Deceased at 96, he was exemplary as a local administrator on the
county-government level and beloved as a rounded individual; not a guarded hack
of an MH professional, he was a true leader as a moral man
[Among others, Rev. Kosa has one obituary, from NJ.com, here. Edit 12/11/18: Here is a scan of his letter to me from August 1987.]
I first dealt with Rev. Kosa in summer 1987, when I had been
pursuing a complaint process against various parties at the Center for Mental
Health (CMH) at Newton Memorial Hospital, stemming from unprofessional moves
there (regarding me as an individual inquirer) starting in November 1986. I had
been an award-winning student in psychology at George Washington University,
graduating in 1984 with a 4.0 GPA in that major (of two majors I had), and an
award for excellence in that major, membership in the honorary society Psi Chi,
and an independent study class (in phenomenological and existential psychology)
as well as an honors-related paper on the Bem Sex Role Inventory. I had also
been a patient at the forerunner of the CMH in the later 1970s, and especially
received crucial care there from Ira Kramer, Ph.D., a talking counselor who was
a Jungian, along with medication from a consulting psychiatrist starting in
winter 1978. So my “standing” with respect to mental-health issues was complex,
primarily honorable, and by no means grounds for me to be treated as I was by
the CMH in 1986-87.
Dr. Martin Nicolai Nielsen, an M.D. and the head of the CMH
in 1987, refused to see me within the complaint process as an “appellate judge,”
and the excuse was floated that vacations were going on by August 1987, when I
last tried to have some response to my complaint come from his level. Previously
I had submitted a complaint to, first, Dr. Richard Finkelstein (a Ph.D.) about
a lower-level counselor (the original grounds for the complaint); then I
appealed to John McNaught, a non-doctor administrator (with a master’s degree);
and then Nielsen, who basically stonewalled me for maybe two months. Rev. Kosa,
as the drug, alcoholism and mental health administrator for the county, was the
next level to appeal to that summer (and I wrote him, I believe). In a cordial
written response I got by sometime in August, he proffered the info that
vacations were ongoing (or the like), but he didn’t give a sense of evasion or
excuse or stony dismissal the way Nielsen had been doing for many weeks.
In 1989, after having gone to graduate school (in St. Louis)
in fall 1987 and then returning to New Jersey and working for a daily newspaper
for eight months in 1988, I returned to the swamp-ish “area of concern” of what
remained to pursue of the complaint process of 1986-87. First, on my request (in
early 1988) I had received copies of psychologists’ records stored at the
hospital (from the 1970s), and in 1989 I reached the point where the most
realistic complaint/query I could make (because certainly what had gone on in
summer 1987 was painfully unfinished business) concerned how some information
was entered into my files (by a clinician) in early 1987 uncontrovertibly contrary
to the hospital’s confidentiality rules (and when I had not been seeing anyone,
strictly speaking, as a clinician); the confidentiality rules I knew about because
I had signed documents related to them starting in about early 1987. Again, I
sent a letter to Dr. Nielsen about it, and heard no answer. I then appealed to
Rev. Kosa. Kosa’s response and tone were far different, and I met with him in
person.
Rev. Kosa voiced being baffled by Dr. Nielsen’s
stonewalling. In our discussions in some room of the hospital complex, Rev.
Kosa’s comments ranged even to the fact that in the old days, starting around
World War II, your medical records were something you carried with you, as if
your ownership and control of these were reflected in your being able to
physically carry them to your next phase of life after the Army. This, at
least, seemed the rule in the 1940s-50s or so. Rev. Kosa was, obviously, a man
whose sense of principles came from an earlier, more innocent time than even
could be appreciated as current in the later 1980s.
Since then, I always had a positive sense of Rev. Kosa. In the
later 1980r, he was the one man tied to the CMH who issued a sense of working
to the patient’s genuine interests regarding a set of ethical problems as I
presented for addressing in 1986-89—except there are also grounds for forgiving
the “team-player disservice” in 1987 of Dr. Finkelstein, who (with him as an
individual practitioner, working in a small group practice) I later got into
constructive dealings with from 2002 through 2005 when I had him give no fewer
than three educational lectures for local support groups (and he had long since
stopped working for Dr. Nielsen’s firm). I would see Rev. Kosa at the yearly
Farm & Horse Show in the county (not talking to him directly), and would be
aware of occasional instances of his doings in news in The New Jersey Herald.
##
The meaning of Rev. Kosa as a mental health–related
administrator in Sussex County is simply this: Rev. Kosa was a moral man with
vision, making Dr. Nielsen look like a hack of a practicing doctor whose main
concern seemed to be the viability of his business (whatever MH firm Nielsen
was heading, whether the Center for Mental Health in the 1980s to early ’90s or
his firm InHealth Associates from about 1995 on).
