cinmhc
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This is message #1 of a set of 200
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| Date: |
Thu, 2 Sep 1999 09:32:02 -0700 |
| Author: |
starfish@northcoast.com (Andrew Phelps) |
| Subject: |
Corinne Camp |
| Cc: |
Allan Rawland, Gary Bruton
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| Body: |
To the California clients, and friends: On Wednesday, August 25, 1999, Corinne Camp of Petaluma died. She called her beloved husband at work and told him the time had come. Corinne Camp was a dear friend to me, a Visionary and sufferer of cruel childhood abuse, and an Accountability Caucus member. Corinne spent 22 years as a Nurse Practitioner, with a specialty in reproductive health care, and gave unstintingly to all who needed her help. Corinne was one of the great heroes of the California clients movement, whose incredible bravery and leadership in 1987-90 exposed organized staff rape and sexual abuse of clients at the County hospital in Santa Rosa. For two years, she took every sort of social abuse imaginable, and stood alone against a county-wide effort to cover up this situation. Among her personal supporters, she cited to me especially her psychiatrist, who was a former member of Radical Therapy, and Ron Schraiber, who has historical connections with the movement on the North Coast. In the end the Mental Health Advisory Board Chair was forced to resign, the County M.H. Director was forced to resign; he eventually received a 'rap on the knuckles' by the Board of Governors for transgression of professional ethics. Corinne met her husband Gary Bruton in 1970, I believe, while she was a public health nurse in a rural area in Colorado that was a focal area in the Chicano land grant struggle. Gary was a loving husband who stood by Corinne and supported her through several lengthy hospitalizations over the years. They had two children, Charlie, now deceased, and Claire, who is currently in High School in Petaluma. Charlie's death a year and a half ago at the age of 18, from an asthma condition, was devastating for Corinne and her family. Corinne, as I knew her, was always involved in people, always caring, always giving of herself to the last full level of devotion. I thought of her as being in the model of another Sonoman, Mario Savio - of Berkeley Free Speech Movement fame - who told the truth carefully and boldly in the face of the whole world watching. Corinne as a medically trained person never denied the importance of medications, but she had an unparalleled insight into the fraudulence of the 'medical model' and the essential role of trauma in mental health etiology. Some people move the world by their moral example; Corinne was one of these, and we will miss her beyond all measure. Andrew Phelps |