Should the APA panic? (and Boundaries)

The American Psychiatric Association is finishing up its annual conference in San Francisco today, at the very moment when a major international newspaper is actually calling for them to be exiled from the mental health world. The timing of Mac Maclachlan’s opinion piece in The Irish Times is just spectacular! It reminds me of Thomas Insel’s announcement that psychiatric “treatment” pretty much sucks, and that NIMH would dump the DSM for research purposes, just as APA came out with its newest edition of their ridiculous bible!  

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at APA. “Mental health services must be prised from grip of psychiatry” was all over my twitter feed this morning, and I did my best to pass that headline along to a couple guys who I know are probably there in San Francisco. 

Within the article, there are such “radical anti-psychiatry” views as:

"The over-prescription of medication reflects not just a system that offers insufficient alternatives to drugging young people, but trenchant resistance from the psychiatry profession…”

"We know that the ‘diagnosis’ of mental health conditions – practised primarily in Ireland by general practitioners, psychiatrists and psychologists – is inaccurate and unreliable; and that it is not a good basis for understanding mental health problems or deciding how to help people.”

"We know that there are no ‘biological markers’ or identified biological causes for mental health problems. There is no blood test, scan, metabolic or electrical brain pattern which maps neatly on to mental health conditions.”

"We also know that most people with mental health conditions can be effectively helped without drugs…”

"Mental health is a multidisciplinary field where the medical model approach is now very much a minority view, and where other professions and many patient/client representative groups – and indeed an increasing number of psychiatrists – advocate for a very different one. Our mental health services have not evolved to reflect what we know about mental health. They have maintained the vice-grip of a medical model and are designed to protect the privilege and interests of one profession at the expense of people’s mental health. There are better ways, and we all know it.”

This attitude, stated so concisely and decisively on the opinion page of a reputable, 200-year-old international publication, is a mortal threat to psychiatry. If mental health becomes a primarily non-medical concern, guys like my friend Joe Pierre, MD, or that silly little racist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, or Illinoisans James Patrick Corcoran, Richard Malis-with-malice, Syed Hussain and Bobby Sharpe, will certainly lose the prestige and money that they’ve become used to. 

Speaking of those Illinoisans, there’s another article hot off my feed today that bears directly upon them, as forensic psychiatrists: “Recovery Orientation Faces Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry Settings” is about a Swiss study which shows that psychiatry staff in institutions like EMHC are worried that they’ll lose authority and power if they try to help patients recover, instead of concentrating on control, security, drugging, and (perhaps) punishment, as they always have. Despite the pretenses of “hospitals” and “medicine” a recovery orientation is highly problematic. They really don't want their "patients" to recover: they want them to obey (i.e., as good slaves).

Lastly, I got an email today from some psychedelic apostle or skeptic entitled, "Psychedelics and polyamory: a survey for an article in www.ecstaticintegration.org." The title tells the story, but survey question number 4 is especially cogent: "Have you been encouraged towards a polyamorous lifestyle by a psychedelic healer, guide or leader? If so, could you tell us about it?"

As I've written repeatedly, one downside of psychedelics for mental health professionals includes a much stronger propensity among therapists and clients to slip into sexual relationships. (The other one is increased incidents of random psychotic breaks and dangerous behavior.)

It's almost comical (but for the gruesome harm it would cause) to imagine the catastrophe this would bring to secure forensic psychiatric facilities. In the Illinois Department of Human Services, administrators and bureaucrats already suffer from continuous high anxiety and must wrestle with an embarrassing, Mafia-like code of silence, about "boundary violations" by staff, who tend to think those slaves are there as property, after all, so why not use them for sex?

The advent of any psychedelic therapy as an optional treatment mode at EMHC would surely bring orgies to the clinical units, and deadly jealous revenge as a constant threat to anyone who works or is enslaved there. Bill Epperson in the parking lot on steroids!

So the thought for today is, pity the screwed psychiatrists at their convention in San Francisco! Or... wake them up, and make them get honest jobs!

COVID and Psychiatry

Perhaps COVID 19 is related to human bodies (or the human race as an animal species) in exactly the same way that psychiatry is related to human society and culture. For me, a cure for COVID or a reliable defense against viral “pandemics” seems like precisely the same kind of project as defeating psychiatry.

I just read the abstract of an immunological study (it required clearing up some medical and biological terms, that's for sure!), which made me think that so-called “long COVID” is caused by what amounts to a tactical military intelligence failure by the immune system. The body sends the wrong troops to fight the wrong enemy with the wrong weapons, in specific battles (e.g., the “Second Battle of the Cerebral Spinal Fluid”). Thus, the virus survives in the war, and it continues to affect the body. More battles become necessary.

