Cohousing-L Mailing List: Question about severe emotional distburbance/mental illness in cohousing

[Diana Leafe Christian (diana]

Question about  severe emotional distburbance/mental illness in  
cohousing,

        Hello,
        I'm writing to ask for help and advice.
	Specifically, I'm seeking descriptions of how various cohousing  
communities, or groups of cohousing residents, may have handled the  
difficult issue of a community member seeming to be quite emotionally  
disturbed or even mentally ill, especially when some residents become  
alarmed that the person may harm the community's property, or  
directly harm residents, their children, or their pets. Or perhaps  
create legal liability for the community.
	In each case where I've heard of situations like this, it seems that  
the first people to notice the person's behavior and want to do  
something about it are villified by the others who don't see the  
problem. But they later do.

	My question is, if you know of a situation like this in cohousing,  
how did the group handle it  ( or refuse to handle it)? What was the  
outcome?

	 I ask because some friends in a cohousing community called just now  
to arrange a phone consultation about the painful conflict in their  
community because of a situation like this. There's a teenager in the  
community whom some adults love and feel nurturing and protective of  
and others feel increasingly frightened of. The teenager has been  
described as setting fires, getting drunk and disorderly and  
violent,  damaging physical objects that belong to others, being  
verbally abusive to community adults or children, threatening harm to  
adults or children or pets, harming other children and pets.
        
	More than 20 adults have met several times to decide how to handle  
this. They finally wrote up a list of the teenager's alarming  
actions, but only those which they've personally witnessed or  
directly experienced. They gave the list to the teenager's parents  
and asked them to  prevent him from doing these things, to set  
boundaries and limitations, to institute consequences for him.

	Now there's a big rift between the parents of the teenager and other  
community members who feel close to the parents and protective of the  
teenager,  and the group of 20+ residents who asked the parents to  
curb the boy's behavior.
	The parents and their allies have used spiritual, New Age, and  
psychotherapeutic phrases to indicate why the concerned group is  
mistaken, the boy is innocent, and the concerned residents are  
violating good community process. These statements have ranged from,  
"Your observations aren't valid because you are not trained mental  
health professionals" and "You need to look at your own shadow issues  
that you're projecting onto the situation" to "You need to have love  
and compassion and not focus so much on rules and agreements" and "We  
just need to meditate ___ Cohousing Community into  healing."
	Does any of this sound familiar? Have similar things happened to  
cohousers you know?

	I believe this kind of conflict is fairly common, and is only  
resolved when the person doing the behaviors gets adequate help and  
changes their behavior (if, for example, they take mental health  
medications), or if their behavior escalates to the point where  
someone in the community suffers severe loss or damage (their unit  
set fire to) or is injured . . . in which case everyone then can  
finally acknowledge to themselves is a problem. And then limitations  
or boundaries are set, or, the community asks the person to please  
sell their unit and leave (though I know the person has every legal  
right to stay).

	At the 2003 cohousing conference a member of Nomad Cohousing in  
Boulder told us in one of the workshops that things became so bad  
there with one member who appeared to be mentally ill that, after  
they'd tried everything else, the community and the person ended up  
in Court. The Judge ruled that the woman had to sell her unit leave  
the community. When some Nomad residents asked him afterwards why he  
ruled that way, he said, "You've suffered enough."

	At the 2006 conference a friend from a community in California told  
me that someone behaved so bizarrely that the community asked her to  
sell her unit and leave. She then then threatened to sue them for  
causing her emotional distress by asking her to leave. They were  
scared of the lawsuit, but they finally realized that they couldn't  
live in fear of what she might do to them, either in the community or  
in a lawcourt, so they said, "OK then, so she'll sue us." I don't  
know how it turned out.

	I'd be grateful for any anecdotes you feel comfortable revealing, or  
any advice you'd like to give my friends.

        Thank you very much.

        Diana Leafe Christian
        
        
        

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