Part Two: Fountain House Is A Cool Place For People Dealing With Mental Health
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State Farm, proud sponsor of My Cultura Podcast Network. Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast. The only podcast that comes out every week. Actually, ah, oh no, are we bi-weekly? It comes out twice a week. I know, does that make it bi-weekly or is bi-weekly every two weeks? Are we semi-weekly? It means both. Oh, wow. I believe bi-weekly could mean either way, which feels like very confusing. Mm-hmm.

Not the first confusion caused by bi. All right. Well, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And with me today, as you probably know, because you probably listened to part one, is our guest, Alison Raskin, who's a New York Times bestselling author, a podcaster, a mental health advocate, and a relationship coach. And a master's degree in psychology, it turns out. Yes. I've struggled my way through that, and now I get to claim it. As you should. Yeah.

Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited to have my final verdict on if I think this is a cult or not. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, like, I mean, this could be a two part question. Is it a cult? And is it a is it cool? They're going to be separate questions. And our guest producer today is James Stout. How are you? I'm good. I'm very happy. I'm having my tea. I'm listening to cool stories about cool people. Hell yeah.

Well, our audio engineer is Rory. Everyone has to say hi to Rory because otherwise I'm afraid bad luck will happen. I've somehow convinced myself of this thing and I'm not normally a superstitious person, but hi Rory. Hi Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. Some weeks I completely forget and it seems to be okay, but whatever, it's gone into my head. Do you all have like weird work things, like podcast things where you're like, I have to do this thing?

Well, I have OCD, so I have a lot of things I got to do. But they're mostly related to contamination and cleaning. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I think I probably, I don't want to self-diagnose myself. I have to go for a run before I do a podcast or my brain just will not be quiet and it will go in lots of different directions. Fair enough.

Well, speaking of getting stuff done, Fountainhouse is getting stuff done where we last left them. For anyone who missed part one, Fountainhouse is a, well, I don't know. I'm not going to do it all again. But it's a place that people go when they need help with their serious mental illnesses. But that is based on developing agency and giving them a sense of purpose. And Fountainhouse is starting to come together under the new directorship.

From its start, its goal has been what could be called assimilationist, which is like in a lot of radical circles, a word that sounds bad. The members of Fountainhouse overall desire to find a way to return to society and not be separated from it by their illness. Interestingly, at least these days, the staff are actually more likely to be radical than the members, but the members, for good reason, are the ones in charge.

you know, they have more stake in it, right? They're like, no, we got to make sure that this thing works and we don't want to change it up terribly, right? Because this is the thing that allows us to continue to live for a lot of people. And many of the members wanted to be able to work and they wanted to work so that they could have the independence that money provides or for something to do. Sometimes people want structure for a while in their lives. And for whatever different reasons, people wanted to work. So Fountainhouse started sorting out how to make that happen.

In 1958, they started working with what's called transitional employment. Jobs for people with any disabilities, including SMIs, are rarer and they pay substantially worse. There's even like, even if it's not a job that's been set aside for people with serious mental illnesses, they'll be getting, I forgot to put the actual number down in my script. It's like 8% less or whatever. You know, there's a wage gap here, right? Well, that made me mad. Yeah, well...

In fact, it's perfectly legal for employers to pay disabled people less than they pay their other employees, including paying less than minimum wage. It's called sub-minimum wage employment. Do you all know about this? That's one word for it. I know there's a huge issue with them.

With disabled people not being allowed to have savings. And if they have savings, then they lose their benefits. And also a lot of disabled people can't get married because if they get married, then their spouse's income counts towards their income and suddenly they'll lose their benefits. So there actually isn't marriage equality in this country after all.

It's so evil. It is just so completely evil that these people who are already dealing with so much, it's just on top of it. You're like, and you're not even allowed to American dream your ass out of this, you know, like. And most people don't know. Like, yeah, it's like a thing that's like was not talked about unless you are disabled or, you know, in that world where people talk about these things. No, I remember my friend who was being like, no, I can only work 13 hours this month.

Because if I work more than 13 hours at the following wage, I will lose all of my money. And they like live with horrible chronic pain and like, you know, can't. Anyway. It's also the question of like, what is the logic there? Explain how that is an OK policy to me in any explanation that is not that these people deserve to suffer. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, sub-minimum wage, the argument that they make is like the Department of Labor. I was like looking at their defense of it and they're like, well, it's okay because they don't do the work as much because they end up like, that's not what minimum wage is about. The minimum wage is you just can't pay people less than this unless they're incarcerated, which is also a problem. Oh, yes. And sub-minimum wage employment, considering the fact that minimum wage is $7.25 federally,

I can't imagine working for $5 an hour again. And I did the math. When I first started working, minimum wage was $4.25. And I was working for $4.25 an hour because I'm old, whatever. And that $4.25 I earned in the 90s is $9.28 an hour today.

Yeah, it's it's astonishing that it does not go up and that we and that California just voted against ending indentured servitude. The language used was slavery. It was literally and it literally on the ballot. It said no opposition. And people were still like, not for me. Nah. Yeah. Let's continue this. Yeah, I think that's fine. We just literally have continued slavery. Yeah.

Sub-minimum wage is bullshit. The Department of Labor is, right now as I record this, considering getting rid of the program that lets employers pay less than minimum wage. But the rule wouldn't take place until January 17th, 2025, which famously is three days before Trump comes to office. So we'll see what happens with that. Fountainhouse, of course, came out the gate with something better.

And in these days they're doing something even better still, but we'll talk about that in a minute. In 1958 they started what they call transitional employment. Basically, certain employers would assign certain job slots to Fountainhouse and then Fountainhouse would fill those slots with its members who are then supported in those jobs because the job is sort of part of their therapy, right? And so one of these jobs, if you suddenly don't show up to work, right, because you're dealing with illness,

Someone else from Fountainhouse will fill that. Either it's another member or it will be a staff person if no one else will do it, right? All jobs for Clubhouse members pay the same as anyone else working that job. And transitional employment positions are meant to be temporary, about six to nine months.

