do that. I've been a member since before anyone heard of this guy. Like, you know. How big is the membership at this point? Are we like wrangling dozens, like five people? Yeah.

I am not certain. My inference is that we're talking like 10 to 40 people max. And I think that there's probably like a very fluid, I think there's like a little tight core and then some people who like kind of sometimes use it. Do you have to pay to be a part of it? No, you certainly don't now. And I don't believe you did then. He wanted the place to be open during the day and not at night because he wanted a certain type of normalcy.

And we'll talk about a little bit about why that is in a minute. And so all this is sort of some progress. Things get a little better. They start raising money. They're just better at getting the board to raise money and stuff. And there's new energy. And they're hiring contractors to come and fix up the place a little bit. Attendance starts picking up. But it wasn't quite working. It still wasn't the kind of amazing thing that I think it is now.

He was trying to do all the old things from AGT that he had done at the hospital. He's introducing activities. It's not work, it's activities. People would come in there because there's nowhere else to go, and then he'd be like, oh, you can, I'm making this up, but like paint and do algebra problems, I don't know. But then some women saved it. His administrative assistant was also a mental health professional, and her name was Mary Smith. And she was much better with the members. A lot of the reasons people were coming in was like to hang out with Mary.

As the story goes, John Beard is at his desk in his office one day, and he can't get any work done because people are laughing and being loud as hell in the halls outside because they're listening to our amazing podcast ads. Sorry, I didn't realize it was time for an ad break. And here's your interruption.

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And we're back. So you can't get any work done because people are laughing and being loud as hell in the halls outside.

The implication is he's like grouchy, right? Which I sympathize with, not because it's a good thing to be. Not a people person. A person that loves people, but not necessarily interacting with them. That's my inference and why I sort of like him in this context, even though he's like the wrong guy, right? He comes down the stairs and he sees Mary surrounded by members and they're all making lunch together and talking and laughing. And he notices two things immediately. One, there is no easy way to tell who's staff and who's member.

And two, as John describes it, he'd heard the members like laugh before, but maniacally laugh. This was the first time he heard laughter, genuine social laughter in Fountain House. Mary sees him and is like, come on down, have lunch with us. And during lunch, they talk about all the filing and stuff that they have to get done after lunch. It's very mundane and like work focused conversation.

Mary and a few other women had cracked the case. Most of the members were poor as fuck. They're living in boarding houses on 47th Street. This is before SSI. They don't have money for lunch. So staff was going and getting pre-made food nearby and then coming back and eating alone. And then Mary was like,

We should pool our money, all of us, and make lunch together. And so the members had like a little bit of money. They just didn't have, like they had like pay for their slice of bread money, but they didn't have like pay for their slice of pizza money. It's an Italian neighborhood. So they pooled their collective money and they went and bought bread and they made sandwiches all together. And they all together had a problem and they went out and solved that problem collectively, staff and members together. And they'd been doing it for weeks before John like noticed. And

John is like smart as fuck and accomplished a lot, but he gets all the credit in most accounts. Literally, this is how much people want to write women out of stories. They're like, and this genius realized what was happening and that it was game changing. And you're like, this thing yet absolutely nothing to do with. Yeah. He literally what he did is he didn't stop it. You know, like good on him. I'm glad he didn't stop it. Yeah.

Plenty of men of that era would. Absolutely. Especially ones who are like in this position of power. Right. And so Mary Smith and the members did something game changing, but he didn't stop it. And so that day contractors came in to fix the plaster on the walls. And John Beard was like, no, we don't need you. And the contractors are like, well, you owe us 50 percent as a cancellation fee. And John Beard is like, fine, that's money well spent. He gives them their 50 percent. They go on their way.

And then with all the staff and members together, he's like pointing at the walls that need new plaster. And he's like, y'all want to live like this? And they're like, no. Like, all right, well, let's fix the walls. And so Fountainhouse became focused not around activities, but around the workday. Activities were working for him with this like captive audience, right? Who had no ability to have agency. And here comes a tangent. My dog's name is Rintroth.

