Psychedelics: psychiatry becomes (bad) religion

Mary Carreón, the Editor-in-Chief of DoubleBlind Magazine's email newsletter, asked a revealing question yesterday: "(S)hould a priest really lose his collar for trying to deepen his connection to God?"

She was referring to the formal deposition (removal from the priesthood) of Rev. Hunter Priest, the Episcopalian cleric who participated in a Johns Hopkins psychedelic study and later left his pulpit to found a "Christian Psychedelic" not-for-profit advocacy group called Legare. I wrote about this recently.

When confronted with arguments like those of my Episcopal priest sister--namely that trying to deepen one's connection with God by using drugs is quite un-Christian, often illegal, and perhaps blasphemous--psychedelic drug advocates fall back to a "scientific-medical" framework, saying that so much human misery might be alleviated if only they were allowed to do research. But the "research" they end up conducting when they are allowed to do so always looks more like (very dark) religion, not science. This has been true since the 1950's.

Jules Evans offers what might be a preview of horrifying, random and unpredictable violence that will call up memories of Jonestown and the Manson murders, which we may see rise out of popularity of psychedelics with elite special forces military personnel who have become a "Fort Bragg Cartel." One story features 82nd Airborne paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, who liked LSD so much he had it tattooed on his arm. He went camping with some military buddies in Fort Bragg, they dropped acid, he had a bad trip and disappeared. His head turned up floating in a lake the next day, apparently chopped off with an axe. His body was never found and his death is still unsolved.

Besides such horror shows, a massive increase in sexual abuse under guises of mental therapy is also predictable. Various mainstream and psychiatric/psychological media have commented about this risk.

So we are looking forward to dark insanity, and less trust of professionals claiming to cure it: not exactly the road to salvation imagined generations ago by Timothy Leary and Adelle Davis. When Mary Carreón writes of a deepening connection to God, maybe she means the Other Guy.

It's good that the Priest lost his collar. Let's throw some psychs in jail, too.

Rick Perry, traumadelics, my sister the priest

Wow! We could have had an ibogaine freak for President.... The great hope for a "trauma-free" utopia engineered through neurochemistry is inspiring a whole new "traumadelic" culture.... And one Episcopal clergyman was just booted for (perhaps) looking for the living in a place of the dead. As the Wicked Witch of the West once said (while she was melting), "What a world, what a world!"

Boundaries collapse: politics, medicine, religion, and personal exploration become ridiculously scrambled. Psychedelic revivalism, a widening impulse for radical social change, and deep-seated confusion or disillusionment with authority suggests Yeats' falcon and falconer.

Indeed psychedelic drugs, originally understood as psychotomimetics, make minds fall apart and obliterate people's centered understanding for dealing with the world. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has lately made research into ibogaine his life's mission and publicly declared himself to be the "Johnny Appleseed of ibogaine." But in 2006 he believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and eternal consignment of non-Christians to hell. It might be said that whatever carefully constructed utility and truth Perry's mind was once centered on while he was an evangelical Christian has clearly fallen apart. He may believe he was only brain-injured by football and a farm accident, and various researchers have suggested that psychedelics are like "vitamins" for neurogenesis. But it's hard to not suspect that Perry's earlier faith simply wasn't effective for solving mental and emotional troubles. So he adopted a new faith, in ibogaine and the complexities of brain function, to replace his ineffective Christianity.

This is not unprecedented in American history. In the mid-Twentieth Century, LSD was a sacrament for the youth counter-culture. Celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis admitted that she experimented with it (on herself as well as her 13-year-old son and his friends) in hopes of "finding chemical Christianity," to counter the hot breath of atheistic Communism in the world. Adelle was at least briefly quite convinced she had attained a true spiritual breakthrough. 

A century before that, the three largest Protestant churches in the United States split down the middle and elected to foment a most destructive war, because their common faith in Jesus apparently didn't solve the issue of slavery. The northern and southern divisions of the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians hated each other with such a vengeance as only siblings in faith could have conjured.

American Evangelical Protestantism was replaced by modern medicine and the apotheosis of the brain, as the motivating theology for the Twentieth Century. The currently emerging (or re-emerging) traumadelic model for mental health is based in this theology. Supposedly, everyone must realize he or she is a victim of childhood challenges, which will necessarily disable each person in the absence of some kind (different, depending on who you ask) of "therapy," whether it be psychedelic drugs or an eccentric, mystical talking cure, or most likely, a combination of the two. The essential point is that people must surrender personal agency to their expert betters (usually medical doctors), and the state must give those expert betters more legal power and pay them better than it currently does. A corollary point holds that only these same expert betters should be allowed to evaluate whether or not any particular "therapy" works.