These are usually fairly uncomplicated jobs. I don't want to say unskilled because that's a myth, but they're jobs with a certain amount of routine involved, working in the mailroom or doing janitorial work or stocking shelves, this kind of thing, the things that might minimize the sort of chaos introduced.

So there's transitional employment that they offer, and then they also offer supported employment, which are non-temporary jobs, but the clubhouse is still, and the social workers and such, are still interfacing with the employer and offering some support in that workplace. And then there's independent employment, where clubhouses will help you get set up to go apply at a regular competitive, you know, get a regular job. And

One of the most incredible things about clubhouses from my point of view is that they seem to hit upon these very radical ideas, but then they come to them or prove the worth of these ideas empirically and not ideologically. Ideologically, I love worker cooperatives. We've talked about them before on this show. We will continue to do so again. But these days, Fountainhouse and many other clubhouses develop worker cooperatives for their transitional employment.

Both an Australian clubhouse and one in Michigan started doing worker cooperatives before Fountainhouse did. I'll talk a little bit later. I'm kind of playing with the timing. Later, we're going to talk about the spread of clubhouses around the world.

And cooperatives make sense. One of the whole purposes of a clubhouse is to develop people's sense of purpose and agency. And traditional workforces strip you of that, while workplace democracy develops it. If you go in and you're part of making the place work, you have some ownership in it. For full disclosure, my work before I was a podcaster was that I worked in cooperative finance and finance.

Like, so it's really funny. It's really funny to tell my, because I've always been this like weird punk kid and like lived in a cabin. And while I like lived in an off-grid cabin, I had to like tell my parents being like, I have a job in finance. I was going to say that almost sounds like an oxymoron. What does that mean?

So, so actually, okay. As a, as a tangent, another group that I think is amazing that I don't know if I've ever talked about in the show, cause it's like newer than I usually cover. It's a group called seed commons. Oh, we have talked about it on that. When we talked about workers taking over their factories in Argentina in a 2003 ish. Um,

Basically, it's a way of financing worker cooperatives and getting them up and going so that they can become profitable businesses, but the money stays in the local economy because there's not an extractive force removing it. And then also everyone who has that job...

has an ownership stake. And it's cool because during the pandemic or whatever, which is totally over and everything's fine now. But during that, restaurants and things like that, especially were closing left and right. And we had dozens of worker cooperative restaurants that we supported and none of them closed their doors for good because a worker-owned business is able to be more agile because they're able to...

themselves. They're like everyone who's working there is part of it. So they get together and they say, well, what do we have to do? And they can kind of like take the hit a little bit more when everyone's an owner, you know? Anyway, I love worker cooperatives, but they don't do it ideologically. They do it because it works and it just made sense for them. It made sense to help build people's sense of agency and purpose.

And the way that they did it was also to fill that the traditional way that they were doing it was collapsing. Because in the 50s, offices would hire their own janitors and their own mailroom staff and their own landscapers and such like that, right? But nowadays, everything is outsourced to different companies. A business hires a janitorial company instead of having their own staff in-house. So all the jobs that used to be set aside for Fountainhouse were starting to dry up. And this became a problem.

And folks were like, fine, we'll become the company that is outsourced to. And so they set up worker cooperatives to do it. And I don't think that this is a total coincidence, this sort of model of being the largest worker cooperative in the U.S. is coincidentally, it's not related to Fountainhouse, but it's also in New York City. It's called Cooperative Home Care Associates, and it is a home care agency in the Bronx.

It has 2,000 people hire themselves as a worker-owned business. And it works really well with the sort of precarious workforce like home care. That's where worker cooperatives often excel. And I think all workforces should be cooperativized, but that's my own utopian visioning. And so transitional employment for most members is more therapeutic than career-oriented.

They overstaff all their positions. So there's like three times the workers that are necessary in order to do one, do the job. You know, less stressful, right? If you work and there's just plenty of people doing it. Although I guess there's certain jobs I would be doing that I would not want that because I'd be more stressed. But whatever, I don't suffer from a serious mental illness, you know. And since Fountainhouse is a nonprofit, it doesn't need to turn a profit, right?

And so it doesn't need to be all cutthroat about staffing. They can just be like, well, we make enough money. It's fine. We'll just hire a bunch more people. So some people do transitional work because they want to prove to themselves that they can hold down a job and are going to go on to supported employment and independent employment. And sometimes they just do it temporarily because they want to do it temporarily. Sometimes they take it on because they're talking to their therapist and their therapist or social workers or whatever are like, you know,

Maybe you could use some external structure right now just for a little bit. Right. You know, you'll get back to painting when you're not depressed. And for now, go make soap. Right. Oh, God, that's going to make it sound like Fight Club. They do make soap. We're going to talk about that in a minute. I couldn't be more of a sucker for a fancy bath product.

Oh, yeah. Well, if you lived in New York City, I got a place for you. Which is not one of the sponsors of our show, although, whatever, I'm clearly shouting them out. Because also, I'm not going to talk shit on them, unlike the sponsors of our show. This is not an ad transition. We'll do one in a couple of minutes. And...

Sometimes they're talking to the therapist and the therapist are like, all right, we could use some external structure. So take on a job for six months to get out of the house and get through this depression spell. And then you get back to painting or whatever your real goal in life is or whatever. So it's sometimes it's pre vocational and sometimes it's not. And there's no pressure about that. I love that. Right. It's like whatever the individual needs as relates to it.

And so Fountain House runs a bunch of these places. They have a store called Fountain House and Body that makes and sells high-end soap and candles and such, and it's package-free. So you can just go in, and you can custom order the scents, and they'll make it in front of you. That's pretty cool. I would bring my own little baggie, though, to keep it from getting dirty. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Imagine just, like, walking home with a bar of soap. Yeah, that's a nightmare for me. Yeah.

Yeah. The texture. Your hand would become so dry. I have very few childhood memories. A question for another day. But one of them is like when I went to summer camp, like I think one summer, like my first night away or something, I had gone and the bathroom was not in the bunk because they specifically had different bathrooms because they didn't want kids from Long Island to go to this camp.

