The Gathering Place: Musical Expressions of Self and Community Within a Non-Profit
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The Gathering Place: Musical Expressions of Self and Community within a Non-Profit, Community Mental Health Drop-In Center A dissertation presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Steven P. Phalen August 2013 © 2013 Steven P. Phalen. All Rights Reserved. This dissertation titled The Gathering Place: Musical Expressions of Self and Community within a Non-Profit, Community Mental Health Drop-In Center by STEVEN P. PHALEN has been approved for the School of Communication Studies and the Scripps College of Communication by William K. Rawlins Stocker Professor of Communication Studies Scott Titsworth Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii ABSTRACT PHALEN, STEVEN P., Ph.D., August 2013, Communication Studies The Gathering Place: Musical Expressions of Self and Community within a Non-Profit, Community Mental Health Drop-In Center Director of Dissertation: William K. Rawlins The Gathering Place opened its doors in 1976 to ex-patients of the Athens Mental Health Center largely through the dedicated efforts of community mental health activist Rita Gillick. Operating according to the clubhouse model of psychosocial rehabilitation, The GP provides a home/family-like environment for its members while providing them with opportunities to develop vocational and social skills necessary for independent and meaningful in the community living. This dissertation is an ethnographic rendering of my three years of involvement with The Gathering Place as a volunteer, musician, advocate, and eventually friend. I share particularly my experiences making music with the members during the collaborative jam session known as GP Jams and the music therapy programs sponsored by the organization. Further, I share the story of community mental health activist and musician Pete Wuscher and the community event to raise awareness of issues facing people with mental illness referred to as “Walk the Walk.” I interrogate my experiences drawing upon dialogic sensibilities informed by phenomenological and pragmatist philosophies emphasizing the significance of lived experience and the possibilities aesthetic expression creates for imagining socially just ways of living with others. Ultimately, I arrive at three dialogic promises that music makes as an act and a metaphor to those who enter into musical relations with others: music as embodied acknowledgement, music as invitation to dwelling, and music as iii expression of corporeal community. In sharing music’s dialogic promises, I offer ways in which they add to communication theory as well as highlight future directions for communication inquiry. iv PREFACE This dissertation is an ethnographic rendering of my experiences making music with the members of The Gathering Place, a non-profit drop-in center for people living with mental illness in southeastern, Ohio. As an ethnographic rendering, this dissertation is composed in a fashion that warrants some clarification so as to prime the reader for his/her upcoming experience. In the pages to follow I adopt a dialogic orientation towards the performance of meaning on the page (the details of which I share later) and pay particular attention to meaning as emerging from the interaction of dynamic selves and others entering into communion within ideologically saturated sociophysical contexts. The idea being that if one desires to perform a rendering of a group of people while probing the significance of their communicative exchanges, one has to dig beyond the superficial appearances of each encounter into the meanings undergirding participants’ perceptions of their lived experiences. In sharing the musical relationships I established at The Gathering Place, I keep this confluence of self, other, and context in mind in composing this text. The first two chapters are dedicated to describing the historical, social, and physical contexts in which my musical relationships with the members unfolded. Beginning with Chapter 1, I provide a brief history of the experience of living with mental illness and mental health care in the United States through the story of former patient and community mental health advocate Rita Gillick, founder of The Gathering Place. After speaking to the historical and social contexts of mental illness as performed through Rita’s life, I describe the clubhouse model of psychosocial rehabilitation that serves as a basis for The Gathering Place’s social and vocational rehabilitative program. In Chapter 2, I invite the v reader into the house by sharing the corporeal experiences of the members who value their time spent with The Gathering Place. In my rendering of the house, I pay particular attention to the homelike feel of the environment as expressed through the domestic quality of the house activities, the sensorial qualities of the artifacts displayed, as well as the invocation of familial metaphors in members’ descriptions of their relationships with each other and the staff of the organization. It is in Chapter 3 where I get to the heart of this dissertation and the introduction of the purpose of this project as raised through the question: How is music experienced as a relational modality of self and communal expression? Keeping in mind the confluence of self, other, and context I have established, Chapter 3 focuses on my positionality as a musician/scholar in relation to the members of The Gathering Place. Specifically, I describe myself as a highly sensitive person who has a lived understanding of mental illness and a rich background with regard to making music. These are two contours of my person that are relevant for the reader to come to know in order to understand the interpretive sensibilities that bear upon my rendering and subsequent discussion of the musical relationships I establish with the members. Chapters 4 through 6 perform the story of my musical relationships with members of The Gathering Place as they unfolded within the house. Chapter 4 describes my participation with the loosely structured collaborative jam session known as GP Jams that is facilitated by one of the members. In this chapter, I introduce music’s qualities as a modality of relation that makes possible the expression and sharing of personal experience. In Chapter 5, I describe my experiences participating in the music therapy sessions as facilitated by undergraduate music therapy students completing practicum vi credits for their degrees. In this chapter we learn about different understandings of and approaches to music, as well as experience music’s capacity to unify diverse persons in their difference. In Chapter 6, I share the song “Walk the Walk” written by Pete Wuscher, member of The Gathering Place and community mental health advocate, that describes the experience of living with mental illness. In addition to sharing the song, I share Pete’s story of living with mental illness as well as insight into the fragility of communal relation as established and maintained by persons. I then provide my experiences as a volunteer promoting the event “Walk the Walk” (also first imagined and carried out by Pete) to raise awareness of mental health issues within the community. Finally, in Chapter 7, I reflect upon my musical experience with the members of The Gathering Place and offer three dialogic promises music makes as a relational and meaningful modality of self and communal expression. These dialogic promises are music as embodied acknowledgement, music as invitation to dwelling, and music as the performance of corporeal community. In addition to describing these dialogic qualities of music as a meaningful modality of relation, I also speak to music as a metaphor for dialogic communication by providing a brief reprise of Rita Gillick’s life read musically in order to drive home the point as expressed by Oliver Sacks (2008), “Humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one” (p. xi). I offer some concluding thoughts on the composition of this dissertation and the experience of conducting ethnographic work within the setting of The Gathering Place. Before officially beginning this story, the reader should keep in mind a few points of clarification regarding the purpose of this dissertation. This dissertation performs the musical relationships established with people living the experience of mental illness. vii While mental illness is a necessary theme to address in order to arrive at an understanding of this state of being-in-the-world, this dissertation is not about mental illness. Rather, this dissertation is about the possibilities music creates for self and communal expression as a meaningful modality of relation between selves and others. In some instances mental health is implicated in my musical relationships with the members, but analytic attention is focused on the musical dynamics and not the mental health issues underlying the experience. Moreover, although a significant part of my experience making music with the members of The Gathering Place unfolded during music therapy sessions, my story does not intend to contribute to theoretical and practical discussions of music through the perspective of music therapy. This is not to say that exploring music therapy sessions from a relational perspective is without benefit; but in the same breath it is not my hope to inadvertently arouse particular expectations without addressing them. Keeping in mind my previous caveat concerning mental illness, music therapy is implicated in this dissertation; but again, my analytic attention falls on the relational aspects of music and not the therapeutic. With that being said, let us begin with the story of Rita Gillick. viii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the members of The Gathering Place who let me into their lives both musically and personally. ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank The Gathering Place, both the members and staff, for inviting me into the home they have fostered at 7 North Congress Avenue. These past three years serving your organization musically and otherwise have been transformative for me both as a person and as a scholar.