People wonder how the hell certain psychiatric ideas continue to percolate through our culture and cause harm. This is also, clearly, a tactical military intelligence failure. In fighting the virus of psychiatry, the correct troops do not arrive at the right place at the right time to win certain battles (e.g., the “Third Battle of Forced Drugging at Elgin Mental Health Center”), so the war drags on, and psychiatric ideas keep coming back to screw us up. 

The ultimate defeat of psychiatric fraud and coercion will come only when we can improve our intel, at the (analogous) level of minor ground patrols or skirmishes and all the way up to the whole theater of war around the world. Likewise, a cure for COVID will only be possible when the human body can improve the intel function of its immune system.

Both of these improvements will absolutely require a more capable and causative command. The individual commanding a body must become sufficiently able, industrious, curious, and willing, to actually improve the functioning of an enormous, complex army which is the immune system. And the only possible benevolent command for our human world must become a group that is ethical and competent enough to actually direct the administration of Earth, rather than merely control populations with lies and drugs.

Intelligence can be tactical or strategic: military, biological, or spiritual. It is always a product of two (and only two) things: analytical ability and organization.

I am recently much encouraged, from contemplating developments in mental health, public awareness, media, politics, and law. The cure for COVID and the defeat of psychiatric oppression may be right around the corner!

Sharpe

This so-called “doctor” believes he’s in control. He’s a pathetic, arrogant bully. My guy Gus has recently become so ideologically aligned with my personal anti-psychiatry philosophy and my abolitionist agenda, primarily because this particular psychiatrist has tried so hard to punish him and suppress him; and it was never necessary. 

But Sharpe doesn’t know the difference between punishing and helping a person. To him, these two things are the same as long as he’s the one doling it out. 

Gus asks a lot of questions, and he points out a lot of (often insignificant, perhaps) wrongnesses. But he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t make many mistakes either. I have repeatedly taken what I thought might be risks, by publishing facts that I’ve gotten from Gus which I probably wasn’t able to independently verify. They’ve all turned out to be true.

The units Sharpe has worked on at EMHC are a disaster. Gabby and Latwon are allowed to fall in love in plain view; Nurse Manager Jai is allowed to keep telling staff, “Hey, let’s not report any suspicions about sexual activity to Administration or OIG, just keep it on the unit!”

This mafia-like culture comes from the top. On any particular clinical unit, the top is an MD psychiatrist. Sharpe, Hussain, Kareemi, Malis (great name, you can’t make that up!), and above them, Corcoran. The psychiatrists are the slave masters, with many overseers working under them. If you look far enough up the bureaucratic food chain, you may find non-MD’s who have managed to become slave masters as well. But it’s the actual psychiatrists who make the plantation what it is, with their horrible, dehumanizing philosophy that an individual is a machine, a brain, to be manipulated and controlled by medical technology. 

I recently met Dr. Meyer in person. I had believed her to be as bad as Sharpe. She’s quite assertive of her professional status, but not unpleasant or unhelpful or unintelligent. So maybe I was wrong about her. 

Who knows, maybe I’ll meet Sharpe in person and he won’t just try to talk over me and shut Gus and me up. Maybe he’ll act like a decent human being. 

But for now, I think he’s a total idiot. 

Hey, hey, STA Shinzetta Warlick

 The "mental health professional" in the title is an STA-III. That's a pretty high position. She gets a paycheck day after tomorrow, for $6800.00 (gross pay).

But some years ago, Shinzetta had a brief romantic/sexual fling with a male patient. Since he was involuntarily committed at the IDHS facility where Shinzetta was staff, she could have been charged with a felony at the time. There's little likelihood of criminal prosecution now, but this thing is not going away.

What happened was more or less detailed in my post to this blog on February 3. As always, I promise to retract, remove, and apologize for, anything I write about any named individual if it turns out to be untrue. I have in fact removed whole articles, and amended others, in the past. And that was even though what was written was not, strictly speaking, untrue, it was just unnecessarily mean. Shinzetta should call me.

But I have not heard anything from her yet. The story I am referring to can thus only be presumed to be basically accurate. 

Hard to say how long before it's a big flap.

Elon Musk is on the side of EMHC

Apparent justification and endorsement of coercive psychiatry came yesterday afternoon from none other than the world’s richest—and many think smartest—man. At 12:14 pm on 5/07/23, he tweeted:

 “Some individuals are a danger to themselves and society and it’s not fixable. Unfortunately, we do need to keep them in psychiatric facilities. ‘Normal’ people are sometimes afraid that perhaps they would be falsely committed to such an institution. They do not realize how far they are from true insanity.”

As I write this, the tweet has been viewed over 4 million times. It has inspired 2,436 comments, 4,146 retweets, and over 36,200 likes. Of course, I contributed several of those thousands of comments. 

