Heartless precarity

New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg claims that dealing with health insurers brings out the "heartless precarity of American life." This is a nice turn of phrase. (I looked up precarity which seemed like an unusual word. It means the state of being precarious or uncertain.)

But what's the real reason people feel uncertain when they think about or deal with health care? It's not that our American system is uniquely capitalist, unfair, or too expensive and unpredictable. We will never fix that. The real reason is that we Americans have uniquely come to believe that scientific medicine is the best route to salvation for an individual. This is a false belief which confuses and complicates everything for us. 

Psychiatry is the ultimate proponent of the false belief. Mental health professionals are dedicated, or labor under deference, to the proposition that each of us is merely a brain. 

Jon Franklin wrote going on four decades ago, that our deepest thoughts, our every emotion, our aspirations to love, to nobility and goodness, or to hateful revenge and evil domination alike, are all nothing more than complex reactions between neurotransmitters and receptors, interplay between the molecules of our minds.

In my opinion, this is the most vital issue raised by antipsychiatrists, variously exemplified by Thomas Szasz, Big Phil Hickey, and Laura Delano, among many others for whom I have huge admiration. Their personal beliefs may differ from my own in ways that I don't know at all, but we almost certainly agree that psychiatry is the most destructive cultural influence in human history, at least since the Inquisition.

Racism might be the closest runner-up to psychiatry, but as I read history they're merely arms of the same evil social body. Who could believe another person was less human because their skin was a different color, without accepting the fundamental falsehood that humans are all merely bodies, nothing but mud to begin with?

While we hold onto the false psychiatric belief our lives will continue to be full of precarity, and we will accuse random and unknown others of being heartless. Medicine is a good tool to alleviate suffering. It can be used more effectively than it is being used here and now. But we will still suffer, and we will still pay through the nose. As one song I heard long ago says, "We could laugh, or cry, or even say goodbye ...and know these bodies crumble through the years."

Maybe we will become a society that approves of a political policy for murdering fathers who work at health insurance companies.

Mangione, Goldberg and Malis are prophets of doom.

Psychiatria delenda est!

Incompetence and bad manners

There's a saying, never blame or allege bad or conspiratorial intent for situations that are just as easily explained by incompetence.

From my experience, this should be a major stable datum for understanding the Illinois forensic mental health system. I probably do not repeat it frequently enough to my clients, who hate the plantations and tend to see evil motives in everybody they deal with. I have two examples from yesterday and today.

At a staffing for Adrian, social worker Dan Malone was bound and determined to make the patient feel like he was wrong for refusing to have his vitals checked or to be physically examined. Adrian had told staff he didn't want that "service" several times, but they continued to bug him, thinking he might change his mind or comply just because they kept after him about it. I spoke up, to point out that of course Adrian had a perfect right to refuse any such medical attention, and Malone admitted it but responded very pointedly: "And that's why we didn't make him do it, because he has a right to refuse..." 

I'm not saying Malone's tone was hostile. He did not add, "...you fucking idiot Kretchmar," but his attitude was arrogant and dismissive. I'd rather be straight-out called a fucking idiot than talked down to, any day.

Everybody can be forgiven for having a bad morning and being a little impatient occasionally. At least, everybody except psychiatric slaves. When Adrian gets impatient it gets charted, and the chart notes can be used in court to help prove he's too mentally ill and dangerous to have any privileges or liberty.

Malone insisted on asserting that the only reason Adrian was being harassed by staff for a physical exam or vitals check was for his own good. People went after him and incessantly asked him to comply because they care about his health. This was Malone's nonsense, of course. People harassed Adrian to get his vitals checked or to have a physical exam because they believed it was proper according to the clinical ritual they follow. After all, medicine über alles, right? Everyone should be happy to have their vitals checked repeatedly all the time, and get a complete physical annually, right? Anybody who doesn't agree with and religiously observe those sacred rituals probably has Prodromal Anosognosia (see DSM-5 diagnostic criterion B).