Rin Chaw is a character from, in the first word, of a book called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. I just need to work this into every script somehow if I can. It's like I didn't do Tolkien in the script, so I have to work in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Got it. Yeah. It was published in 1790. In this book, there's a section called The Parables of Hell. And one day I'll do a whole William Blake episode and probably have some poor guests listen to me read every single one of these parables. Yeah.

Some of them have carried on throughout the years. The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, I think I've heard somewhere before. I don't know. But there's one that has become so cliche that it's become kind of anodyne. It's sort of cheesy. It's not the kind of phrase that comes from something you'd expect to be called the parables of hell. And that is, the busy bee has no time for sorrow. Oh. This is...

I don't think any of them are talking about William Blake while they're describing it, but I am. This seems to be like the basic idea. It's not, oh, keep busy so you don't have time to consider how bad everything is. It's not just a way of sticking your head in the sand. Instead, it's a way of building agency into your life, doing things, accomplishing things, having tangible goals that you reach.

And I would argue the joy of accomplishing things has been stripped away from us by the modern workforce because in most jobs, we act without agency. We just do what we're told and then we do it. I feel very blessed that even though I, this would have been a great place for an ad transition. What was I doing? But we're done. We don't need any more ad transitions. So anyway, I feel very blessed. You could do a Marx transition here. But please don't. Yeah.

I'm a big proponent of purpose. And I think people get like the defensive around it a little bit because of, you know, capitalism. But it's like a reimagining of what purpose can be. I mean, purpose can be that I'm a great grandmother. Yeah. Or that I my purpose is my rescue dogs. But just having something to tie you to this life is very helpful. No, I agree. And purpose is one of the things.

I think there's like a people, place, and purpose are the three things that the Clubhouse model argues that people need when they leave inpatient psychiatric care. Yeah. And when the members of Fountainhouse hired John Beard to help them out, he organized it around the workday.

Members can come in anytime they want from 9 to 5. They don't have to come in, but they can come in if they want to. While they're there, they don't have to work on the place, but they can if they want to. They also don't get paid for it. We'll talk about how they work to get people paid later. But they're doing real work, not simulated work, in the maintenance and running of the clubhouse itself. They don't get paid for it the same way that I don't get paid to do my own dishes. Right.

There's a reason to this day that articles about Fountain House describe it as looking more like a fancy country club than a medical space, because people take pride in maintaining the space and beautifying it.

The clubhouse moved from a socializing model to a working model in part because it was an easier way. This is kind of what you're going to get out about, like how purpose has been like taken away from us by like capitalism. Right. You know, because under capitalism, you think, well, I just want to not work. Right. But that's not for most people. That's not really true at the end of it. You know? No.

So it moved from a socializing model to a working model because it was an easier way to get people involved and make friends with each other, paradoxically. You'd think socializing is the better way to socialize, but it's not necessarily. When the clubhouse was open at night, it had a bit of a party vibe.

Go to a party that you don't know anyone at, especially if you're suffering from serious mental illness already. That's hard as fuck for a lot of people. What are we talking about? What is there to say when you're working with someone? It's inherently there's something you're having a shared experience. Yeah, absolutely. And most members of Fountainhouse have been kicked out of more communities than the average person has ever been part of.

And a friend of mine describes, a friend of mine who works there, describes how he brings in new people. There's more than 2,200 light bulbs in Fountainhouse. This is not a light bulb joke. It's a weird, it's a lighthouse parable instead.

But it's literal and true. There's more than 2,200 light bulbs there. And because the place has been renovated dozens of times, all of them are like different kinds of light bulbs, right? There's always a bunch that have been burned out. So he sees a new person who doesn't know anyone who's in their own head because of symptoms or depression or newness. And he's like, hey, I'm going to go change the light bulbs around here. I don't need you to do much. But if you could hold the ladder for me.