So I like when it took my first shower that I was like walking back to my bunk and I like fell and my soap like fell on the dirt. And I remember it was just like so heartbreaking. And it's like, but the soap is meant to make things not dirty. But now the soap is dirty. Or it now has like a nice texture to it. You know, it's more like exfoliation. I guess branches are always helpful. Yeah.

I bet you pay extra to put sticks and twigs and soap, you know? I mean, if you hit the right niche, you could really make a killing off of that. Yeah. Eau de crust or I don't know, any French. But yeah. And so...

Fountain House and Body, they network with other social enterprises around the world. So you can like go in and buy dish towels made by blind folks who live in Finland or things like that, right? I believe it's currently closed. I'm not 100% certain. I think it's moving from Soho to be closer to Fountain House and it's going to reopen with like a coffee and tea shop as part of it. Then it becomes like the kind of place where I would just go hang out and do all my writing. Yeah.

I wrote a bunch of my books sitting in a worker cooperative cafe. It's a nice place to do it. I can't write not in my home. Really? Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Like I, I don't know. I've never been a coffee shop writer. Do you write with music on or in silence? In silence. Me too. Yeah. Music feels wild to me. Yeah. I think I had to listen to music when I was writing in coffee shops.

But it can't be music with words unless they're words that I don't understand, which is a lot of words because most of the languages in this world, I have no idea what people are saying. My dad's music taste is like spa music. Nice. So you can write to that. Yeah, like he could. Like we were in the car with him and it was his music was playing and everything was like spa music and then like the soundtrack to Cirque du Soleil.

That's worrying. I once traded a massage therapist friend of mine was like sick of all the like hippie massage music that was available. And I had been, I was thinking to myself, like, I bet I could write an hour's worth of this music faster than an hour. I bet I could write it in less than an hour. Yeah.

And I proved myself wrong. It took me 90 minutes to write a 60-minute track. Not a terrible ratio. Yeah, so then I traded my friend this track for Massage. But I made two versions of it because the first version I described as Enya in Hell. And it was a little too much. To be honest, Enya all the time makes me feel like I'm in Hell. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I love Enya. And I'm so sorry, Enya. That's just a personal problem I have. I might have a similar taste in music as your father. I'm not sure. Isn't Enya and Hel just Bjork? Yeah, that's true. I mean, mine's just like run through some distortion and with more like weird chanting in the background. But, um... Okay. Yeah. I had to make a version without the distortion and the chanting is what I had to do. Uh...

There's two versions of it. Anyway, James, are you a quiet or are you a... This is totally what we're all talking about today. Are you a quiet writer or a music writer?

I write my dissertation. I'm a music writer. I did my dissertation on my first book in coffee shops with music. I have to have my headphones on when I write. I have to have very specific physical feelings to feel like I'm locked in for writing. It's the same with me for lots of things, actually. And I have to have the headphones on. I have to listen to music. As long as I have the headphones on and I have the music, then I can write anywhere.

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And we're back.

And I have no idea what we were talking about. Oh, yeah. Other worker cooperatives that they ran or do run. They do messenger work. Their biggest client is Meals on Wheels. So, you know, if folks need food delivered to their house, sometimes it's people from Fountain House doing it. They have a landscaping business that manages like small plots and rooftop gardens and stuff like that. They run a warm line so that people in crisis or near to crisis can call and talk to someone who you know has been through that shit too.

That's great. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And they also have a non-transitional worker cooperative, like one that's more of a permanent employment type place. And it's an art gallery. And it's about to have its 25th anniversary. And so they just get stuff done. And long term. Like they've persevered through the decades, which is really cool. Yeah. And it's funny because the fact that it's still a little bit like workplace focused, it still has a little bit of like a 50s vibe. Yeah.

You know, but not necessarily in a bad way. They're like pulling it off. You know, what part of it's a 50s vibe? Oh, I think that like being kind of like work. It's good. Go have a job. You know, I'm not going to say work will set you free. That's a terrible. I was going to say you were really close. I know. I know. It went into my brain and I was like, well, not that. It went into mine too, Margaret. Yeah.

Plus, if they all dress like greasers. No, they don't. But it'd be cool if they did. They're in pink lady outfits. That's what I was hoping it was outfits. Yeah. I actually don't think there's like a subcultural element to it that I'm aware of. But I would be fully supportive if there was. And I'm going to go on a tangent. Oh, I should. That's when I should have done the ad break. But it's too late. I already did it.

I co-host another podcast called Live Like the World is Dying, and it's about individual and community preparedness. One topic we've covered several times and will continue to cover is preparedness for people who deal with disabilities. About a year ago, episode 101 is with a Canadian activist and writer named Leah Lekshma Piepsma Semersinga. And I think about this episode all the time because people often sort of ask how abled preparedness can apply to disabled communities. But in some ways, this is an inverted question.

disability activists and communities have done way more of this work for longer because both individual and community preparedness is often required for day-to-day life. And so there are networks of people who track each other's needs and work together to meet them. And there's an awful lot that abled people interested in preparedness can do that they can learn from the networks that disabled people have put together. And when I read about the clubhouse model and Fountainhouse,

And it's focused on developing agency in healthcare, social environments, and the workplace. All I can think about, again, is like, oh, these folks are the teachers, right? These are the people who've been trying this and doing this and running it through experiments for 70 years, you know? Because folks fighting for their rights and agency as neurodivergent people have done an enormous amount of work in this field.

And the people who study this stuff, who are often neurodivergent people themselves, have done an incredible amount of work. Fountainhouse changes people from patients receiving care to people who are working to develop their own agency around care. E.L. Desi, one of the founders of self-determination theory, put it like this, quote,

The main thing about choice is that it engenders willingness. It encourages people to fully endorse what they are doing, pulls them into the activity, and allows them to feel a greater sense of volition. It decreases their alienation. And boy, are a lot of people feeling alienated right now. Yeah. Like, we live in the golden era of isolation and alienation. And here is a component to solving that. And that is...

developing our lives by creating structures that engender purpose and give us choice and give us agency and things. And I get really excited about it. It's an interesting time because...

the country is less religious and I personally am not a big proponent of organized religion, but there was a community element to that of like seeing the same people every week and going to church and synagogue and temple, you know? And, and so like we haven't filled the gap in terms of like how to have community places that people go to frequently enough to

That to like fill the fill the role that sort of organized religion did for quite some time. I think that's a really good point. And, you know, and also that like more and more communities are just online and online communities can fill important purposes, but yeah.