Dan Malone is some sort of clergy of the psychiatric faith. He knows what's best for Adrian much better than Adrian does. His motives cannot be questioned, even if his manners are plainly bad. After going on about how staff's concern for the health of patients was the only reason Adrian was asked if he wanted a physical exam or his vitals checked, Malone proceeded to question Adrian in a very condescending and insistent way (almost like, "What's wrong with you?") about why he would ever refuse these wonderful, helpful medical services provided by such perfectly professional, medical mental health staff.

Adrian didn't have much of an answer, but Malone kept going on, and I finally told him brainwashing was unnecessary. He didn't like that very much. He doesn't believe they do brainwashing at EMHC, but he's wrong. Anyone who doubts it should read Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). Psychiatric slaves recognize Lifton's descriptions of the Chinese techniques instantly, and staff on the plantations would, too, if they were able to be honest. They can't be honest though, they have to lie to themselves all the time. They probably can't read that book either.

Which brings up the incompetence factor. These people are mostly semi-literate cogs in a machine, pretending to be doctors specializing in the medical treatment of behavior. It's too obvious to almost everyone that they get poor or zero (or harmful) results, for which the taxpayers would never knowingly foot any bill. Dan Malone can't get any handle on Adrian, he can't help this patient, so he just has to blame him, disrespect him, despise him. It's not hard to see that, sitting in the room. It's not like Adrian misses it, either.

Meanwhile, over on N Unit, Gus was recently prescribed a heart monitor because his migraine meds might be having serious cardiac side effects. The cardiac doctor at UIC carefully instructed Gus on exactly how to use the monitor. He also mentioned that he didn't trust the data he was getting from EMHC, so he wanted Gus to take the monitor on and off himself, exactly as instructed. Later at EMHC, Dr. Seema Khan wouldn't let Gus do it, and wouldn't listen to Gus about how to do it. Who knows? Hopefully Gus isn't being denied appropriate medical care for a serious heart condition.

Everybody (staff anyway) at EMHC has to prove they can fight Gus. His social worker Joseph, who is supposed to be on a different unit but comes to N just to fight Gus, told him today that his packet for conditional release has gone to the court. But he refused to say when, or how he knows. A packet that recommends conditional release is a big deal; Gus has been waiting a long time for his packet to work its way through administration, his treatment team, second level review.... It probably should have been in court a couple years ago. In fact, comments by none other than the Almighty Statewide Forensic Medical Director, James Patrick Corcoran himself, suggested that Gus was ready for manumission long ago.

I told Gus to question Joseph closely about the conditional release packet, because a casual statement like, "...it has gone to the court," might be true or it might be just Joseph trying to get Gus to leave him alone. Gus needs to confer with his lawyer about an actual petition for conditional release, so he needs to be sure Joseph's news is accurate. He also needs documents, etc., to support a petition. (Tony Dillard wants to charge him a dollar/page for them though. That's suspiciously steep, to say the least!)

So Gus tried to ask Joseph politely, "When did that packet actually go to the court? What day did it get filed? How do you know?" Joseph simply refused to answer in any way at all, which makes no sense unless he was lying to Gus about the packet, which seems pretty likely to me.

But incompetence explains all of this at least as well as bad motive.

Decent manners would help.

The thing about apologies & retractions

Apologies can be sincere or insincere, and still make no difference in how anybody feels about an offense. 

Retractions likewise might have no impact at all, because the truth remains the truth, and lies remain lies.

There was once a "patient" at EMHC who was nicknamed Wookie or Scooter or Nookie or something else cute (I'm not sure what). He's long gone from the plantation by now, maybe very few people remember him. This guy accused one female staff of giving him crabs. (I looked up "crabs" to be sure I knew what it meant. It's gross, but if somebody accuses somebody else of giving them crabs, suffice it to say that does mean the accuser is saying he had sex with the accused.)

So... Wookie/Scooter/Nookie/whatever apparently had sex, or at least claimed or imagined that he had sex, with a female EMHC staff who shall go unnamed here. The allegation was investigated and the female staff was not fired. Perhaps she had some disability (other than crabs, that is) and EMHC/IDHS felt sorry for her.

But as I have said many times, when a staff in an IDHS institution has sex with a patient who is involuntarily committed for "treatment" of mental disorders which supposedly caused a crime, that staff commits a new crime. It's a serious crime, too, one that might earn the staff a prison sentence, and just about always should. I cannot fathom why anyone with any professional status or ability would ever choose an EMHC "patient" for sex. It is almost entirely incomprehensible to me. 

