These people were supposed to help me get employment; that's their job.
I got this letter yesterday:
I have attempted to be a client of this agency since September 2016. They finally told me at the beginning of January 2017 that the only work at which I could be successful was to wash dishes part-time, supervised while working by a one-on-one monitor from another vocational rehabilitation agency, and I objected to that degrading and inappropriate evaluation. I gave them my transcript from the Spring Semester 2016 that has my grade point average of 3.9. I sent them pictures of my clean and maintained apartment. I sent them a picture of a utility bill that I had paid, so that they would know it was my apartment. I was appropriate and polite to everyone at their agency and at the other agency and the workplace where they sent me to do menial labor as a test of my ability to work, which even the testing agency said I did better than anyone ever had. I told them that I can't do anything about what people say about me on the Internet, that I have attempted to get the hateblogs about me removed and the websites that host them won't remove them. I told them in September, without being asked, that I know that the Internet search results for "Lena Kochman" would make any prospective employer not want to hire me, which was why I needed the agency's help. I told them that I did what I had to do, every year, to document being harassed and stalked, and that it was not a mental illness that had made me think that I had gotten harassed and stalked. I told them about what had happened at school at the end of the Spring Semester 2016, and that I'd felt that I'd had to leave school for the summer and the fall for my own safety, because the school denied even knowing who the student who had stalked and harassed me at school was, until he began to harass me online in September 2016, when it was too late for me start school again.
The Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission blamed EVERYTHING on me, although of course they'd never use a word such as "blame" and they never stop saying that I don't "understand" why they're saying that I'm too mentally ill to work somewhere without being degraded. They cannot perceive me as a capable person; that is their disability, not mine, even though there are posters in their lobby promoting the conglomerate's agenda and specifically targeting me for voyeurism and involuntary pornography. There could even be hidden, illegal cameras in their bathroom; I don't know. There were Wet Floor signs on dry floor all over the building when I was there a few weeks ago.
I've done everything that I can not to be welfare-dependent.
This is what social services are like, even when a client is not stigmatized by gender discrimination and abused by powerful people.
Everybody in the world other than the people who have had their lives ruined by the mental health care system thinks that people who are labeled as mentally ill are the problem, but it's the system, and its systemic negligence and abuse of the clients, that are the problem.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, January 29, 2017 @ 1:44 p.m./additions @ 2:35 p.m.
