The American Association of Suicidology Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism
Wokefication and institutional capture are not what you think; Neither is BIPOC.
“We believe that the only way for the field of suicidology to reduce suicide and build lives worth living for BIPOC is to dismantle systems of oppression.” — Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism
Prelude: The Return of the Repressed
This article represents the return of repressed memories of the farcical overthrow of David Covington, the president of America’s major suicide prevention organization, by a tiny social media mob that struck immediately after his presidential address. The coup was made to appear spontaneous, but it was not. The disturbance was orchestrated by a tiny group pretending to be anonymous but familiar to the organization's members, including the deposed president. The coup was covertly financed with $100K in public funds that the organization's leadership had obtained without much fanfare or formal announcement.
Americans, wherever they are on the political spectrum, should oppose the ill-gained and unaccounted-for waste of federal funds for a project to corrupt suicide prevention. Someone should be required to repay this money, along with penalties and accumulated interest. It is not too late. Maybe this process can be qui tam’ed under the False Claims Act.
Jonathan Singer’s lovely ladies.
[Before readers are offended, note that one of these women referred to me as “Princess,” and the other responded to my single tweet with a rageful string of tweets. A sampling:
The ringleaders and public faces of the coup were two lesbian women without formal professional credentials. They were known for their recurrent disruptive and anti-social public behavior, if they were previously known at all.
Their speech was slurred in their unscripted signature series of podcasts, and sometimes they nodded off. They appeared to be under the influence of high dosages of prescription drugs and alcohol and sometimes said so. They talked of their serious suicidality with callousness and bravado, not compassion.
The women publicly preached that suicidal persons should consider keeping guns in their homes because sometimes taking one’s life was the only escape from life in capitalist society. To take one’s life is emancipation. You are going to die anyway and probably prematurely. You could assert your freedom by choosing the time and place. That’s why you should keep a gun or a pre-made noose in some readily accessible place to make sure means are accessible when the intent is to die is fresh in your mind.
Like many things in this article, this characterization is grounded in some statements that can be checked. Stay tuned for the receipts that I will provide in future installments.
The tales told on the podcasts are illustrated with graphic details. Mementos on display took the form of tattoos applied or gifted after a suicidal episode. They were meant to serve as reminders that these women and those men and women who believed them had attempted suicide and survived. Stencils for these bespoken designs could be purchased on a website established by one of the women to sell various merchandise and display professional and celebrity endorsements.
“Hey, if you are experiencing suicidal ideation, get yo’ tattoo stencil here, cheap! You do not have to make a serious attempt on your life to display a tattoo, but you will be more authentic if you do. Don’t wear a tattoo without having earned it, it cheapens my brand.”
The more outspoken of the two women regularly expresses great distress on social media, sometimes threatening to beat up women who disagree with her. She would rarely apologize to those she attacked, but she posted various versions that her rage had to be expected, but friends should intervene if she veered into talking about how badly she felt.
The AAS grant application described the two women in odd, glowing terms to justify their effectively serving as Co-Principal Investigators. The lived experience that substituted for the training and expertise (AKA investigator qualifications and relevant previous work) usually expected of someone serving as a grant Co-PI was documented with numerous awards, many of them from the suicide organization they disrupted with the coup.
The transition in leadership of AAS that followed the overthrow of the president initially proceeded in an orderly fashion. Jonathan Singer emerged as he were the Strongman who assumed power in Third World military coups. Try to think of Jonathan as if he were Forrest Whittaker playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
Source: Wikipedia
Jonathan Singer earned his professorship in social work at Loyola Chicago University almost entirely based on his podcasting. Thus, he had a natural affinity with the women of Suicide N’ Stuff. Hopefully, the Department of Social Work at Loyola counted their frequent mentions on their respective podcasts as citations.
Although it is disputed in some places on social media, Jonathan was the next in line to be president, but he assumed power early when David Covington was forced to resign. In announcing his ascension to power, he politely thanked the outgoing president and praised what David had done for the organization. In an unguarded moment in Facebook Messager, Singer complained that it took him months to clean up the mess David had left behind.
The woman urged followers to vote for Jonathan for president, but it is unclear whether his ascension to the presidency was ever by a froaml vote after the coup. Maybe, like some dictators like Putin, Jonathan still needed the love and validation of a winning vote in the election.
Jonathan Singer publicly and affectionately supported the woman responsible for his early ascendence to power. He expressed his love for her during her disruptions of the board and scientific meetings of the organization and when she posted a live videotape of her slashing herself with a large knife and calling 911. Jonathan refused to criticize or apologize for the woman bringing antisemites into my life. He warned me to watch out because he was Jewish, so he could not be condoning antisemitism and saying so couldme get into trouble.
‘The taped incident served as the basis for a $42,500 GoFundMe fundraiser for her to obtain inpatient treatment at a special setting in Utah, specializing in the treatment of persons with dual diagnoses of mental health and substance use disorders. She could only tolerate the rules of the setting for a short while and checked out, spending the remaining money on other things, including personal gifts and travel. She was irked by restrictions on her use of social media, but enraged by rejection of her demand that she maintain a stash of psychotropic drugs to be self-administered at her own discretion.
The Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism of the American Association of Suicidology
Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism American Association of Suicidology
The purpose of the American Association of Suicidology is to prevent suicide and better understand its causes, while supporting those who have been affected by it. We seek to build lives worth living. It is critical to embrace a world where Black, Brown and Indigenous lives matter. We can only do this by dismantling systems of racism and oppression that implicitly or explicitly endorse the individual biases and racist systems that marginalize and erase the experiences and contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). These are the same systems that actively destroy the physical and mental wellbeing of BIPOC. We pledge to recognize and address the intersectionality of the impact of suicide and its prevention when we traditionally have not as a field, even though we certainly should have.
