Saturday, December 13, 2025
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Dr. Pepper? What a nuisance!
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Kiley Snake Pit Adenda: The Evil John Cosgrove, Kinga Mucha
I noticed long ago that when somebody thinks you might have caught them, or that you might suspect them of doing something bad, they will go almost nuts trying to distract you and others from what they're afraid you might find out. They'll get very critical and unaccountably or disproportionately upset. The "doctor" I dubbed "evil John Cosgrove" in my last article reacted precisely this way, when I suggested in front of a dozen of his professional colleagues that he was pretending to have read records or reports which didn't exist.
Evil Cosgrove said a certain patient had a record as being unusually prone to falls ever since childhood. That could explain why the patient always has visible bruises and abrasions every time her mother visits her at Kiley Developmental Center. Of course, another theory might be that the bruises and abrasions are evidence of Kiley staff slapping her around, punching her, knocking her down and terrorizing her on a daily basis to control her for the faux "legitimate needs of the facility" whenever she exhibits what they feel is "maladaptive behavior."
I checked around for these alleged records of proneness to falls since childhood. They don't seem to exist. I asked evil Cosgrove about the records. He responded by immediately becoming critical of me and all lawyers, and acting unaccountably upset. It was a tip-off. Maybe evil Cosgrove knows staff were beating that patient, and he is covering up crimes (possibly including rape). Or maybe not: but evil Cosgrove sure is nervous!
Kinga Mucha sent a false report to Illinois child protective services, threatening possible action against my client's guardianship of her disabled adult child. When she was questioned about this false report, by which time she had been advised that it was false and that forwarding it was a crime, she insisted that either, a.) the report was not really or not completely false; b.) she had corrected it; or c.) she hadn't intentionally filed it anyway, she was only following procedures. These were mutually contradictory excuses which weren't necessary to begin with. A simple apology and a factual correction or clarification would have sufficed to solve the problem. I think the issue was some allegation about refusing to provide medical information. In any event it was proven to be a falsehood; Kinga was basically left holding the bag.
Kinga repeatedly beseeched anyone who would listen: "I haven't done anything wrong!" She was a little hysterical about it, unwilling to even admit having made any innocent or careless mistake. She insisted that the issue was black and white: she was RIGHT and my client was WRONG. It was irrational, thus suspicious. Who knows, maybe Kinga was ordered by higher-ups to find evidence against my client that might threaten her guardianship of her adult child. It's not like Kiley/IDHS had no incentive, my client was a continuing nuisance to them.
Some would say that as a lawyer, as a professional, and officer of the Court, etc., I shouldn't caricature or insult people on the internet. I say they shouldn't torture and enslave people they are paid (with my taxes!) to help, and they shouldn't allow their peers to do that, either!
I've spent 24 years advocating and representing people who are beaten down, insulted and dehumanized. Who wants to help?
Psychiatria delenda est!
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Kiley Snake Pit, Wade Frasier
Of the several Kiley staff I recently met at an Annual ISP Meeting for a disabled adult resident, the most difficult person to dislike was Dr. Wade Frasier, Unit Psychologist. He seemed professional and smart (or at least clever in the circumstances). He didn't interrupt or talk over anyone, as best I recall. He looked me in the eye several times. These are unusually positive personality and behavioral features for a snake pit employee. I found myself reflexively wondering why this gentleman had lowered himself to work in a snake pit.
There was no mistake, however, in assuming that Kiley Developmental Center, the state-operated facility under the purview of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) located on West Dugdale Road in Waukegan, IL, is absolutely a snake pit, as defined by Google: "noun... a place of overcrowded squalor, especially a poorly run mental hospital."
Admittedly, I had made my own prejudiced presumption that Kiley was a snake pit before I ever went there, based on a conversation I'd had with my friend Alan, who happens to be a long-time director of a private not-for-profit which gets very good results helping the same population that state facilities seem so hopelessly unable to help. When I mentioned that I had a client whose child was at Kiley, Alan actually grimaced and said, "Ooh. That place is a terrible snake pit!"
Other than Dr. Frasier, just about everyone else in that big annual meeting was predictably dull, disgruntled, even clearly incompetent. Kinga Mucha, who valiantly attempts to be a very pleasant woman, almost immediately called my client's daughter by the wrong name, while gratuitously asserting the predictable platitude, "Of course, we are all on the same side...." (Nice example for the caseworker in charge, right?) An evil Dr. John Cosgrove reported that the patient had been "...prone to falls since childhood, per records." (I asked him what records, and he did his awkward best to cover up the fact that he had no idea, he'd totally fabricated or imagined those "records" himself.)
Tyson the dietician reported the patient's normal fare and current weight. But he had no record of her weight over the previous six months, and (incidentally) no awareness that he could have just asked my client, the mother, who weighs her daughter whenever she visits at Kiley, about twice a week.