I don't think it's everything, you know. It's hard because I think online communities can be so awesome. Yeah. But it also keeps you like immobile. It keeps you like locked in to the inside in a sense. Like, you know, like it can make you more closed in versus like exploring nature with your friend or, you know, going somewhere with them to do an activity together. Yeah.

You mean like taking care of alpacas? Because that's the next part of what I'm going to talk about. Thank God. I'm so excited. Wait, though, before we talk about the alpacas, I just got really excited about a good transition, but now I'm not even going to use it. Nope, I lost it. We'll just talk about alpacas. Oh, thank God. Okay, good, good, good. One of the many projects attached to Fountainhouse is called Fountainhouse Farm, which is an appropriate name for a farm attached to Fountainhouse. They call it The Farm with a capital letter, which is a point in the cult book, but, you know, whatever.

This is a 477-acre farm in New Jersey where members of Fountainhouse can go for a few days or a month to help grow the food that is served in the clubhouse. And they get to work together as equals with other people, and they get to eat community meals, and they get to hang out with animals. And this is less like the worker cooperatives and stuff and more run like Fountainhouse itself. The work there is volunteer. You can go there and just hang out. You can go there and take care of folks.

You're taking care of yourself and your own community, right? You're like producing the honey that gets sent to Fountainhouse. Some of it gets sold, but that gets sent to Fountainhouse to feed people, to feed you. The farm itself has an interesting history. There's a guy named Alfred Keller from a rich family who suffered from a serious mental illness. And in the 1930s, he used to run away from institutions that

I mean, I would say he was suffering from the institutions at least as much as he was suffering from whatever anyway. He would run away and he would go hang out at this farm. And his family never abandoned him, but he kept getting re-institutionalized. He was actually a Fountainhouse member, but he kept getting re-institutionalized. And so his family bought the farm hoping that one day he would be allowed out of the institutions and could just live and work on that farm. As best as I can tell, that never happened. Alfred died institutionalized, as I understand, although...

His family then donated the farm to Fountainhouse. Most of the articles about the farm are framed kind of condescendingly in ways I don't like, with headlines like, Modern Farmers 2015. At this New Jersey farm, alpacas help the mentally ill. And you're just like, well, that goes in both directions. Yeah. Yeah, the alpacas aren't bringing their own crumbles. Yeah. Like, it's actually mutual aid is what's going on. Yeah.

The article itself is all right. I know writers don't pick their headlines. If you wrote that article, I'm not mad at you. If you wrote the headline, though. But we are mad at your editor. Yeah, totally. But yeah, at Fountainhouse Farm, people raise sheep and alpacas for wool, and they work with a co-op that spins that wool. They keep bees, and they grow vegetables and fruit, and I think maple syrup. They just do all the stuff. And there's endless good quotes that didn't end up fitting into my script from people just being like,

This rules. I get to go hang out with animals. They actually put it much more eloquently than I just made it sound. But they just are like, this is amazing. I love going out and hanging out with animals. And there's also a lot of stuff around like, I say this living in a house with only my dog that's curled up at my feet right now. Sometimes people have an easier time hanging out with animals and with people, you know?

I don't know anything about that. It just must be other people. Oh, yeah. Me neither. Yeah. This is a dream. I love it. It's interesting. This is not the only alpaca farming cooperative that we have covered here on Cool Zone Media. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, it's rules. Well, apparently at the first, I'm off script here so I get the details wrong, I'm sorry. Apparently for a while they kept alpacas and then sold them because there was a big boom in alpaca farming in the early aughts. Yeah, the alpaca boom. Yeah, the old alpaca boom that everyone knows about. Well, because the one I went to was taking alpacas off boomers who had got alpacas during the boom and could no longer look after them. Totally. That actually makes a lot of sense.

this boom to me people are just like really into having alpacas or they want the alpaca wool i think it's the 80s and 90s you know people's wearing bright colored clothes yeah i think it was for the wool i think it was like everyone thought it'd be like the good business it's having a resurgence so actually like in the last four or five years um i get way more pr pictures about alpaca wool can i plug a brand of alpaca wool clothing that i like

I mean, as long as everyone knows it's not one of our advertisers. Yeah, yeah. They're not paying us. There's a company called Arms of Andes who make alpaca wool base layers. And I love them. They're great. I was hiking the other day. I wore one. I felt good. Hell yeah. It makes me happy. Yeah. Alpacas. They're great. This podcast brought to you by alpacas. By big alpaca.

One big alpaca. It's Godzilla size. The final boss, you know. Or the biggest friend. Or both. Depends on what you'd say to it. It's not a boss. It's a cooperative. Alpacas are inherently cooperative. They can't have bosses. No gods, no masters, just alpacas. So yeah, they have a farm.

They also support their members through education. They offer mentoring and tutoring groups. Like if people go and seek traditional education, right? They will, the social workers there will, you know, help you do that. They offer mentoring and tutoring groups. And I think like helping people get ready for class and whatever, whatever else folks need. Like a lot of the stuff that happens at Clubhouse is just like,

You show up and there's someone who can help you figure out how to move or find, apply for housing. You know, like talking to my friends, they're like, oh, you know, what did you do today? Well, I drove around all around town with like a couch in the back of the van trying to figure out how to get it up the stairs or, you know, whatever. They just go around and are helping people sort stuff out. That's what these big companies should offer rather than like yoga.

Yeah. Right. It should be like, you need help with some weird technical issue or scheduling or something. Well, we'll send someone to be at your place when the cable guy comes. Yeah. That's going to be a better benefit than like, you know, free like yoga or whatever, like the fancy snacks are. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, my God. There is going to be a dark part of the future where this clubhouse model is appropriated by big tech. Absolutely. Probably as a result of this episode. Yeah, which is cool. And I will feel great about it as long as they hire someone else. When I can't, I like live alone in the country and every now and then I have objects that are too large for me. And I'm like, well, what the hell am I going to do now? You know?