We believe that the only way for the field of suicidology to reduce suicide and build lives worth living for BIPOC is to dismantle systems of oppression. Systemic racism not only affects how we understand and provide access to mental health care and crisis support, it frames how suicide and mental health are conceptualized, how resources including funding get allocated, and what questions are deemed worthy of research funding. Furthermore, we pledge to examine AAS’s structure and operation to understand how racist and oppressive systems are embedded in our functioning in order to shift our own organization to have anti-racist perspectives and practices.
As a predominantly and historically white organization, AAS, its board, staff, and leadership understand that we must deepen our commitment and resolve to include the voices and experiences of our BIPOC members. AAS must lead by example when it comes to inclusivity, diversity, and equity and demonstrate to current and future members that this is an organization committed to doing the work to dismantle systemic racism.
The AAS Board, Staff and Leadership pledge to:
Continue our current work with Dr. Pata Suyemoto and other knowledgeable advisors to create an anti-racist organization
Diversify the Board of Directors, leadership, staff, and our membership
Continue to work on Board and leadership development related to anti-racism and equity
Examine and reevaluate policies and practices at all levels of the organization, including governance, programming, fundraising, communications, recruitment and operations, and member engagement through a lens of anti-racism and equity
Highlight BIPOC voices and perspectives at the annual conference and throughout organizational activities
Acknowledge and engage the Indigenous people whose homelands on which we stand and meet as an organization, including returning time and space at the annual conference to Native people as invited speakers, breakout sessions and hosted events
Create recognition and accountability for the historical harms done to BIPOC by mental health, public health, social work, and other fields central to suicidology
Listen to and engage with BIPOC to respond to their needs
Continue to engage with members and the public with live stream events to increase access to activities and to respond to concerns of BIPOC communities in real-time
Amplify the voices of BIPOC engaged with suicide prevention, intervention and postvention
Continue to improve our accreditation standards to ensure crisis centers are addressing diversity, inclusivity, and equity
Develop scholarships (research, conference attendance, etc.) for BIPOC members
Advocate for funding for research to understand and address the factors that contribute to BIPOC suicide
Discuss and encourage intervention and prevention research and initiatives specific to the culture and beliefs of BIPOC populations
Recognize the ways that intersecting marginalized identities may impact BIPOC and to engage them across disciplines, including BIPOC suicide attempt survivors and survivors of loss in all parts of the organization
This is your AAS. The Board, leadership, and staff pledge to remain transparent in our efforts to create real, anti-racist, decolonized outcomes for the organization, our members, and suicide prevention at large.
To be continued
As I hinted in this article, I have buckets of screenshots; there is much more to this narrative. Future twists and turns will take us to expected places like Jonathan’s favorite squeeze disrupting her lesbian wife’s remote classes with the announcement that she is flashing her breasts (tits, she said). Or my wife getting doxed and threatened by a Temple University faculty member whom I had never met and seemed to know nothing about me.
Jonathan’s presidency did not last to the expected end of his term. The junta split into factions that sued each other, each claiming the other AAS pretender to the CEO position had gotten there having sex with someone they should not. Most past presidents resigned, and there were calls from some board members to boycott the organization until it dissolved. Here I will produce a couple of screenshots to counter critics who wonder if this whole story is batshit crazy.
Craig seems decent, but he was at the crime scene and may be responsible for paying for some damage. He is an ex-military person who has been paid to provide mental health services to veterans. Craig must have sworn numerous oaths to protect and defend America against such threats to democracy. His “Hey, I yelled fire, and I headed out the exit” won’t cut it.
I will return to poke fun and express dismay over Jonathan Singer claiming to be BIPOC, no matter how BI marries POC or how they get divorced. Jonathan remains as historically white as AAS, and putting on a wig does not change this.
This is a cosmic silliness to this kind of sophomoric neo-Marxism that should offend the whole spectrum of the political spectrum, waste public funds, and destroy organizations and institutions—-individuals’ reputations and ability to earn a livelihood after they have been involved for decades in seminal research about reduce deaths by suicide.
I had never met the woman who has dominated the story and she did not know me when she was provoked by my tweet about who Biden should nominate for a political appointment overseeing mental health and substance abuse problems. There is no evidence that she knew UK anti-Semite Peter Kinderman or his interlocuter German Eiko Fried. However, she stayed all night doxxing me and easily discovered the packets of hate that Kinderman and Fried had distributed on the Internet. The woman joined forces with Kinderman's biggest cheerleader, Lucy Johnstone, and there has been unrelenting harassment ever since.
The General Counsel for the AAS Board threatened to sue me for drawing a connection between Jonathan Singer and his lovely woman friend and exaggerating the offense of her behavior.
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Thank you for your comment and you’re willingness to read through this collection of evidence a third time. There’s a lot in there.
I’m still trying to figure out what Jonathan Singer meant by BIPOC. Perhaps the B stands for bat shit crazy. Perhaps he’s claiming in insanity defense for behavior that is not silly because it involved misuse of ill-gotten public funds.
My stint at affective disorders only lasted a short while, I got a job at a different type of psychiatric clinic, but what I saw amplifies what I knew from literature: to paraphrase St Paul, in self-deletion-related mood disorders there is no man or woman, gentile or Jew.
To meet with a deeply depressed or severely anxious person as a representative of a class sounds exactly like the sort of thing you would do if you wanted them to go and finish the job.
Telling someone who already feels guilty for using up oxygen that they are personally responsible for bad events wholly out of their control and that, simultaneously, they have no agency over even their own despicable feelings and actions towards people of different ethnicity should be a firing offence for mental health professionals.