Hello, my Name is Tim Dreby. I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and I have been working at Highland Hospital Outpatient Psychiatric Unit since 2002 approximately 24 years. I think back to so many stories of oppression and suffering that I have witnessed in our clinic. These are gut-wrenching stories. Stories I have never had the sense that the public see or understand. It is a place where people process years of shelters, board and care homes, hospitals, homelessness, jails, family struggle, alienation, and exclusion. Many of these are stories complicated by abuse and neglect, by extreme experiences and by isolation. In the clinic, we transform this into powerful subcultural stories of endurance and community resilience.
The thought of closure is so concerning. I understand that many day clinics in Alameda County will be shut down at the end of this fiscal year. I wonder what is going to happen these stories I speak of without safe spaces. In the current climate, does our local government really want to fold to federal policies of mass deportation and psychiatric incarceration? That’s what these layoffs are doing, paving the way for federal agents targeting vulnerable people for incarceration and warehousing. We are in stage one now and we are being set up for stage two and beyond. Where will our clients go and how will they survive? In and out of psych ER is a cycle of abuse that is hard to come back from. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself.
