Coach Kay – Keisha Merchant
Candidate for Governor

Campaign website – https://drcoachkay.wixsite.com/drcoachkay4governor
Campaign email address – drcoachkayforgovernor@gmail.com

READ – All Survey Results

The Mental Health Association of Portland is a 501 C 3 nonprofit organization, prohibited from making candidate endorsements. We endorse no candidates.

Question One – People with lived experience of mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, and or trauma are under-represented in public office. What is your personal experience with these illnesses?

ANSWER – As a country we live in a high percentage of undiagnosed society due to 400 years of enslavement and imprisonment of communities. Those who have done it and those who have been the victim of it. It is a two way “unhealthy lifestyle of the mind,” to endure. The veterans have endured PTSD. The list goes on. Trauma management, head injury management, trigger management, and mood management can be a hardship to many undiagnosed populations because they live in a world that they cannot have the support, accomodations, and adaptations to allow them to be excellent ENERGY in their own communities. We have the highest unemployment, imprisonment, and homelessness in the advanced wealthy societies which shows our inability to be socially responsible, healthy socially, and fit as a leadership to build together.

My Good Stewardship platform campaign addresses mental health as a holistic approach to sustainability, fitness, and Quality of life to increase health and manage health as a forefront component to building a stronger environmental justice system.

Question Two – Oregon ranks at the bottom of states in a well-regarded national survey of access to public treatment services for mental illness, addiction and alcoholism. What can you in office do to change this?

ANSWER – Treatment, therapy, wellness centers, naturopathic medicine, and green zone remedies for mental health as a holistic approach to health care, fitness as a quality of lifestyle choices; this will be part of the environmental justice system to build health coaches, wellness coaches, personal trainers, nutritionists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, neurologist, health and wellness educators and instructors, and support groups, will become part of a universal health care system, as naturopathic medicine, doctors, coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and more. These professionals will have a right to make house calls as well, and be mobile. It will no longer just remain in a medical institution or on a campus as the only options as well. The healthcare initiative will include caregivers, care assistants, nurses, and pharmacists, or other professionals that provide Quality care as an approach to mental health practitioners as a holistic health wellness, fitness, and health initiative. Providing appointments to all practitioners and professionals to serve and assist in management of health. All hands on the deck so to speak.

Question Three – In that same national survey, Oregon ranks at the top for prevalence of mental illness, addiction and alcoholism. What can you in office do to change this?

ANSWER – Increase access to resources and access to professionals as a universal system that is not a hardship or challenge to sustain. My Good Stewardship platform campaign includes humanitarian aid communities, systematic processes and professionals and practitioners to provide street clinics and home clinics even mobile clinics and make home visits. Providing a team to each person’s life allows access to their choice of mental healthcare and beyond.

Question Four – A natural consequence of lack of access to treatments and high prevalence of mental illness, addiction and alcoholism is chronic homelessness. Why isn’t Portland’s strategy to reduce homelessness working and what could you do in office to change that?

ANSWER – The reason why no one previously was able to resolve the challenges of homelessness based on mindset and ideologies, even traditions. Access to resources and competition is the opposite of the mathematics in capitalism. Everyone would need to be wealthy to have access to resources. Everyone would need to be plugged into the top tier of capitalism to have access to Quality of lifestyle choices which includes the resolution of homelessness and other components of mental health. Unfortunately wealth does not cure self control or the motivation for discipline to practice environmental justice or to find or know the best team or fit in professional teams, products for your body and chemistry. Therefore, elements of uncertainty and unknown factors are still part of the process of actualization and transformation for health and living your highest potential for health, wellness, and fitness as a holistic approach to mental health. The Good Stewardship platform campaign includes humanitarian aid communities systematic processes to increase environmental justice and environmental health, wellness, and fitness for interdependency with the environment and each other.

Question Five – In 2015 the US DOJ found the Portland Police Bureau has a pattern and practice of harming people with mental illness. There’s little data to show that pattern and practice has changed, and no data to show other metro area police bureaus are any different. How would you in office engage with this problem?

ANSWER – First the law enforcement has a high percentage of untreated and undiagnosed populations in its professionals. Law enforcement have unmanaged triggers of phobias and paranoia as extremes in their due process system as to pulling over citizens to kill orders as a collective consciousness to protect their own life above others. The threat to others and to self becomes the mental health issue that is ignored. Uncertainty and unknown factors heightens mental health issues through extremism of random selection based on attitude and behavior and not communication skills or science of a practitioner skills. Officers are not doctors, lawyers, or scientists which means the highest level of educational training for most officers are high school level and basic college level. They are not required to get medical certification, legal certification, or any certifications for that matter to understand human development or anatomy. They are the least trained but required to protect societies with violence as armed weapons. The doctor must receive a Ph.d before license to practice commercially yet officers have the right to practice commercially and environmentally with a certification with a gun without years of discipline in education, clinicals or training to show the holistic approach of mastery in skills of medicine, as an emergency respondent or legal mastery to understand rules the citizen rights as stakeholders, or mental health as practitioners and mental health doctors to understand behavior. We have allowed our justice system to have the freedom to be exempt from accountability and responsibility to be book learned, tested, peer reviewed, and validated as a scientist to performance level for justice. But we know the history of justice in this country, so it is clear the country is not ready for change and if this state is ready for change it would need to uproot the whole justice system because it was founded on the principles of discrimination and slavery which is not justice. The ideology is mental health issues from the beginning as an infrastructure. It is rooted to the core as unhealthy and unfit as a system. The professional and the system as a whole are not good healthy practices. We have so much work to do, but so very little time when it comes to people’s safety and health from premature deaths.

My Good Stewardship platform campaign and I address all of these issues in my Good Samaritan Act 1 and 2 for all professionals and “pay it forward” campaign within factors of the Good Stewardship platform campaign.