Fugue—Listen to the Music

October 10 was World Mental Health Day. The goal was to call attention to the growing problem of mental illness throughout the world, and offer solutions to help people in distress. The stigma of mental health issues, lack of education and awareness, and funding cutbacks for programs all contribute to the mental health treatment gap.

• One in four adults and one in ten children worldwide will be affected by a mental or neurological disorder at some point in their lives.

• In the United States one in five adults and youth experience some form of mental illness each year. More than half do not receive mental health treatment.        

                                        —Statistics: World Health Organization, National Alliance on Mental Illness

“At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether it affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness and there should be no distinction.”      —Michelle Obama

Fugue, from the Latin fuga for flight, is a word with multiple meanings. In psychological terms it refers to a dissociative mental state characterized by loss of memory. On the street it refers to an altered state of reality caused by ingesting drugs or too much alcohol—and in musical terms it is a composition where a theme is introduced and then repeated as if it were flying around the scale. 

Fugue by Jeff Key
Twilight—
Crimson numbers flash.
Boards blink. Metal rows run and trip. Melancholy whispering ebbs and flows with the solstice sky.

Laughter can be heard in a meadow below a crested bluff—an incongruous rumble, rising and falling on the cusp of an undaunted evening.

It is a night like none other.
It is a night like any other

full of transgression, collapsing inward in order to stem the wilting malaise of branches with no timbre.

Leaves—syncopated with the early rustling of the stars cut into fragments marking the cross between bolted doors and the waning moon.

Tents blow down by the river trapping tales of hoodwinked drifters shifting beneath blankets of mottled deceit. To live for another day under the torrent  of hollow contrivance becomes the strength of a white-washed vision.

A newborn wakes in the thalo light, bottled with a nascent longing  for the arc of a swinging limb as it pivots with the torque required to capture the luminous twist of side-stepping dance.

It is a day like none other.
It is a day like any other

• The 2019 US Fiscal Year Budget calls for a 21% decrease for the Dept. of Health and Human Services—a $600 million cut to Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment programs, eliminating $451 million in training programs for the health professions, and a $1.4 trillion cut to Medicaid (over 10 years).

What can we do to help alleviate these problems—

• Write to our current legislators and urge them to vote for more funding for mental health programs. • Vote in November to elect local, state, and federal officials who will work to amend or overturn the proposed budget cuts.