It's difficult to predict how this cultural phase will wind down for humanity. Psychedelic-assisted therapy students and patients were left in the lurch and investors lost millions of dollars when psychedelic companies began to contract or collapse, especially in the wake of the FDA's refusal to approve MDMA (aka, Ecstasy) for treatment of PTSD. With the triumphant return of Donald Trump, the whole "wounded child" personality archetype is suddenly disfavored, and non-military, non-law-enforcement projects are not as easily funded as they once were. Since the pandemic, nobody even trusts doctors.

I have a sister who became an Episcopal priest late in life. When we were in college together, she took LSD, and I never did. Her husband (since divorced) has told me that she was a major enthusiast. I've recently corresponded with her about the so-called "psychedelic renaissance," figuring her perspective as both a former acid head and more recently a member of the clergy would be unique. She assured me that she was entirely appalled by the suggestion that any faithful Episcopalian would ever believe they can use psychedelic drugs for spiritual gain. I was surprised, because the literature of the "renaissance" is replete with that exact purpose, and I would have expected that Episcopalians would not be immune to its appeal.

The Episcopal Church did not formally split between north and south in the Nineteenth Century the way the three Protestant denominations did, although there was still a lot of acrimony over the slavery issue. Episcopalianism is a Catholic faith, and therefore, more characterized by top-down authority. However, this issue of psychedelic drugs for spiritual benefit does not find unanimity among the Episcopal flock. A priest named Hunter Priest was recently deposed for "Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy" because he refused to abandon his advocacy as a founder of the non-profit Ligare, which describes itself as "a Christian psychedelic society," and for his public participation in a Johns Hopkins psilocybin clergy study. For his part, Priest is unrepentant, arguing that "...several Episcopal Church bishops, as well as many clergy, seminary professors, and laypeople from multiple denominations have expressed how important they believe (his psychedelic) work is."

My sister says she thinks it's a good thing that this guy is no longer a member of the clergy. But psychedelic drugs are an issue that is not resolved by Christian theology, even as slavery was not resolved before Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Sherman burned Columbia to the ground; until Lincoln lay dead from the assassin's bullet to his brain and every drop of blood drawn with the lash was paid by another drawn with the sword.

Somebody said people are not spiritual beings, they are white or black bodies; they are brains, biological machines: mechanisms pure and simple, objects explainable and controllable with no reference to any concept of soul. This was the falsehood to turn us against each other. It was a lie by a psychiatrist.

As the creed of my Church states, we believe that the study of the Mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields.

EMHC's N Unit is a low-functioning unit

But "low-functioning" doesn't describe patients. It describes staff.

Just for example, there's Joe Basso, Social Worker II. Joe spent months getting my guy Gus' pass packet together. For most of that time, he just kept saying it was "with the court," or "with the Administration," but it was obvious that Joe had no clue where the packet actually was, it was lost. Vik Gill stood up for Joe, or in fact covered up for him, by coaching him on how to finish the packet. Gus finally got his passes, although nobody knew the court had approved them and Gus was unable to use them for a full month (maybe two) after the judge would have expected his order to be complied with. 

I'm not sure why Vik Gill wants to keep Joe around, unless it's because nobody else wants to work on low functioning N Unit, and Vik doesn't want to be any shorter on staff than he already is. He doesn't want to be stuck as the last person of authority on crashing-and-burning N Unit. Dr. Nidea, the unit medical doctor, recently quit; and Dr. Ronett the psychologist is on her way out the door, too. Nobody gets psychotherapy at EMHC anymore; but that's true on all the other IDHS plantations, too.

The Nurse-Manager for M and N units is Teresa Niacua (my spelling may be wrong). Hers is a fairly high position, she basically has an administrative title. But after less than a year on the job, it's clear that Teresa is as dumb as rock, just like Joe "Basalt" Basso. Gus has asked for her help with problems of normal services that Joe is unwilling or too dumb to perform, like making copies of documents, obtaining forms, or getting a memo to security to enable a monthly staffing in the forensic program building legal conference room. These are things social workers are supposed to do for patients. But Teresa can't do them either, she just protests that she'll send it back to the incompetent social worker. Joe would no doubt say (with Vik Gill's backing) that he works really, really hard for all those patients assigned to him. (He has two besides Gus.) In any event, Joe is incompetent at his job, Teresa is incompetent at hers, and the whole clinical unit is dysfunctional. Nobody helps anyone with anything (especially "mental illness"); they just try to avoid trouble, which is a sure way to guarantee trouble will come.