There was a skinny "Home Manager" whose name I don't recall, who tried hard to explain or excuse obvious staff neglect of their patient with inappropriate or irrelevant claims about "the needs of the facility" and my client's daughter's "maladaptive behaviors." These are favorite phrases, repeated incessantly, which nobody ever thinks need to be defined and which are perhaps intended to sound like authoritative medical/scientific/administrative lingo, but which I think are pure, unadulterated bullshit. They merely identify the speaker as a robotic cog in the machine with no ability to think at all. The only legitimate "needs" the facility has are better staff who will actually treat the people entrusted to its care and teach or enable adaptive behavior.
In addition to Dr. Frasier, I was impressed by an African-American woman who had really nice corn rows. She sat directly across the table from my client,and made a very practical suggestion or two. She offered to meet and confer whenever I wanted if I thought she could help with anything. She also warned me sternly, the way my wife probably would in similar circumstances: "Don't be mean, be nice!" The evil Dr. Cosgrove by contrast, merely snarled on his way out the door as the meeting ended: "Grrrr! That was a complete waste of time."
But Kiley is indeed an unrepentant snake pit. The buildings are in desperate need of paint and repairs. Many staff are in desperate need of getting fired, sued, or prosecuted. Their motto appears to be, "Never fail to get retribution against any parent who attempts to advocate for their child!"
I don't know why Wade Frasier demeans himself to work there.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
The Doctors' Trial
United States v. Karl Brandt, et al., was the war crimes trial in 1946-7 which resulted in a court decision including ten rules about medical research on human beings that became what we now call The Nuremberg Code. Full transcripts of that trial are available on line.
It's hard not to notice when reading this material that there is no way forensic psychiatry in Illinois ever comports with the Nuremberg Code's principles of voluntary informed consent. In particular, the first principle of the Code states that a human subject of a medical experiment (compared for present purposes to a human subject of custodial medical treatment)...
...should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
The difference between a subject of medical research and a patient in mental health treatment cuts different ways. On one hand it could be said that if a treatment procedure is accepted as meeting the standard in a given medical specialty (here psychiatry), then the patient is not presumed to be at such high or unknown risk as the subject of an experiment, undergoing an entirely novel procedure of completely unproven efficacy and unpredictable side effects. Thus, "free power of choice" probably comprises more critical variables for the research subject than for the patient in treatment.
However, this analysis presumes scientific integrity and beneficent art in the medical specialty (psychiatry). In other words, it presumes that schizophrenia, e.g., is a valid diagnosis that could be scientifically falsified and reliably cured by standard treatment. Unfortunately, such presumption is unwarranted at best. It is really a forlorn hope that common elements of "fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" can be effectively covered up to avoid prosecution or civil liability.
If the treatment of mental, emotional and behavioral difficulties were as good as the treatment of a broken bone, or cancer or heart disease or diabetes, that would be one thing. It's altogether another thing, when sparse or non-existant psychotherapy, drugs and shock are only "treatment" in a commonly laughable sense, and when "diagnosis" is acknowledged by the medical specialty itself to be bullshit. Here in mental health, the "free power of choice" is at least as important to the fundamental ethic of primum non nocere as it is in medical research.
The "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center is arguably at as much risk of manipulation and abuse in 2025, from social workers, STAs, psych nurses, and doctors... as was any inmate at Dachau in 1944 (from all the same types of supposed professionals and bureaucrats). Indeed, I have litigated a lengthening list of federal lawsuits involving such allegations, and I'm pretty sure I can continue to bring cases for an unlimited number of future plaintiffs, for the rest of my life!
In 23 years, I have never had a client who failed to conclude that he/she would have been better off pleading guilty to charged crimes and accepting an honest prison term, than landing in the hands of psychiatric clowns and vindictive, little state employees who tragically degrade medicine and law.
Nobody who pleads Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) and goes to a "hospital" for help with the mental illness said to have caused them to commit a serious crime ever got off with an easy sentence. Their creeping disability and dehumanization until a distant Thiem date is a far worse punishment than prison.
Going into it, they are not informed. As I wrote over sixteen years ago, patients at EMHC think the nuthouse is a softer prison, and the treatment plan is their punishment option, chosen by someone they can't identify now, at a moment in court they don't quite recall.
Their plea is not voluntary, and the Nuremberg Code is violated.
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Lockean...
John Locke was a physician, and one of the most important philosophers in the history of Western political thought. It behooves all of us to take any time we can to study Locke to any extent, however brief. He wrote a great deal in English that was a bit different from the language we speak and read in the 21st Century, so the study might seem a daunting project at first glance. Locke is probably remembered most frequently for a fundamental principle of religious tolerance, at least for religious beliefs that do not disturb the civil peace. (I can't help noting, the title of this blog reflects that same limitation: Don't piss off the neighbors!)
In 1693, Locke published (anonymously) Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which included this fascinating advice:
"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be entered by degrees as he can bear it, and the earlier the better."