And he's done this hundreds of times with people with very severe mental illnesses. But even folks who don't care whether or not they themselves live or die, every single time they can be counted on to make sure that another person who is climbing up a ladder is safe while they do it. And he goes around and he changes light bulbs. He's not even like, oh, I got a job for you. Go change the light bulbs, right? He's like, I'm doing this work. You want to come help me?

After two or three light bulbs, they're friends. And my friend can introduce them to new people. With work, you can talk about work and you don't have to talk about yourself. And you can also connect with that healthy part of you instead of only connecting about your illness.

And the work is purposeful. It matters that someone has made lunch. It matters that someone has held the ladder to make sure that someone didn't fall. It matters that someone answers the phone and files the paperwork and cleans the vomit and like the like real unglamorous tasks of daily life, you know?

And you are not required to do anything. You can come in and eat lunch and smoke cigarettes and leave. That's the way my friend phrased it. I don't know if you're allowed to smoke in the building or not. At some point, at least you were able to. And there is no external benefit either. It's not like whoever puts in the most work is more likely to get hired on a staff or gets promoted to being like volunteer of the month or like any of that.

You can't fail at Fountainhouse. You can get paused. Your membership can be paused if you assault someone or you steal stuff or something like that. But there's no mandated work. All you've got to do is come through the green doors. And there's 37 principles. We'll get to it later. I know it sounds kind of culty, but whatever. There's the first two principles. One is once a member, you're a member for life. So if you get in...

You can leave for 57 years and come back and you can come right back in. Right. What is the admissions process? I don't know as much about that.

Maybe it's like an old English club, you know, like they go around with the billiard balls and then if someone puts up, are you familiar with this process? No, but tell me about it. All right. Okay. This is the thing I learned about history class. To be clear, those of you who have not been to United Kingdom, it's not still the 19th century there. But one of the things that they used to do in these clubs was they would, if a new member was being admitted, right, they'd get all the other members together.

and be like, Margaret would like to join the club. Are we okay with Margaret joining the club? And then what they would do is pass around a sack and everyone has balls, billiard balls, right? Like a snooker pool, whatever, um,

Don't play snooker in America. But yeah, they've got balls, right? You just keep referencing things that are more and more confusing to us. Billiards worked. Yeah. We're good. We know it. A fancy word for pool. Yeah, they've had to become the Britain Explained podcast. Yeah. Yeah, so they're passing it around, right? They've got billiard balls.

Anyone could put in a black ball if they want to. But you don't know, right? Everyone's just putting their ball in the bag, but you don't know. Then they get to the end and dump them out. There's a black ball for Margaret. It can't be admitted.

Oh, no, but I really wanted to be part of the gentleman's club of England. Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. I know. You got blackballed. That's where the verb comes from. Oh, my God, that's where blackballed comes from? Yeah. Whoa. I know blacklisted more than I know blackballed. I didn't think Americans used blackballed. I first heard it in a Dead Prez song, and I think they were making a play on words. There you go. Full circle. Well...

First two principles. Once you're a member, you're a member for life. And then everything at the clubhouse is voluntary. First two principles. While I am talking about all of John Beard's other great accomplishments, I can't help but point out two other accomplishments of his. He married a Margaret and had a daughter named Margaret. How lovely. I know. I know. A man of good taste. And also he named his son John. Basically, they're like John and Margaret. Like, we got the best names. Why don't we just keep on going? Yeah.

So was born the clubhouse model. In the book Fountain House by Alan Doyle, Julius Linol, and Kenneth J. Dudek, the authors put it like this. Stripped of a medical surrounding and a preoccupation with illness, the workday at Fountain House provides an ordinary setting for social interaction and personal contributions in which the collaboration of staff and members and everyday activities becomes a transformative event that aids in the process of mental health recovery. And, uh...