Part of the problem is simple corruption, which comes from low morale, which comes from incompetence. Gus hates the corruption, and all the corrupt staff hate him for seeing it at all. Rules against contraband are broken all the time. One patient has markers which are banned: a green one was found just lying on the floor recently, and a new social worker made a big display of dramatically asking, "Which patient had this?!" although she clearly already knew. That new social worker covers over the window in her office door with some opaque plastic so no one can tell when she's in there. She's following a long line of rule breakers in this, including social worker Xiaomara (who quit) and social worker She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (who went to prison). Drs. Ronett and Gill are also aware of patients who have banned items (laptops with bluetooth wifi, let alone large markers) on the unit, but they never report it or investigate. Staff frequently cheat on sign-in rules and hours, but nobody cares.

I attended Gus' monthly staffing today, and I asked the treatment team why they are unable to perform the most basic administrative functions. Joe Basalt just stared down at the table. He needs a haircut and looks stoned. Gill stood up the whole time because he can't easily sit right now, with some back or shoulder injury. What a motley crew! But other units are just as bad, and some people are even worse. 

I attended three more staffings today, all for Hartman Unit patients. The first one featured none other than Richard Malis-with-malice, who had absolutely no patience with my mild sarcasm, about how therapy groups at EMHC seem to not be important for any purpose of helping patients, but only for making the staff who run them look good. The psychologist in the room had just told the patient that his attendance was needed in her therapy group precisely because almost no one else comes to it. I thought that was just too funny to not comment on. But Malis-with-malice got up and walked out, like some kind of drama queen, ending the staffing to "protest" my disrespect.

But I do honestly disrespect these people who, with all their self-important, arrogant pretext, try to tell their slaves that they, as "experts" alone know what is best for "recovery" from the invented "mental illness" myths. Almost every psychiatric slave I've ever worked for in the past two+ decades is smarter than Dr. Malis-with-malice, who is actually a bad and dishonest man, or Joe "dumb as basalt" Basso, who might just want to get high.

Then there's Rose, my Hartman Unit social worker friend who loves old rock'n'roll, and was so caring today as to ask about the welfare of a patient who recently Thiem'd out. 

Rose is the best, and all is not lost.

Psychiatry and antisemitism

In my most recent previous post, I did not explicitly say that psychiatry and antisemitism go together. They do, and I will argue that point here, publicly. Psychiatry and antisemitism are almost one and the same phenomenon, historically, philosophically, and politically.

In the 1930's, German psychiatrists actually piloted the killing machinery of the Nazi Final Solution. Tödliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeuneren, und Geisteskranken, 1933-1945, by Benno Müller-Hill (Rowalt Taschenbuch, 1984), is probably the best written documentation of this horrific fact. The author had conversations with the nearest surviving relatives or descendants of some of the most infamous German war criminals who had been directly involved in exterminating the Jews of Europe. 

One is seized by an unholy vertigo reading the transcripts of Müller-Hill's interviews, when after perhaps only three or four, the same reasonable words obviously repeat as if rehearsed, with nearly identical statements from one witness to the next, arguing so very earnestly that each of the doctors was a good family man, hardly even a Nazi, just doing his job in a very difficult time with no evil intent. 

Alfred Hoche, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, was one prophet of direct medicalized killing. He wrote that various psychiatric disturbances were indications of what he called "human ballast" or "lebensunwertung Leben" (life unworthy of life). From early euthanasia programs to the industrial operation of the infamous death camps, psychiatrists were front and center. The gas chambers of Auschwitz had been disassembled from German psychiatric hospitals and shipped to Poland, and the personnel who knew how to use them traveled there, too, to turn millions of Jews into smoke. 