But apparently lots of IDHS staff do want psychiatric slaves for sex. Is there anyone reading this who has not heard credible rumors about some such "relationship" (terrible lying word for it!) at EMHC? Never mind whether you reported that suspicion to OIG within four hours... tragically, almost nobody does that!

And just by the way, another thing I cannot fathom is the concept itself, of "meaningless sex." In my own experience (which may be embarrassingly limited), that's an oxymoron. I was never jubilantly promiscuous, I always worried about it. Even a flirty look or a mostly social kiss and hug might be meaningful, and can often be memorable. Therein lies the problem. Sex is extremely powerful: it's a lot like LSD (the tiniest bit can cause huge effects), as anybody who ever had any knows. It's never meaningless or entirely free.

The female staff who had sex with Wookie/Scooter/Nookie many years ago has probably been a perfectly good girl ever since. But I guarantee she remembers him. I understand that, and I sympathize. She should rat out others, there are many.

Everyone should be interested. Everyone is.

More on Turley, Amanda Calhuon, N Unit

January 6th, 2021, has been called "an insurrection." I thought, even from the day it happened, that the use of that term was a cynical political tactic which dishonored our law and our history, not to mention three quarters of a million Americans who (as Lincoln said at Gettysburg) "gave the last full measure of devotion."

Trump's riot (or whoever's riot it was) at the Capitol was an upsetting and ugly warning; but it has been made much uglier by this dishonor. I come from a family who meant 1861-1865, not 1941-1945, when they spoke about The War... and that was when I was a kid in the 1950's, barely a decade after VJ Day but almost a century after Appomattox. 

One person was killed in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. The human cost of the American Civil War was beyond anyone's expectations at that time, and thoroughly beyond our understanding in the 21st Century. That insurrection claimed at least 2% of the entire population of this country. It was more deaths than those from all other wars in our entire history combined.

It also changed the fundamental character of the country. Constitutional changes eliminated most of the sovereignty of the states. We stopped saying, "the United States are..." and ever after said, "the United States is..." The constitutional changes gave this country a much better character. But who can study that history and believe Congress and the States would ever have bothered, let alone succeeded, in working out such a far reaching remake of the whole idea, due to the death of one person in an insurrection?

I have been told that the BLM riots in the summer of 2021 were also called an "insurrection."  (I don't remember that in the media, but I could have missed the meme.) Apparently about two dozen people were killed then, but I still find the application of the term to be a silly and dishonorable political ploy. 

Perhaps a few moments during the 1965 free speech movement in Berkeley, or the civil rights protests and mass marches later that decade, prompted some comments about "insurrection" during those times, too. It's the same thing though: public relations or propaganda. The ideological causes and arguments in 2021 and 1965 were utterly insignificant compared to the complete national mobilization of all moral and material power to save the Union and end slavery (or to dissolve the Union and protect slavery, depending on which side you were on).

Jonathon Turley expressed some of this view, and other opinions, in an article this week. I mostly agree with him. Meanwhile, some people suggest that what counts is not how many people die, but whether an event upsets ("triggers") somebody. As I noted in a post earlier this month, Yale's Amanda Calhoun advises her psychiatric patients to cut ties with their own families to avoid being upset about politics on Thanksgiving.

This is wrong. It's more wrong than calling January 6 an insurrection. It actually may be one of the most wrong, ridiculous, discreditable things any psychiatrist ever said. But it's only one example of how wrong psychiatry is. Calhoun thinks we should all avoid getting into fights no matter what, no matter how we have to lie to each other, or be insulted, or fail to help others, or even lose our families. The ultimate value here is some weird, almost unrecognizable version of "safety," especially the safety of our feelings (not of our families, that's for sure!).