The obvious, reasonable argument is well-worn, and not unpredictable from a libertarian-populist. But it’s surprisingly facile for a person who has such superior means to acquire knowledge. 

First of all, I wonder what Elon believes “true insanity” actually is, and how he knows, or how anyone knows, “how far (normal people) are from (that).”

Psychiatrists don’t know what insanity is, though they think they see it every day, and they have always presumed it to be brain disease. It’s not a medical idea in fact, it’s a legal one, and no such explanatory brain disease has ever been discovered.

I suggested, with one comment to Elon, a possible lesson about the distance or closeness between normality and insanity: clandestinely dose 10 “normal” people with about 300 mics of LSD, and just watch for a few hours. The CIA and various leading psychiatric researchers did that for at least a decade, and they carefully noted the results. Musk may not know the history (but I’d be surprised). The generally observed phenomenon in that secret research was: “normality” becomes “insanity” in about twenty minutes, in any human being.

My second point is that psychiatric facilities do NOT make dangerous people less dangerous, but only control dangerous people in the same sense that prisons or chains (or execution, for that matter) would control them. 

And as a NYTimes book reviewer once wrote, our love affair with modern psychiatry is a sub-prime crisis waiting to happen. Maybe since the pandemic and the latest advent of radical political populism, it’s not really waiting anymore. Everybody tends to hate and rail against “experts” these days. There haven’t been literal heads on pikes yet, but we’ll see. 

People are reasonably afraid that they could be “falsely” committed to a psychiatric facility. Psychiatric “diagnosis” is well known, and officially acknowledged, to be bullshit. With the suicide-inducing “treatments” of SSRI’s being prescribed so widely for the depression that we can all expect to come down with (like a virus) any day now, almost anyone might be alleged to be dangerous to him/herself in a dark moment. 

But I’m not even sure what a “false commitment” would be, since no one can ever prove that they don’t have mental illness, or that they are not dangerous. I know many people who have tried, and it is actually an impossible legal argument. 

If you get along well enough with your family and your neighbors, maybe no one will come after you; but if things go south, the “men in white coats” will be there on call. 

We all know this, instinctively. Maybe only Elon Musk is sufficiently certain that things won’t go south for him. 

Suggested procedure for Gus' next staffing on Love Unit K

Sometime in the first half of May, Bobby Sharpe and Stoyki Meyer, probably along with a couple more clinical staff and an administrator, will have another meeting with Gus and me. The purpose of the meeting will be to collaborate toward helping Gus get out of slavery. (I do know that's not how anyone but I would put it, but this is my blog.)

Bobby and Stoyki will approach the project as medical people, i.e., ultimately the way to free Gus will be some perfect combination of drugs to fine-tune his brain for being more social. 

Some plantation staff will approach the project as coercive persuaders, i.e., ultimately the way to free Gus will be to present him with some perfect combination of threats and controlled choices to force his behavior into conformity with others' standards, and thereby piss off fewer neighbors. 

A few might approach the project as one of changing Gus' mind about a specific pet principle or principles which they believe to be universally true and beyond all limits of value, e.g., "Love God," "Love thy neighbor," "The majority rules," or "Arrive first and strike a hard blow."

Personally, I see the project as one of real communication with Gus resulting in the accurate exchange of ideas between him and those who have influence over or interest in his freedom, so that the world that's real to Gus and the world that's real to others are closer to being the same.

Each of these approaches to the project of freeing Gus probably has some value. For May's staffing, I suggest the following procedure, to enable as much valuable input as possible:

1.)    Each person who will participate in the staffing should receive in advance via email, and acknowledge receipt via return email, a copy of these 16 "Staffing Group Norms" -

    a)    We respect one another.

    b)    We use our time well.

    c)    We are fully present with our focus, intellect, professional acumen, emotions, understanding and humor.

    d)    We are open, candid, honest and direct. We are as truthful as we can be.

    e)    We strive to understand what others say, feel, and believe.

    f)    We listen.

    g)    We do not interrupt.

    h)    We ask questions.

    i)    We engage in orderly dialogue and discussion.

    j)    We remember that we attack only issues or differences of opinion, never individuals.

    k)   We take silence to indicate agreement.

    l)    We each endeavor to look at what is best for the recipient of services at EMHC as the institution exists, in the context of the court orders that are legally in effect, even when that may not align perfectly with our own personal approach to mental health or criminal justice.

    m)   We speak (in the staffing) as equals, without rank or title, status or pretense.

    n)    As a group, we seek relevant facts, and let go of rumor, hearsay or misinformation.

    o)    We expect to learn from each other and achieve practical consensus.

    p)    We take time to debrief after each staffing, to whomever should know about it.