Laypeople in the Twenty-first Century hardly considered themselves scientifically competent to second-guess doctors until the obvious disaster of the Covid pandemic inspired the whole Western public, a full century after the nascent dawning of the Third Reich, to variously rebel against elite authorities who had been so happy to consign them to some basket of deplorables. Such glib disrespect of common Americans who lacked Ivy League diplomas merely echoed the philosophical theories of German psychiatrists, who knowingly embarked on the Nazi program to purify a master Aryan race, logically requiring full elimination of the Jews and bringing epic disaster to the world by 1945.

It's more than worth mentioning... that the Jews are the oldest continuing ethnic group in Western Civilization. Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion by millenia. Whenever anyone in the West gets the idea that the human world should be remade, their attention is necessarily directed to the Jews. Psychiatrists have frequently considered themselves capable of remaking the human mind, and thereby the world. From Brock Chisholm to Jeff Lieberman, the leaders of this purported "medical specialty" have conspired to power above all other purposes. The power of organized religion has been the primary barrier standing in their way, and no organized religion has such a record of demonstrated staying power against materialism as Judaism. There is no symbol of antipsychiatry as potent as a single Jewish martyr standing on a gallows and reciting the Sh'ma.

Jeff Lieberman deserves special mention. He is Jewish, so we should naturally wonder how he can be antisemitic. In my experience, most American Jews are instinctively favorable toward psychiatry as a generality, partly because they believe it is a medical specialty. They identify with Freud (a Jew), and while Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population, 14% of American doctors are Jewish. Lieberman wore a white coat and draped a stethoscope around his neck at every opportunity, right up to the day he was ostentatiously exiled from the profession he had led, as a racist.

When a Jew insists to a hostile world the Lord is one, he strikes directly against the central ideal of medical psychiatry, namely that the lord is nothing. The individual is nothing, there is no soul, there is only the neurotransmitter and the receptor, there is only brain, only mechanics, mud. We must look into the mirror and make peace with the fact that we are staring at a machine. We will be replaced by machines.

It's just not true. Psychiatry is a lie. Antisemitism is one cover for the lie, inextricable from psychiatry itself.

This type of mental illness, psychiatry, antisemitism

I recently saw an interview clip with a Jewish student at Columbia University. This young woman was very impressive. She made a point, perhaps better than anyone I've heard or read, that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist arguments from last year's demonstrations on elite college campuses are in fact arguments against the whole tradition, theory and culture of Western civilization, which the American university system is supposed to stand for and perpetuate. 

It reminded me first of my friend Gary Kash's explanations of antisemitism: (in part) it's not racism against Jews, it's rather jealousy of other people's success, plus paranoia over possible secret conspiracies. There have been plenty of undeserved successes and secret conspiracies in history. We can all wonder about them, just as we can buy lottery tickets and fantasize about how to spend a couple hundred million dollars. But the exceptional stories never really explain and don't change our real circumstances now, in present time. We only make things better for ourselves or anyone else by creating and organizing, i.e., by what we think of as work.

When ideas inspire human action, it's because there is some truth in them. The truth in antisemitism and anti-Western or anti-American agitation is the natural objection to bad conditions in the world. People don't like the ugly deaths of innocents, or starvation, or disease, too much heat or too much cold, too much  or too little rain. The Abrahamic tradition has postulated for millenia that these bad things happen because people disobey God or because we have not attained sufficient scientific understanding. That explanation (btw, it's not two different ones!) arguably enabled our species to progress all the way from an animalistic existence to an ability to reach the stars or wipe out God's creation on earth. So judging by such a result there was at least some truth in the foundations of the West.

But we have apparently stagnated. At least that's what the anti-American, antisemitic agitators must believe. There's truth in that, too, most of us feel it. The worst stagnation is in mental health, and that stagnation relates critically to all the others, though it's rarely recognized except by groups lobbying for more money for peculiar versions. Those groups repeat useless shibboleths like (IDHS's), "There's no health without mental health," while doing nothing to improve mental health. In fact these days they habitually use the term "mental health" to mean mental illness (e.g., "She suffered from mental health..."), which is totally, amazingly stupid, beyond Orwellian newspeak. 

An example of this useless stupid-speak was heard this morning in the wake of sickening circumstances, a mass shooting in midtown Manhattan. Fox News featured analysis by former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker, who seemed to speak of some presumed psychiatric diagnosis of the shooter when he said, "This type of mental illness is the most dangerous kind because they can act with purpose, and almost, you know, r-rationality... they can plan. But yet, obviously there's some type of mental illness involved here." 