Ironically, the only place this supposed psychiatric value of "safety" might not apply is in psychiatric institutions. Real physical safety takes a back seat to privileges, convenience, deference for mental health "experts," and certainly everyone's ability to bury their heads in the sand when anything bad happens. It's not so bad if a patient gets injured in a fight, or if a staff who doesn't toe the administration's line gets injured. But if somebody says something sarcastic about the powers that be or those loyal overseers who truly believe in psychiatric slavery... well, that's "verbal aggression" and that's bad. The overseers can dehumanize the slaves with fake "diagnoses" of non-verifiable, non-falsifiable "mental illness." Just don't ever give STA Quinton Ivy the finger--he gets away with battery!

An immediate example (just today!) of this distorted version of "safety," is N Unit at EMHC. Dr. Vik Gill has a "patient" who continues to violently attack anyone in sight for no reason. The eighth such attack by this same individual in the last couple weeks happened this morning. Somebody will be seriously injured soon. Dr. Gill can't do anything about that for two reasons. One, he has no clue how to improve anyone's behavior, he only knows how to drug people. And two, he's at the mercy of a fundamentally corrupt EMHC culture which thrives on violence among the psychiatric slaves as a method of control.

The Illinois Department of Human Services theoretically has a facility for violent "patients" like Gill's: a separate plantation called Chester Mental Health Center. Gill's violent patient should have been sent there  a long time ago, before eight other patients got beat up. 

It's possible that Gill wants a violent patient on his unit for some purpose of his own, but I don't think so. I think he's being set up by somebody above him. Somebody wants Gill to look bad, so they won't approve sending this violent patient to Chester.

The overseers stab each other in the back all the time.

Retraction and apology

An STA on Hartman Unit persistently asked a patient to tell me I falsely accused her in a post on this blog, of having sex with mental patients at EMHC. The post at issue is "Sex with mental patients again and again" published July 8, 2024. I accused a couple dozen people in that article. In the post itself and in other separate posts on the blog (e.g., here, here, and here), I repeatedly promised to retract any challenged accusation against anyone willing to tell me it was untrue or unfair.

No one ever bothered to convince me or tell me directly that my accusations are untrue or unfair. People are afraid to call me, either because they know that if their bosses find out they called me they'll be in trouble, or because they think I'm crazy and thereby dangerous to talk to. Maybe I don't blame them, but I want to point out that I'm going beyond my promise in an effort to show good will. It took me months to even figure out who the Hartman STA was, and what blog post was disputed. No one I ever accused by their full name, no one I actually know, has complained to me. My articles only name people in such ways that they can identify themselves or each other. 

Nevertheless, I hereby retract any accusation that anyone ever had sex with any mental patient. I apologize to all who have not been convicted of this crime, and hereby presume it only happened once in all of history. (The perpetrator in that single instance was convicted and sent to prison.) Although I have been told by long-time staff at EMHC that a whole list of individuals should be named as perpetrators, I now realize any staff who ever told me anything like that are liars. Anyone who says the crime I was accusing a couple dozen partially identified people of is endemic at EMHC and throughout the Illinois psychiatric slave plantation system is hopelessly brain damaged and psychotic. 

I would like to know how I could have been so mistaken about this, so anyone willing to help with my re-education is welcome to connect. I would prefer to sort it out completely, so that I know for sure who all was falsely or unfairly accused, whether by me, by my sources, or both. I really do not want to falsely or unfairly accuse people!

But what I long believed was that the Illinois Department of Human Services runs institutions that effectively perpetrate sex slavery under a guise of "medical help" for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. This would be incredibly damaging to enslaved individuals, and to the social order, not to mention to respect for the law and medicine in this state. If I must stop complaining and accusing, I sure do hope that I was delusional, for the sake of the victims, and the perpetrators.

If anyone  were in fact up against a mafia-like system with many weapons, legal and illegal, the truth would be very difficult to tell, because the truth might end such a system. Slavery, sexual abuse, fraud, and denial of due process are illegal and ugly. The public would not knowingly pay their taxes for it, so the system would have to fight the truth to survive.

That system does not, after all, sell so-called "mental health services" to those who actually consume them. The consumers don't pay: only others who dislike them or find them troublesome pay.

Help me out guys, I need to know whether my complaints and accusations are accurate or completely crazy, and whether my whole point of view is just plain wrong. Maybe after all, IDHS is a fantastic, benevolent group of medical mental health geniuses, and its consumers are uniformly thankful for it and toast its health every Thanksgiving.