As I move a large filing cabinet down a hill. Your Google helper will show up soon. Yeah, exactly. Or you'll just herniate a disc trying to do it by yourself. That's the more likely thing. And as I age, I'm like, how do the people who lived here before me... Anyway, whatever. It's more about my house than anyone needs to know. And so they help people through higher education. Enough so that a 2003 study estimated that, quote,

The majority of supported education programs available for adults with serious mental illnesses were provided by clubhouses. Wow. Which is like there's only 60,000 people who are being helped by clubhouses in this country right now. So that's bad. It shouldn't be. I mean, or there's just be a ton more clubhouses. But that's how exceptional in the field they are.

The clubhouse model spread, and it is still spreading. It took a minute. A lot of the stuff they pioneered is somewhat mainstream now, but it was revolutionary at the time. And then throw in the worker cooperative stuff, and it's still revolutionary in a literal challenging capitalism sense. Although, again, a completely apolitical project. I want to push back on that. They identify as an apolitical project. But I think that's a mistake. Okay. Yeah.

But I guess, I know, I guess it's strategic, right? But I personally think that all mental health care has to be political. Yeah. Because so much of our issues are our structures of oppression and the way in which society is set up. And to say that, like, it's a big debate, like within like therapists and, you know, how political should you be with your clients? But I'm of the proponent that you have to be political because so many of these problems are caused by politics. Yeah.

That makes sense to me. I tend to agree with you. We should write them a letter. We'll let them know. Totally. Well, what's funny is it wouldn't be able to change without the members themselves agreeing to it, right? And so it's kind of interesting. Yeah, I recently was helping a bunch of my friends deal with a bunch of pretty intense mental health crises recently.

And at the end of it, I was like, if someone was able to give you cars that ran, most of your problems would be your mental health would get better. Oh, absolutely. You know, like you can't like positive think your way out of poverty. Yeah. There was that study a long time ago. I'm sure this number has gone up. There's a study a number of years ago that money does buy happiness up to about $70,000 a year and then it stops. I also don't believe that.

You think it keeps buying happiness or? Well, especially 70,000 that needs to go up the cost of living. But I also, I mean, just this whole concept of like money doesn't give you happiness. It's like, that's just not true because. Well, yeah, that's, and that's what the study was is they were like, oh, actually no, it directly correlates. But I do think there's a difference between like, I don't know. I think that there is something if like you can go on vacation.

Yeah. Like if you are getting more money than just like your basic needs, I do think there is something of like, oh, I can take myself out to dinner. I can treat myself here. I don't have to worry about that. I can, you know, do what I want to do for my children. Like this idea that like, oh, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. It's being poor. It's very stressful. Yeah. Yeah.

We just got upgraded to 70,000 thanks to our union. Nice. Yeah, it's nice to be like, if my truck breaks, I can buy the parts and fix it. I'll be okay. That is considerably nicer than not being able to buy the parts and fix your truck. Yeah.

No, it is interesting because that was actually part of the conversation I had with a friend about this is just like talking about how they do not perceive themselves as a political project except specifically around these particular things. Whereas so many people in this field do. And it's not a plus or minus to Clubhouse in a lot of ways, right? It's just a thing. Maybe it's what makes them more effective because the world's become so politicized.

politically divided that saying they're apolitical lets them through doors that would otherwise be closed to them. Yeah, it's possible. Even though it's like, again, I'm like, oh, they're a consensus-based organization that fights for justice for people, or like on an individual level fights for justice for people with serious mental illnesses who have been forgotten by society and builds worker cooperatives and like, to me, they're political as hell and they're like envisioning a better world in so many ways, but that's not the way they conceive of their project, you know?

Right. And that's probably strategic and smart. Yeah.

So deinstitutionalization swept across the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s. And there's a bunch of different reasons for it. And I started learning about them. And then I realized this is only going to be about a paragraph of my script and I can't take two days learning about this. But overall, psychiatric meds became more available in the 1950s and 60s. And that helped an awful lot of people. It has its own problems as well. And the like political will to keep people safe.

locked up, like chained to things, you know, whatever, stopped being there. And some of it came from a desire to not make everyone's lives miserable by putting them institutions, whatever. So they were like, oh, we're going to deinstitutionalize. And there was a lot of like radical movements. I think I'm gonna talk about more on the show that fought for this, especially in Italy. At least that's the one that I started reading about before I realized that Fountainhouse was going to take up my entire script. Originally, this was going to be half and half Fountainhouse and then this Italian thing. But for whatever reason,

Deinstitutionalization swept across the US in the 1950s and 60s. And this meant that half a million people left institutions to live in the general public, but without proper access to housing and care and employment and shit like that. And there's a reason that there are so many abandoned psychiatric hospitals around the country. They are a model that has largely been proven ineffective, at least at the scale they were being used.

But it's messy. I don't know. Do you know what? All I know about it is, is messy. I was reading like there's some implications of how messy it is. But well, they just took away a resource that wasn't working and didn't provide anything else. So like now you have people being like, well, we should like people like Trump being like, well, we should put them back in an institution or back in a camp or, you know, and it's like, no, like those places are not good.

good, but like there has to be something else like they're needed to maybe be more outpatient resources that were given to people and more social services given to people and better access to mental health treatment. So, you know, if you went for being in a psychiatric hospital where like, I guess maybe you were at least getting therapy questionable how good it would be.

But now, like, you can't even afford any therapy because no one takes insurance or your insurance won't cover it. Like, it kind of went from like, well, we're going to take over your whole life and not do it very well to actually you're completely on your own. Yeah, that that sounds about right. But what supports us and so that we're not on our own are podcast sponsors.

That was a good one. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. This is the only thing I'm actually good at in my job. It's the part I enjoy the most is the just pure raw cynicism. Much like the cynicism with which these ads have crafted their messages to appeal to you. Here they are.

