The setting for Seeing Red: A Memoir, is the growing Central Oregon community in the mid-1970s. A young mental health professional is drafted and easily seduced into a position of leadership for which he is woefully ill-prepared and decidedly un-suited. Seeing Red: A Memoir, is a love story embedded in a struggle to grow local mental health services in a time of fiscal austerity and a battle to provide actual services to clients in a public sector bureaucracy that demands organizational meetings and paperwork. As in Jim's previous writings, clients provide the story with courage and wisdom and employees demonstrate weaknesses, wonders and humor. Finding one's place in a complex and demanding world is a theme which runs through the entire narrative.
Jim was Director of the Deschutes County, Oregon, Mental Health Department from 1973 to 1977. The tales in this book come from those years. He was seduced into taking the Directorship by its previous occupant, the late Charles Whitchurch, who was also known as "The Red Baron." Chuck became a dear friend and alter ego. A colleague once remarked, " the two of you almost make a complete person." Jim was born in the Rogue River Valley of Oregon in 1944. He attended college in San Diego, where he met and married his beautiful bride of 48 years, and counting. He was a Magna Cum Laude graduate of California Western University in psychology, and received a Master's Degree in clinical social work from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. These studies launched an over-40-year career in mental health services. Jim worked for eight years in the public sector of mental health services in Oregon, as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Since then, he has been in private practice for 36 years. He is an NASW Diplomate in clinical social work, and is a retired Clinical Member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, as well as a retired AASECT Certified Sex Therapist. For eleven years, under the appointment of four Oregon Governors, Jim served on the State of Oregon Clinical Social Workers Licensing Board, chairing the board for the last five of those eleven years. At the local level in Deschutes County, Oregon, Jim has served on the Home Health Advisory Board, the St. Charles Mental Health Advisory Board, and the Deschutes Alcohol Council, where he served as its President for two terms. In the years following his graduation from the University of Chicago School of Social Science Administration, Jim worked for the Family Service Bureau of Chicago, and the Douglas County Family Service Clinic, prior to serving as Mental Health Director for the Deschutes County (Oregon) Mental Health Program. Since mid-1977, Jim has been in the private practice of mental health, specializing in the treatment of stress illness, sexual dysfunction, and process addiction. Jim closed his private practice on Halloween 2008, but continues his clinical work as a Certified Mental Health Examiner for Circuit Court in the State of Oregon. He is the author of two previous books: Pee Up A Tree/A mental Health Memoir and Satisfaction Guaranteed/In Chicago.