Right? Maybe I need to shut up instead of complaining more loudly more often.

Maybe I should tell my clients to take drugs.

An old lesson

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote about what it means to debate the "Existence of Mental Illness." My friend Rodney Yoder commented from his own bitter experience that being locked up in, e.g., Chester Mental Health Center, is social segregation or correction, punitive as a matter of explicit and implicit policy. It is not medical help, "...and the average person understands this all too well."

The window dressing of psychiatry demeans both medicine and the law precisely because it encourages the public to pretend ignorance of social policy choices. There are standards of behavior which simply will be enforced one way or another, and legitimate scientific medicine never has much to do with that. The function of so-called "mental illness" is at least to deflect responsibility, and at best to encourage faith or hope for future progress. 

The problem is it wastes honest human effort in present time, and it ruins the public fisc. Yoder, as an avowed atheist, would argue that this is ever the result of religious faith. His mentor Thomas Szasz, and his expert witness Nelson Borelli, both wrote long and eloquently (as no compliment) that psychiatry is best seen as a state religion.

Two weeks ago today, the American election demonstrated some serious impatience with continuing poor results from social policy choices. The world is on edge, and people want change. They may not know exactly what change they want. They may bounce around between increasingly radical promised "solutions" for years. Nobody knows what will happen, but the understanding of the average person is much better than the authorities apparently believe.

People are not generally stupid, they're smart enough to survive. Some are infinitesimally "smarter" than others, but only for moments at a time. We have (contrary to elitists on our left) no real competent educated class; and (contrary to delusional reaction on our right) there certainly is no subspecies or race "higher" than the simple diverse majority, however deplorable or morally upright they may be. There certainly will never be "brain treatment" breakthroughs to afford broad salvation.

The Jewish High Holiday Prayerbook contains a page I memorized many years ago, which is the best prescription I can think of:

In well doing rather than in well being seek your salvation.

Leave for awhile the narrow sphere of your concerns, and with Israel's ancient seers ascend the mount of vision. Thence behold the millions of your fellow beings madly struggling for air and light and a place in the sun, and tearing each other's flesh in the panicky scramble.

You will forget your small cares in the woes of the defeated and helpless multitudes. The pang of compassion will grip your heart, a pang that for ought we know is the stirring of God within you. 

And you will cry, Oh that men were united to do Thy Will with a perfect heart!

Then descend into the valley where men die struggling. Thither take the vision, the pang, and the prayer, and transmute their urge into deeds of love. 

No apologies to my friend Rodney Yoder for being religious. And no apologies to the IDHS plantation overseers for being antipsychiatry.

We simply have to work.

Baker and Malis-with-malice

Dr. Richard Malis has a patient who has violently attacked other patients at least half a dozen times lately. In theory, one primary purpose of mental health treatment in an institution like EMHC is to keep crazy people from hurting themselves or others. But this patient of Malis-with-malice keeps on hurting others, and nobody does anything about it.

Today I found out that the latest casualty is my friend James Baker. James is an elderly African-American man who has been at EMHC for several dozen years (most of his life). Malis' dangerous, uncontrolled patient just walked up and cold-cocked him this weekend, sending him to the hospital! James only has one good eye, and the vicious, totally unprovoked blow to his head caused bleeding in that good eye. More medical evaluation will be necessary, as well as a very thorough investigation into why this patient of Malis-with-malice is allowed to wonder around the clinical unit freely to attack others at will.

Malis-with-malice tried to keep James Baker in chains for a long time, making it very difficult for him to get regular ophthalmology care for his glaucoma, until a Cook County Circuit Court judge finally put a stop to that. Now this violent patient, whom Malis just glibly allows to assault and batter people may have damaged Baker's one good eye. A casual observer might be forgiven for suspecting that this is on purpose.

Long ago, Rodney Yoder told me that psychiatric plantation overseers "dog fight" patients just for fun, and as a tactic of control. More recently, Barry Smoot has explained this as the characteristic "failure to protect," as reflected in the title to his book.

Anyone injured by Dr. Richard Malis-with-malice's violent patient should call me. You may have a civil claim.