Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Mental Illness in Cohousing & Society

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

I used to do group facilitation training and  mediation training and work in
Intentional Communities of all kinds. From my experiences I would generalize
that community forms which have a small or nonexistant financial commitment
to join tended to attract the most people  who were in one way or another
highly dysfunctional. Cohousing tended to attract  people  who were
functional enough to be able to hold a job and secure a mortgage, which is a
pretty big indicator of functioning.
So, to put it in not so nice terms, the economic requirements of home
ownership  screens out the serious crazies.

That said, I have had several private conversations with people who were
hiding a mental illness from their neighbors. In general, they were afraid
if they came out, they would be socially ostracized. One of the most
difficult client privacy situations I ever personally encountered was a
person who had a history of Pedophilia. To my  relief I convinced this
person to come out to the  community.

So from these experiences I would hypothesize that for some people who have
mental illness, it is a difficult thing to bring out to the community,
especially if they can function more or  less on the surface to the extent
that they can hide their problems.

I myself get serious mental heebie-jeebies when crowded into small spaces
with lots of people, like hallways or elevators. Thus I tend to avoid
hallways during concerts, arrive early and stay seated, stay through the
credits at movies. My partner of 14 years did not know this about me until
last month. So its easy to hide stuff especially if you are embarrassed
about it at all.

Rob


-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Zev Paiss
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 11:11 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_Mental Illness in Cohousing & Society


Dear Everyone,

The reason for my initial question about community members with some
"officially diagnosed" mental illness is two-fold.

First, I am wondering if cohousing is attracting a disproportionate number
of people in this situation, and secondly, and much more problematic, is how
might a cohousing community in its development stage, openly have
discussions about this as the future members are getting to know one
another?

Have at it!!!

Zev Paiss
Nomad Cohousing
Boulder, CO
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