When we come back, we're going to talk about the worker cooperatives that they set up. And we're going to talk about the way that it has spread to 33 countries. And we're going to talk about the farm that they have that totally makes it sound really culty whenever they're like, oh, you're going to go to the farm. And it's just the farm. And then farm is capitalized, which I understand why you do it. But the optics on it sound cult. Anyway, whatever. All of this stuff, you're like, where's the line? Yeah.

And that's what's so fascinating to me about this is if there is like, there's critiques that can and have been levied about this. And I have like talked with people about them. Right. But there's not, there's not like a hidden bad, you know? Right. There's no big bad. That's like, yeah. Like pulling the strings with some bad agenda or power grab. Right. And I think the big difference is that instead of existing, like a cult exists to strip members of agency, right?

And this exists to provide not just purpose, but agency to its members. And we'll talk, I'll quote a bunch of studies about how effective that is in part two. But first, at the end of part one, how are you feeling? You came in skeptical and it's okay if you're still skeptical, but I'm curious how you're feeling about it.

I'm feeling optimistic, I would say. I'd say that I agree with these principles that they seem to be based on. It makes sense to me. I'm a huge proponent of social support and community building and relationships and living in relationships. So, you know, I'm intrigued. Hell yeah. James, what do you got?

Yeah, I'm loving it. I really like this idea of participation being empowering. When you spoke about your friend who likes to help people, likes to have people help them with ladders and bulbs, it reminded me, I've done a lot of helping out in refugee camps, and one of the things you'll sometimes see is like,

Most people are over there with their families and their communities, and you can see they're kind of forming their own little communities in the camp. And sometimes you'll see someone who's not. And the thing that we've always done is been like, hey, I have a giant vat of lentils here and I need somebody to help me spoon the lentils. And it's always really empowering for that person to be to help you with the lentils. And then often you'll do that. You arrive the next day.

And they'll be like, hey, we're doing the lentils again. Or like, be the hot sauce person. There are lots of jobs that are required in lentil distribution. Yeah. I can associate with that. It's important to feel like you have a role. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, I was trying to do it. Well, what is your role, Alison, in terms of plugging what you want to plug here at the end of the first episode? Yeah.

So I just had a new book come out in October called I Do I Think? Conversations About Modern Marriage that sort of examines what marriage used to be and the possibilities of what marriage can be as we tailor it more towards our individual needs.

Or if you even want to get married at all, which is great about modern society because you don't have to. And then you can listen to my podcast just between us every week. I also have a sub stack called Emotional Support Lady that is all mental health based. And I'm also a relationship coach that is taking clients. So you can find out more information about that on Allison Raskin dot com. Hell yeah. I'm excited about all this. James, you got anything you want to plug? Yeah.

There is a humanitarian disaster in north and east Syria, and I would love for you to give some of your hard-earned money, I know everyone's poor at this time of year, to Hevyasor, the Kurdish Red Crescent, H-E-V-Y-A-S-O-R. Well, now I feel selfish that my plug is about me immediately after. I know, I felt terrible. I was like, oh no. No, no, no. That is actually just, that's just what happens with Cool Zone Media is we do both. It's completely fine. Yeah.

You can follow me on Substack at margaretkillsroy.substack.com. I post a lot of stuff. Half of it's free and half of it is like the more personal stuff is for people who support me there. And also, I want to shout out that I work with a collectively run publisher called Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness.

Every month we mail out a zine to backers anywhere in the world, to anyone who supports us on Patreon at $10 a month or more. And you can also just read all of those for free on our website, tangledwilderness.org. We do a lot of fiction and poetry and essays and stuff. I don't know. It's a lot of stuff. We even have a separate podcast network.

that I have a podcast on that James is now sometimes a co-host of called Live Like the World is Dying about individual and community preparedness. That's right. So there's lots of other stuff. If you're like, wow, I don't want to wait till Wednesday to hear more of Margaret talking. No one actually thinks that. But if you do think that, you have many options. I'm sure there are many people that think that. That's potentially true. But all of you can hear me, all three of us, again on Wednesday at...

And we're just going to wait till when all of us are waiting till Wednesday and every podcast is live. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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