Swecker is an FBI expert in protecting the public, not a medical expert in mental illness. Thus he gets away with implying that some specific type of mental illness ("this type") has been defined and identified, perhaps by someone more knowledgable than himself; but then in the next sentence he can step back to reality ("obviously there's some type") by acknowledging it's really just the glib, popular presumption of laypeople, aka myth. Fox's audience doesn't even notice that this guy has no clue what he's talking about. He almost certainly has no solid evidence, at this early stage of investigation, that the dead shooter had an identifiable purpose or any level of general ability to plan. 

Why does the FBI talk that way, and why do we all just buy it?

There is a widespread feeling that we are at the end of some road. Our elite universities, the highest symbol of rationality and rule by human reason, are going nuts. The world suddenly hates Jews again, as if that can be a new solution. Nobody knows whether there is a difference between evil and brain disease. We don't want to work, we just want to get lucky.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last...

J. Duncan's case

I have a client, Junior Duncan (not his real name), who is currently suing various individual employees of the Illinois Department of Human Services for sexual abuse he suffered while he was in their  custody. 

Junior is no longer an involuntary mental patient: he is now in jail because he violated court protective orders. He says he just wanted to retrieve his clothes and other possessions (including important legal documents), from a woman who had started a sexual affair with him while he had been her "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center, aka "EMHC", the storied 19th Century psychiatric "hospital." That woman, the so-called "mental health professional"/perpetrator, later threw Junior out of her house after they had been living together as an intimate couple for months. Junior spent a long time on the street, and he was a mess (no shoes, no diabetes medication, etc.).

I believe Junior; everybody who knows how things work at EMHC easily believes him, and I'm pretty sure a federal jury will eventually believe him, too. This particular woman who put Junior out on the street was allegedly the second EMHC staff who had seduced him and used him as a sex slave while he was in custody. (I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome, Illinois taxpayers!)

I have long maintained, and most of the clients I've represented have agreed, that a psychiatric slave plantation is worse than prison. But currently, Junior says jail is petty brutal. He is held at Will County Adult Correctional Center in Joliet, on the misdemeanor charge for violating the court domestic protective orders. He's been beat up by guards a number of times, and medically neglected. 

One day not long ago he woke up on Thursday morning paralysed from the waste down. None of the jail personnel paid any attention. They probably presumed he was malingering, and after all, they all knew he was mentally ill, which means too crazy to think of as a regular human being. Junior didn't get better, though. He really couldn't walk. He attended a court hearing Friday morning in a wheelchair.

Several nurses or orderlies in the jail (see their names below) refused to help Junior until Friday night, by which time he couldn't stand up. Finally they shipped him off to the emergency room at St. Joe's Hospital, where doctors (also see names below) ordered emergency surgery after an MRI showed a tumor on his spine. Nobody heard from him for several days (his mother called me very worried) and it was not easy to find out what had happened. He is now recovering, but very slowly, because the jail is refusing to provide the physical therapy that was ordered. The jail is perfectly willing to risk Junior's chance of ever walking again, on the hope that he'll be released soon enough so they'll be rid of him and somebody else can be blamed, somebody else can pay.

Junior is litigious. As I have written elsewhere, this could be good evidence that he is no longer mentally ill. I'm not sure he will ever renounce the status, though. He thinks he needs it to maintain certain privileges and immunities. My tendency is to try to change his mind about that, but I'm his lawyer, not his minister or therapist. I know he didn't end up in his current condition because of "mental illness." He ended up in this condition because he was abused, defrauded, and enslaved by psychiatrists under a cynical guise of "treating" mental illness with snake-oil (fake) "medicine."

The offending and otherwise involved personnel at Will County Adult Correctional Center include several Wellpath agency-contracted employees, and several medical professionals at St. Joe's Hospital in Joliet. I haven't had time to repeatedly debrief Junior on all details, so I can't be sure these are all bad guys: Tom Ranovsky, Rakeya Smith, "Nurse Donna," Erica Paterson, Dr. Tiffney Luckett, "Dr. Rachel," Dr. Gandhi, and Tamir Hersonsky, M.D.(N.B., I think the final two names are surgeons at St. Joe's who are good guys.) This who's who will shake out by the time any new lawsuit is filed.

The situation is not mental health. It's bad people who fail to help others. No amount of scientific research, no new drugs, and no improved legal procedures, will ever turn people who have chosen to be bad, into beneficent doctors and public servants.