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And we're back.

Sometimes we actually get like actual sponsors where I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. You know, like there was like for a while, like a lot of the ads were like, go outside with your friends. National Forest Council says go outside. And I'm like, you know what? Go outside with your friends. Hell yeah. I love the ads for Ronald Reagan's son's organization. That's like about being an atheist or whatever. And he's like, I'm something Reagan and I don't care if I burn in hell.

That is a good attitude to have to life if you're Reagan, to be fair. Yeah. I'm not worried about burning in hell. That's an ad I can really get behind. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, the clubhouse model suits deinstitutionalization all right because it meets former patients and folks with serious mental illnesses where they're at. In 1977, the National Clubhouse Training Program was formed so that the model was able to spread.

Standards were developed in 1989, and Clubhouse International started accrediting clubhouses in 1992. Not all clubhouses in the network have accreditation, meaning there's some sort of like kind of like half clubhouses, three-quarter clubhouses, right, where they meet certain parts of the criteria, not others. And there's a lot of projects that are like clubhouses but fundamentally different and aren't associated with Clubhouse International at all. We're going to talk about one of those in Japan at the very end.

There are more than 370 clubhouse model institutions now in 33 countries. Actually, I don't know if institution is the right word. It probably isn't. You don't live there, you know? None of them. People don't live in them at all, ever. Oh, it's funny. I did read all 37 of the principles and I can't remember that's on there, but I think it is. Okay. Yeah, got it. And they, you know, they help you with housing and things like that. Oh, great. Yeah.

In the US, clubhouses serve about 60,000 members, but considering there is an estimated 15 million people in the US living with serious mental illness, this is only a drop in the bucket. Clubhouse International has developed 37 standards for accreditation. It's a good list, and not all of them come from Fountainhouse. Some of them, and I'm paraphrasing here, membership is voluntary and without time limits, members choose the way to utilize the clubhouse,

There's equal access to all opportunities without differentiation based on your diagnosis or your level of functioning. All meetings are open to members and staff both. There are no staff-only spaces in any of the buildings. Clubhouses can't be attached to mental health institutions like any other organization. Job placement will be the prevailing wage.

And the very last of the 37 principles, standards, sorry, is, quote, "The clubhouse holds open forums and has procedures which enable members and staff to actively participate in decision-making, generally by consensus, regarding governance, policy-making, and future direction and development of the clubhouse." And it's this last part, "generally by consensus," that I'm going to focus on for a second.

These days, Fountainhouse has 1,200 active members and 70 staff. Not to put you on the spot, but did you go to any of the Occupy-era consensus meetings? I didn't, no. Okay. In some ways, you were lucky. James is now twinkling. And...

The Occupy protests of 2011 first popularized consensus decision-making and then kind of, through backlash, unpopularized consensus decision-making because everyone was sick of endless meetings and the struggles to find consensus and saw all the ways that people can hijack that process. And though, of course, though Occupy was a huge deal, it also didn't really accomplish its goals, which doesn't really make it seem to be able to say empirically, like, this is the method that works, right? Right. Right.

During that period, I was talking to one of my friends who works at Fountainhouse. And to paraphrase that conversation from memory from 13 years ago, he said, everyone is saying consensus decision-making can't work or that it's too hard. We make decisions through consensus at Fountainhouse with hundreds of people, all of whom have serious mental illnesses, and we reach consensus quickly because the people at Fountainhouse know that they need to. They know that it isn't a game. It's their lives. And

The reason I love this so much is that they didn't decide, I know I've said this before when I beat this point home to you listeners, they didn't decide on consensus from an ideological position. They didn't say we do consensus because it's good and moral and everything else is authoritarian and bad.

They reached the idea of using consensus because it worked. They tried voting and it quickly formed two factions, peddly squabbling, and the whole thing almost fell apart, which we totally can't think about. Obviously, no one in the United States has dealt with anything like that recently. Under John Beard for a while, it basically was like it wasn't consensus under John Beard for a while, right? The only factions are John Beard and then everyone else.

And I think it was like a benevolent, accountable, transparent dictator, basically, who was director. Everyone's involved in a lot of decisions, but sort of the buck always stopped with him kind of thing, you know? You know, I really have this belief that that's the best way, but it's impossible to get a good person at the top. Well, and so what happened is, is after that stopped being the case, he died in 1982 when he was only 59 years old. He was still the director, I believe, when he died.

They moved to consensus because it worked. And so that was mean, I don't know what it means. I'm so sorry. I take certain things for granted. I should know, but I don't know what. No, no, no. It's totally fine. Consensus decision making is when you get everyone to agree instead of voting.

Oh, so everyone has to be on board rather than you just need a majority. Right. Got it. Got it. And consensus is interesting because everyone thinks it's like super aggressive voting and it's not. It's not getting everyone to vote the same way. It's saying like, what is the thing that we can all agree to do? Because if you can't reach consensus, like imagine, imagine you and your friends wanted to commit a crime.

I'm just using this because it's a heavy thing, right? There's a consequence to committing a crime. Unless you're a president. Yeah. Or son of. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Oh, I did have a friend. I had a couple friends who had diplomatic immunity when I was a teenager because I grew up near D.C. And the stuff... Anyway, whatever. I would have raged. Yeah, no, actually, at one point, one of my friends...

Her dad got promoted back to the country that she was from because they were sick of her and her brother getting in trouble and having to bail them out. My very first earring was shoplifted by her, and I met her on the day that she was supposed to be in court for shoplifting. But she decided not to. She went to a concert. Anyway, before I talk about international incidents that I was involved in when I was younger. So imagine you and your friends want to commit a crime because this is somehow a better thing to talk about.

And there's like eight of you and you're like, all right, should we go commit this crime? You clearly need to have everyone agree. Right. And if everyone doesn't agree, then all eight of you shouldn't go commit that crime. Right. Because if someone doesn't want to, they shouldn't have to go commit the crime because it's a huge, big risk. And so consensus is like a way of finding out what are we all comfortable with? And maybe you start off with a really big crime, but then like four of you are like, no, I don't want to do that.