Ironically, I was alerted to this quote today by War on the Rocks, an on-line newsletter about currently evolving military strategy and tactics. A fence against a world which a young gentleman must bear by degrees, is an amazing picture. I might love to describe it at enormous lengths, or to paint it, if I only knew how to paint. But here I'll try not to waste time and space.
Locke was advising aristocratic friends about raising their child when he wrote the letters that became the anonymous 1693 book. A fence to keep the world away was what most members of that class wanted for their children. Locke evidently believed to the contrary, that children should become adults as quickly as possible; parents should acquaint them actively and early with the world despite dangers and unpleasantness.
My mother frequently admonished my sisters and me, "You have no idea how lucky you are!" She meant that we should get a college degree and be eternally grateful to have been born into an educated, privileged class similar to John Locke's friends. She wasn't racist, but she was certainly prejudiced against people whom she considered were less educated. Education into high human rationality was the solution to all evil. Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, 50 million casualties in WWII, communism... never would have happened if only enough smart people had asserted themselves to correct the bad guys' policies at the right historical moment.
I take John Locke's quote on a more tactical level. A gradually increasing ability to bear the world in its ugliness and insanity, and a steadfast quest for knowledge with the intention to understand and improve things, are the logical prerequisites to creation of a better world. This is classical liberalism: the West, the United States of America before and after the Civil War, enduring even through the darkest moment of 1945.
Locke was persecuted and forced into exile from England for his "radical" political and religious views. He learned to live most of his life very carefully in turbulent times. His philosophy is replete with carefulness. I think the discipline to live carefully is very valuable and very boring.
Anyone's fence against the world must have controlled gates to be opened for fast forays out to obtain knowledge. A love of action, constantly testing the limits of what one can bear, is necessary.
Is a lawyer the opposite of a spy? I sure would like to speak to Wild Bill Donovan over good whiskey about John Locke!
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
JAMA, Cato the elder, Pancho Villa (musings)
I recently read a report, in the venerable Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) no less, about a randomized clinical trial which tends to prove that professional psychological therapy is no better for treating eating disorders than web-based guided self-help.
I quickly passed this JAMA report on to my friend Diane, who could have been one of the "specialized (predominantly master degree-level) therapists" who participated in the study. I asked her whether it portends that her professional specialty is fated to wither away as mostly useless. My wife advised against this because she didn't think Diane would take it well, but I at least added a laughing emoji at the end, to indicate that I didn't intend any serious insult. But so far, no response.
This is no stretch however, to say that it's discreditable for "mental health professionals," when the world's leading medical journal points out how anyone does just as well to treat a prevalent eating disorder which affects more than 52 million women and 10 million men by going on line for self-help, rather than employing a specialist for therapy. Why spend the money and time for nothing? Not only that, but people might wonder if maybe the rest of the "mental health" profession, and the mass government bureaucracy it has spawned, are equally useless! It is at the very least embarrassing, right?
Cato the elder was the Roman statesman who ended every speech, and even dinner conversations, with the meme, "Carthago delenda est!" which translates as "Carthage must be destroyed." I have tried to adapt that call, for an anti-psychiatry movement which flourished in the 1960s but caved against the "decade of the brain" and the fraudulent but very successful ad campaigns about "chemical imbalances in the brain" causing depression to be cured by the Prozac chemical balancer. Now with all that nonsense revealed as an epic scam, with millions of young people deprived of their natural sexuality and millions more "mental health consumers" saddled with horrible withdrawal symptoms for indeterminate weeks, months or years, we who are anti-psychiatry in the 21st Century can say, "Psychiatria delenda est!" and mean it.
It took three wars over more than a century for Rome to finally replace the Punic Mediterranean empire. If we go back the same amount of time from today, to 1907, history marks passage in that year of the first state law (in Indiana) for sterilization of criminals and the insane. Coming forward through the full embarrassment of the Freudian cult and the near end of the world in 1945, to Brock Chisholm's advocacy for "...reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong..." by psychiatry, and the invention by Nathan Kline and his ilk of "antidepressant", psychedelic, and other horrible drugs to literally dehumanize millions in the name of "mental health," we might see that indeed, however long it might take, psychiatry must be destroyed!
As I began to write this article, I found out that my daughter is headed for Mexico on a business trip. I texted her saying have fun, and give my best to Poncho Villa, who is buried, apparently in many separate pieces, all around the country.
I have a t-shirt with a really ugly picture of Pancho Villa over the caption, "Disrupt!" I've worn that t-shirt several times when I was on vacation in Mexico. I almost always get strong approval from locals, who point and laugh, and say, "Viva Villa, we need that man now!"
Pancho Villa was the last foreign military commander to ever lead an armed invasion of the continental United States. That was in 1916. In response, General John J. Pershing was dispatched by President Woodrow Wilson on a year-long campaign to capture and punish Villa, but "Black Jack" was never able to accomplish his mission. Pancho Villa was loved by the poor people of Mexico. He finally died gruesomely of gangrene, yet as a popular hero or even a legend, before Pershing's well-suppied American army of 10,000 men could catch up with him.
History can be surprizing.