Rational argument, protest, Fuller Torrey

About fourteen and a half years ago, I wrote an article which has been the third-most popular out of more than 450 on this blog. This was my reaction to E. Fuller Torrey's claim in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that to reduce mass shooting incidents in America all we need to do is validate psychiatry, and then consistently lock up and drug the people whom psychiatrists "diagnose" as mentally ill and dangerous. 

I argued, maybe too rationally, that Torrey was a fanatic, proposing the use of supposed "medicine" to punish and restrain people; and by such proposal, he proves psychiatry is not, or at least not entirely, a medical specialty, and it is definitely not help. I said, and am still convinced almost a decade and a half later, that Fuller Torrey will ultimately be held responsible for far more harm to society than any mass shooter. What is called "forensic psychiatry" (involuntary "hospitalization" and court-ordered/forced "treatment") is a giant dodge for modern people who are afraid to protect themselves and their families and unable to witness anything un-pretty in their wimpy, over-protected lives.

People are desperately afraid of insanity. They are willing and even anxious to turn over the whole subject and all its myriad implications and phenomena to "experts". If a child from a suburban family "speaks in tongues" without religious upbringing on that phenomenon, it's probably "schizophrenia" which a "doctor" should "treat". Everyone bemoans, but also ignores the facts, that there is no cure for "schizophrenia" and any two "properly diagnosed" (i.e., strictly in accordance with DSM criteria) schizophrenics may have no symptoms in common at all. The "expertise" we are so happy to turn these problems over to is bullshit, as openly admitted by some of the field's most prominent practitioners.

I reviewed the old blog article today, immediately after reading Betsy Levy Paluck's long Atlantic piece, "The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest," which centers around predictable left-liberal issues like climate policy and reproductive choice, but also offers very valuable insight that applies anywhere on any political spectrum. What the author calls "a spiral of silence" is the snowballing tendency for silence to beget silence in conversations that approach controversial issues. People get more and more careful to never hurt anyone's feelings or let any voices ever be raised, until everyone just stops talking about anything but the weather for fear of stating a minority opinion. This undermines the kind of informal "common knowledge" about what other people think, which is essential for a democratic society.

Paluck suggests that we should speak up and become politically involved: i.e., we should protest. I think that is even more true for involuntary "patients" in state nuthouses than it is for regular people who are not accused of any "mental illness" imagined to make them "dangerous to self or others." Many of my clients are protesters, against the meds they hate taking, against the condescending, dehumanizing attitudes of so-called "mental health professionals," and against the ugly corruption, outright perjury, and wasteful bureaucracy in the psychiatric plantation system of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

I can describe grim details of endemic sexual abuse in state-operated institutions: female social workers have oral sex sessions with their male "patients" three times a week for years, only steps away from doctors and administrators specially trained to detect, prevent and report those crimes; male STA's and librarians seduce female "patients" and pass them around to each other like real chattel slaves; female "patients" get pregnant in the institutions and nobody knows whose fault that is, so there are well-worn routines for coercing them to have cheap abortions or hysterectomies; and the harm piles high as everyone, EVERYONE, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil, as their Illinois Attorney General's office, taxpayer-funded legal counsel argues that they are all immune from any prosecution or civil claim, as experts who must be accorded discretion and who can never be contradicted by lawyers or mental patients (God forbid!!) about their almighty professional judgment or their "medical" diagnoses and treatments.

The bottom line is, most people think that everyone else rationally believes involuntary mental patients to always be the problem, and their overseers, the mental health professionals, to be the only (albeit occasionally, rarely, slightly imperfect) solution. So nobody ever discusses the things I see every day in my practice of law. Good, normal people don't know anything about state psychiatric "hospitals," and they don't want to know. This is why protests by psychiatric "patients" are probably increasing and need to increase a lot more. 

The question is whether such protests will be noticed. "Not taking your meds" was long agreed to be an unsocial behavior. Laura Delano and Cooper Davis were first of all protesters, just because they stopped taking meds. They are getting noticed, big-time now. I sent Laura's book to a patient who is protesting from inside Packard Mental Health Center yesterday. (I had to cut the hardcover off and turn it into a paperback so security won't have an easy excuse to withhold it from my client.) 

If Unshrunk is released in a paperback format, I'll buy a dozen for clients who'll be protesting, "...Takin' it to the streets!" What a party, man....

Then God help the IDHS nuthouse administrators.