Or even two of you or one of you is like, I don't want to do that. And you're like, well, we all want to hang out together. So what do we all want to do? I mean, honestly, I could have used going to a restaurant with your friends as an example. You know, it's like as the vegan in any given group, like basically it's like we always have to go places that I can eat, you know? Same. Both examples track. Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So that's consensus decision making, and that's how they make their decisions is with hundreds of people, and they talk about what they all are down to do together. And we know the clubhouse model works because there are thousands and thousands of people telling us that it works. And we know that it's a model that we can learn from about how to build agency and community and end alienation and how to make decisions collectively. We also know it works because it's been studied time and time again.

According to a 2022 paper by Joshua Seidman and Kevin Rice, quote, Also quote,

Clubhouses have further been proven to reduce severe psychiatric symptoms, improve self-esteem, and decrease internalized stigma, promoting greater recovery experiences, thus reducing the need for psychiatric hospitalization. Randomized controlled trials of clubhouse programs have shown reduced hospitalization of clubhouse members. Clubhouse costs are substantially lower than partial hospitalization. Thus, clubhouse membership reduces the overall cost of health care.

And study after study, and I know this because I read the meta-analysis study because that's what I do with my time, it shows that Clubhouse members have more secure employment, more friends, and more people that they can rely on, and a higher standard of living, better wages, and fewer re-hospitalizations. And it's not perfect, right? Fewer re-hospitalizations is... I forgot to write down the numbers in the script, but it's something like it goes down from like 45% to like 28%, you know? All right. And it...

It's not just going to like solve everything. Right. You know? And I think that's also worth pointing out that you get this like sort of biodiversity thing of like, this is a way of doing this and not like, not that now the clubhouse should take over the world, you know? And to contrast it, I asked my friend at Fountain House if there's anything else I should bring up. And he told me about a place in Japan called Bethel House. He went and stayed and visited a while ago.

The people at Bethel House knew all about the clubhouse model, but they had their own spin on things. It was a more radical take, but it started quite similarly. In 1978, a group of people who'd just been discharged from a hospital got together to take care of one another. This one's even more culty, but they also seem totally fine. They bought an abandoned church, and they moved in together, and I just ordered the only book on English about this place, and I might end up doing more episodes about it. But for now...

The biggest difference subjectively between Bethel House and the clubhouses, and there are clubhouses in Japan, is that Bethel House isn't assimilationist. It does not focus on rehabilitation. It forms essentially a counterculture. There's no like subcultural elements to it that I'm aware of, but it wants to create a different, they're like, we will interface with mainstream society, but we're not trying to just go fix ourselves and be back, right?

It, too, doesn't see itself as a political project because they'd see it as they see it. They're not trying to change Japanese culture or politics. They're just trying to live their lives outside the system that they don't participate in or agree with. They are integrated economically into the small town they're in, and they believe that they ought to be helping out those around them as well. There's about 100 people involved in Bethel House, so it's a very different scale. These 100 people run a ton of worker cooperatives.

While my friend was there, they ran a seaweed factory, a restaurant, a radio station, a knitting cooperative, and others. According to their website now, they also deliver materials to the elderly as one of their main businesses. So it's like a really similar set of things, right? Yeah. And the way that they make their decisions about who's going to work is even more like chaos time and super autonomy. It's really interesting. Every morning, they gather together, and the captains from each worker cooperative say...

Alright, well this is how much help we're hoping to get today at the place that we work, right? And people would volunteer to work their shifts. It's paid work, but you know, they would decide to go do it. Some people wouldn't bother to work at all. Others would be like, eh, I only want to do seaweed for two hours and I can only do it from 11 to 1 and I don't want to do it any other time. Other people would work whole shifts. At Fountainhouse, if no one takes a place at one of the cooperatives, staff steps up and makes sure that that business functions that day, right?

Right. At Bethel House, if no one works at the radio station, then the radio station just doesn't run that day. And one of their slogans from the English language section of their website is, let's make a workplace where everybody can skip work without feeling guilty.

Oh, it's beautiful. I know. I almost feel like this setup would make you feel more guilty because it'd be like, there's no radio station today because of me. I know, but I think that they like really, I think they're really strongly like, that's fine. All right. Like, not like, well, we're not even going to do it if you all don't do it. It's just like, all right, no radio station today. Like no one wanted to, like if no one wants to paint the walls, we can't make them paint the walls. We're just not going to have the walls painted, you know?

Another one of their slogans, which I don't know how to entirely... I have the way I interpret it, but I assume it's not a perfect translation, is, No more upward life. We stay with downward life. What? And they honor those among them that hear voices, and they call them Mr. Voice or Mrs. Voice. And they wear pins indicating how they feel that day that are color-coded. It's kind of like a, don't talk to me today, you know? Yeah. And they're more on a mad pride vibe than the Clubhouse model is.

But again, they don't live there. They live elsewhere. I actually think those people do live there, but I'm not sure. Give us a vibe that they live there, but I could be wrong. So it was described to me that there's like a group of them that are called nomads where I think they have a bunch of different like basically crash pads where anyone can stay at any of them. If you're a member of Bethel House, you can just show up at any Bethel House house and be like, I'm going to stay here tonight.

So I don't know much about them yet. Here's a question I have. How do you start a clubhouse? Who is...

How does a location decide to start a clubhouse? Are they like franchises? Is there like some overarching person in charge of making, you know, because some are accredited, some aren't. Like how does that happen? So every clubhouse is autonomous as long as they subscribe to the 37 principles. And so I believe one of the principles is that the clubhouses are autonomous. So like the decisions are made by those local members and things like that.

And I know that there is a organization called Clubhouse International that I believe is not formally, I believe Fountainhouse is like the flagship of Clubhouse International, but it's not running Clubhouse International. I believe that is a separate body. And so I believe that you basically, I assume you start a 501c3 and intend to create a Clubhouse model and ascribe to these principles and then get accreditation through Fountainhouse.

Clubhouse International. And I assume probably the like financing of it is going to come the way that you would have to finance any nonprofit through grants and things like that. But I've been more certain about things, but that's my inference from what I, I've read a lot of shit about this, but I didn't read a how to start one.

