The Truth Ain’T Popular: Impediments to Hope

By Dr. David L. Mount

Behavioral Health Equity through Human services integration, forged in part through legislative and policy solutions, is key to reducing health disparities and promote good health outcomes across multicultural communities, said Dr. David L. Mount (founder and president for the NC Network for Human Services Integration to Prosperity).

Voices in advance praise for Dr. David L. Mounts The Truth Aint Popular: Impediments to Hope

As the nation steps into the dawn of 2020, community revitalization through Human Service Integration will become the emerging Civil Rights movement. Dr. Mount takes on a storytelling that seeks to reject a one size fit all framework, choosing to name and frame the multiplicity of we. He holds that we must cast the brightest shot light on a collective resilience while embracing a person-centered social justice (Ms. Kara Morrison).

This book has economic implications viewed through the lens of social capital. The framework lifted up is based on the working model that use, access, acceptability and holistic outreach may fail to detect issues surrounding shaming, negative stereotypes, resilience, and alliance biases (Jason E. Mount, MBA).

Professor Mount points out that the content of our lives has market value beyond the traditional commercial venues, where the everyday person is consistently fighting against a psychological bankruptcy. The implications for human services integration to prosperity echoes a call to stop scapegoating human suffering (Ms. Mara Ramirez).

In many ways, the movement surrounding human services integration to prosperity works to place in the forefront a call to action on behalf of socially, emotionally, and economically oppressed communities, where folk are walking on an increasingly uncertain floor while reconstructing hope and attempting to dream against the noise of a shaky future (Ms. Yvonne Bowser).

How, why and when vulnerable people matter is worthy of ongoing critic. The author underscores the psychosocial determinants of health with attention to galvanizing a major paradigm shift that will positively impact social justice through human services integration (Dr. Bobby Dunn).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524551988

Dr. David L. Mount

Dr. David L. Mount is a treasured social justice advocate, lecturer, writer, community organizer, team builder, professional speaker, and clinical psychologist with specialties in primary care psychology, medical neuropsychology, and medical rehabilitation psychology. Dr. Mount is a sought-after speaker for national meetings and is a winner of mentoring, teaching, and service awards in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina. He is well regarded for his work on integrating mind-body mental health and framing health disparities as a human rights campaigner. He was an undergraduate student at Alabama State University where he received his BS in psychology and minor in sociology in 1994. From there, he continued his education at Argosy University where he received his MA in clinical psychology and later accomplished his PsyD in clinical psychology in 2001. From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Mount pursued his residency (clinical neuropsychology, neuro rehabilitation psychology) at the University of Missouri–Columbia. He holds several certificates including North Carolina State Board of Examiners of Practicing Psychologists (board certified health service provider in psychology); American Board of Disability Analysts, disability analyst and fellow; National Academy of Neuropsychology, affiliate level status; behavioral medicine (University of Pittsburgh); chronic disease: a focus on health behavior (University of Pittsburgh); and neuroimaging (University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon). Dr. David Mount is the director of community outreach, partnerships, and patient care for the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, where he promotes health equity advocacy, social justice leadership, research, and community health organizing. Dr. Mount is the founder and national director for Chip-C™.

Book preview

The Truth Ain’t Popular: Impediments to Hope

DR. DAVID L. MOUNT

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. David L. Mount.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2016917259

ISBN:   Hardcover    978-1-5245-5200-8

             Softcover     978-1-5245-5199-5

             eBook           978-1-5245-5198-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/20/2016

Xlibris

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Envision the Change Strategy

Chapter 2 - Light Can Penetrate Stone

Chapter 3 - No Wasted Voice Valuing Lived Experiences

Chapter 4 - Data, Knowledge, Understanding = Wisdom

Chapter 5 - Just Looking Out the Window

Chapter 6 - Looking Right, Dying Left … Living with Multiple -Isms

Chapter 7 - Lets Focus on Keeping People Whole

Chapter 8 - Courage to Tell the Truth

Chapter 9 - Grind with the End in Mind

Afterword

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Rev. Dr. Carlton A. G. Eversely’s Bio:

He was born and resided in New York, attended college at Oberlin University, and earned his doctorate from Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta Georgia. Rev. Dr. Carlton A. G. Eversely is a pastor of Dellabrook Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem and have taught courses that at universities in North Carolina. His life’s work has been at the forefront social justice, community organizing, and decoding educational and social policy toward improving equality. Rev. Dr. Carlton A. G. Eversely continues to be a global visionary who is well known for his grassroots in support of the successful effort to free Darryl Hunt from prison. Pastor Eversely is mentioned in books Making Justice Our Business: The Wrongful Conviction of Darryl Hunt and the Work of Faith by Stephen B. Boyd; and Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America edited by Michele Gillespie and ‎Randal L. Hall. In addition to his congregational roles, Rev. Dr. Carlton Eversley is the cofounder for Concerned Citizens and a former president of the Ministers’ Conference of Winston-Salem. He is a community partner with the NC Network for Human Services Integration to Prosperity. He continues to work hard in supporting LBGTQ, NAACP, and Urban League advocacy. He is married to Luellen Curry, a professor in the School of Law at Wake Forest University. They have two adult children and a granddaughter.

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Atty. Hazel Mack’s Bio:

Atty. Hazel Mack grew up in and resides in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is the recent former regional managing attorney for Legal Aid of North Carolina and is a board president and founder of Carter G. Woodson K-12 Charter School. She operates H. Mack Consulting and attended Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, from 1977 to 1980.

She is noted for the following statement: You can’t work your way out of poverty by plugging away at low paying jobs, day after day. That’s a myth. You have to leap out. Education is the force to propel you into a better life. For over thirty-three years, Atty. Hazel Mack dedicated her life’s work to helping vulnerable populations work through legal parameters ranging from women’s rights to educational, housing, racial, and economic disparities and domestic violence. As a community advocate, leader, and legal representative to the poor and marginalized. She provided the temperament in supporting the forging of the 2008 statewide program addressing the statewide housing foreclosure that disproportionately adversely affected economically disenfranchised people living in the state of North Carolina.

Prior to pursing a law school degree, Atty. Hazel Mack joined the Black Panther Party at the height of the civil rights movement and was one of the founding members for the Winston-Salem chapter of the Black Panther Party. Through her company, H. Mack Consulting, Attorney Mack is working steadfast to create social innovation in helping facilitate the establishment of more schools that can fully address the educational achievement gaps in serving children and their families. Her complimentary specialties include board development and leadership; mentoring; fundraising; nonprofit incorporation; 501c3 applications; and customized training for groups of individuals, organizations, and church leaders who want to establish schools. She has three adult children and three grandchildren. She is a community partner with the NC Network for Human Services Integration.

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Foreword

While the fluidity of hope and the exploitation of apathy appear to be taking center stage under mounting social, economic, political, and psychological pressures, it must be made clear that we are more than a doomed basket of fruits, and it is not time to cover the window. Yet there is widening concern that the opportunity circle is too narrow and that out-of-the-box thoughts streaming from the chronically underclass are all too frequently naturalized by decisively editing how the marginalized represent their own storytelling. We have learned over and over again that insecure leaders cannot grow others while walking in circles and misleading others. For the last ten years, Dr. David L. Mount has been a member and ordained elder at Dellabrook Presbyterian in Winston-Salem, Norther Carolina. He came to us with a religious background into Pentecostal/Apostolic, a.k.a. Holiness Church. We asked him to lead our Social Justice Ministry. We did so because Dr. Mount clearly sees the whole matter of social services systems and healthcare inequities and disparities based upon racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic status as a cure for social justice issues. Through his community outreach and advocacy work, he has frequently talked about how it may be thought to be less than genuine and even hypocritical if to suggest that a chat should be equated to action and/or a movement. In this, he follows the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King who said, Of all the social inequities, inequity in healthcare is the most insidious.

Dr. Mount knows that black, brown, yellow, red men, women, and children, and the economically disproportionately die sooner because of unmet mental health needs, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases. Such conditions and unmet needs call all to be exacerbated by poverty, lack of access to healthy food and good nutrition, exercise opportunities, healthcare resources, cultural awareness and sensitivity, etc. If the most vulnerable are to thrive, the historical failures of a broken human services must be challenged to demonstrate excellence on all fronts.

Dr. Mount has learned from study and experience that many professionals, even the well intentioned, have sabotaged their ability to bring forth healing and hope. Because professionals stay hunkered in silos, one-labeled healthcare, another mental health and still another social services, the marginalized continues to feel the run around while simultaneously being told that their thoughts and feelings about in frustration and despair are just the embodiment of personal liabilities.

Dr. Mount see humanity like the Bible does. Not as a tripartite disconnection, body and mind and social. Rather, we are living souls breathed by the Holy Spirt of God. So we cannot save souls without saving their bodies, minds, psyches, emotions, socioeconomic status, cultural conditions, and political participation. The Truth Ain’t Popular in the words of the late sportscaster