So you said there's 60,000 current members in America or 1,200? 1,200 is Fountain House. Oh, Fountain House. Got it. Yeah. And then 60,000 people in clubhouses across the country, of which I believe there's a couple hundred. I know it's like either 270 or 370. I don't remember. I said it earlier. But there's a number that is the entire world, and then there's a number that's in the U.S. that I forgot to write down. But it's like 200-ish. That's wild. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you, there's a map, if you, if anyone is interested in this, like, you know, honestly, this like seems like it's for me, right? Uh, there is a map. There's like a find your local clubhouse and you know, they're in places that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

And all of them are perfect and you will have a perfect time and everything will be great and 100% satisfaction guaranteed. I don't know. You just can't talk to your friends or family, but that's fine. Yeah, totally. You have to give all your money to the clubhouse. No, because if you give the really Cliff's Notes version of clubhouse to someone, it sounds kind of wacky, right? Because we're so attuned to being afraid because this is the kind of people who are preyed on by cults. Yeah. Right. You know?

And even some of the like, don't worry, we're all just working and work will, you know, set you free. Right. There's like cults that get together and make products that they're just exploiting people's labor and stuff like that. And I think that it's just so interesting to see someone not doing that, you know? Well, it's like really exciting and kind of a relief to know that that can happen because I feel like so many things start off well-intentioned and then become...

Yeah. And so to recognize like this has been around for decades and it seems to still be above board and doing the intended mission is like really wonderful. Yeah. And dare I say, cool. I know. So is it cool people doing cool stuff?

Until I get an email from a listener saying, Allison, how dare you? This is a very problematic institution. I will say it sounds like it's cool people doing cool stuff. And if you want to send that to Allison, you should send it to me instead. Although I'm not going to give you my email address, but people somehow managed to find a way to reach me anyway. Because it's my fault, not Allison's fault. I don't know how they find it. People find my email. I'm like, where? I know. I know. And don't email me to tell me how you found my email. Best as I would get like these emails that were like...

I figured out your phone number from your dog's collar. It is blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. And I was like, OK, but that's not it. This is why every time I take a picture of my dog, I make sure that his collar is covered. I know you have to. But it's always the people that are like, I'm not creepy. Yeah. I just want you to know that someone who is could decipher this because I did. Yeah.

And this isn't to say that everyone who has reached out to me, including by finding my email address, which I think is available in some public place because enough people write me that it must be somewhere publicly. Most of these emails are very nice. Oh, no. Yeah. It's super well-intentioned. It's just funny when they're like, and I cracked it. I'm like, and that's not my number. Yeah, when the Nazis doxed me, they were like, and you live here. And I'm like, oh, no, you've got me. Yeah.

Don't go to that address. Meanwhile, some poor lady. Yeah. James, you got any final thoughts? Clubhouses? This is cool. I love a cooperative. I love people helping people. I like this. This is cool. I'm going to look them up. I'm going to see if there's one nearby. Yeah. And I haven't talked to anyone from any other clubhouse, to be clear. But I, you know...

It's like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. And maybe I'm sure those people have had bad experiences with it. Right. But overall, I'm really excited about it. I warned Twitter. I was like, next week's episode is going to be unrelentingly posi. But yeah. How can you do it to the Margaret? Well, if people want to hear more of your voice, how can they do that?

Besides sending you an email. They can get the audio book of my new book. I do, I think, conversations about modern marriage, which I narrate. And it's also available as a hardcover. And then you could listen to my weekly podcast called Just Between Us. And if you just want to hear my thoughts in written form, so read my thoughts in written form, you could subscribe to my sub stack called Emotional Support Lady and

And then I guess if you want to hear from me directly, you can go to my website, alisonraskin.com, where I offer relationship coaching for both individuals and couples. That's awesome. Also, I believe in your listeners' ability because I do this with podcasters that I listen to. I can read their written work.

And hear it in their voice. I get that all the time. People are like, I read this exactly how you would say it. Yeah. Because, you know, it's like, I listen to podcasts all the time, too. I understand it. You know? They're like, I read this in your voice. It was fun. Yeah. James, you got anything you want to plug?

Yeah, sure. I have a Patreon. It's my name, James Stout, patreon.com slash James Stout, I believe. People can read my thoughts there. I'm writing a book for AK Press about anarchists at war, and you can buy that in the coming year, in 2025. It will be done, and it will be available for purchase. Oh, is it coming out next year? I'm excited about that book. Yeah, yeah. I did the old author questionnaire, and we

We're closing in. I have to, I rewrite the Syrian civil war section about every month or so as things dramatically change. So that's fine for me.

But yeah, and then the Myanmar one on the other month when I'm not doing the Syria one, I rewrite that one too. So that's been enjoyable for me. That's a problem with books, right? Yeah, you can keep writing them as it turns out. Yeah, after you hear this, I'm doing an event to raise money for Rojava, Rojava, Kurdistan, Western Kurdistan. But that will have been the day before this podcast comes out. So you won't be able to attend, but you can still donate.

Hevyasor, H-E-V-Y-A-S-O-R.com. Hell yeah. If you want to read a book of mine and imagine it's in my voice, my most recent book is called The Sapling Cage. It came out from the Feminist Press earlier this year. I want to say October 24th. I'm not actually sure. And it is about a young trans witch. And it is not technically a YA. It is technically a crossover, which is somehow different. Ooh.

And, I mean, I actually do know the differences, but to me it's a pedantic difference. But I guess it's not. I don't know why I'm telling you about this, but you can read the book where I don't discuss that, but instead discuss the coming of age of a young trans witch in a fantasy world. And it's not even mostly about gender. It's mostly a heavy-handed metaphor about climate change. Don't worry. Wait, that doesn't make it sound better. But...

I'm so relieved. It's much lighter of a read than you thought. It's just a metaphor for climate change. Yeah, see? Exactly. You understand. Anyway, you can catch us next week, or probably just me and the three of us, but maybe, who knows, on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and we'll talk to you all soon. ... ...

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on 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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