2.)    At the beginning of the staffing, each participant should read one of the norms, in sequence. (They should not be read to everyone else by the social worker or a host or leader of the staffing.) Everyone should participate in reading them aloud, and state his or her agreement.

3.)    All participants should further agree that when any norm is violated, the violator should be called out by the participant who notices the violation, or ideally, by the violator him or herself. All participants are charged with maintaining the whole group's adherence to the 16 norms. (As an example here, I now call myself out, for my first three paragraphs above, which violate Staffing Group Norm a, by disrespectfully calling Drs. Sharpe and Meyer "Bobby" and "Stoyki", and by my analogy of EMHC as a slave plantation.)

The above is just my suggestion, but it's based on my friend's major success in relevant circumstances. I'd love any feedback from anyone!

Bobby, Stoyki and Rache

Another dog's breakfast staffing for Gus yesterday afternoon!

I fail to understand how Rachel Nelson, the social worker nominally hosting Gus' staffings, can list out a dozen or so items of protocol and manners logically intended to enable some degree of productivity in this kind of meeting, and then consistently and repeatedly violate every single point herself! This was the second time in a row that she did this. It was not subtle, but she apparently had no self awareness whatsoever. 

Robert Sharpe (supposedly an M.D. psychiatrist -- one might think he could act professionally) and Stoyka Meyer (supposedly a Ph.D. psychologist -- same thought) were almost as bad as Rachel. The rules were obviously for Gus and me, but not for the treatment team. 

Bobby and Stoyki were also very insistent that they should be respectfully addressed as Doctor.... I can't blame them for that. After all, they're both working in a state institution where their "patients" mostly hate so-called "treatment", and only bear it as a lighter criminal sentence than prison. It's not like Gus, or anyone else enslaved on the EMHC plantation, ever came to Bobby or Stoyki willingly, thinking they might get help. Bobby and Stoyki are fake doctors in fact, at least in their capacities on the EMHC plantation. People in the most degrading jobs ("forensic mental health professional" -- i.e., overseer) always tend to be the ones who must demand respect with the highest energy.

It might also have something to do with Bobby and Stoyki both being non-permanent IDHS employees. I'm pretty sure they're both independently contracted, to make up for all the doctors who have quit to find honest jobs. I've rarely encountered such obsessive superiority from long-time, real Department staff, no matter what their position. Vic Gill and I got along famously most of the time. (I even thought I might have a beer or two with him at an annual APA conference some year, but then he was never able to attend that event.) Donna Luchetta used to tell people I was a valuable member of her treatment team. (I was shocked, but complemented in an odd way.) I could even call a couple current and past EMHC administrators friends, or potential friends. (I hesitate to name them, because they might get in trouble or be discriminated against for tolerating me!)

Bobby and Stoyki are also much more prone to lie and get caught lying than regular IDHS clinicians. Gus was restricted from viewing a couple movies this past month. The ROR he received included a credible (at least on the surface) reason for the restriction. However it also stated that this had been a clinical decision by the treatment team. It seemed highly unlikely to me that the whole treatment team had conferred about these two movies in time to restrict Gus, or even that they should have bothered to do so. 

I started asking questions about that in the staffing. I asked Bobby if he had actually known the titles of the movies or the content prior to the ROR being issued. He responded, "Yes, it was a treatment team decision." Well, that's an obvious evasion and dodge to a different issue... Maybe it was supposed to be a treatment team decision, maybe after the fact of the ROR, the whole treatment team agreed with the decision. But I just didn't believe that Bobby was in on any discussion of the issues before the ROR was signed. I mean after all, he's only on the unit a couple days a week anyway.)

So I kept trying to clarify. "Dr. Sharpe, did you actually review the specific movies, or know the titles or contents of them and the rationale for a restriction in this case, before the ROR was issued?" He could have answered no, and I wouldn't have thought twice! His answer was, "It was a treatment team decision." 

OK, I get it. He was trying not to lie, but he was afraid to answer my question honestly for some reason. I just hate it when people think I won't notice that they are refusing to answer my question! I don't like people who think I'm stupid. Why didn't Bobby just answer, "I heard about it the next day, but I agreed with the ROR and signed off on it"-? 

So I kept bugging him, until he had to interrupt and talk over everyone several times, and act really assertive and strong and disciplinary, and Stoyki was piling on, too... until we all finally said the conversation could "move on". Which meant Gus and I had no right to clarify who had actually decided to take his property away. Bobby had some clinical prerogative to lie or dissimilate as much as he wanted, because he's the master and we're the slaves, that's what it's about. I think Rachel probably decided on her own to take Gus' movies, and she later got the "team" to agree, and Bobby imagined that he was protecting Rachel from me in some weird way by not admitting it. So what? Maybe all these people are delusional.

Rachel Nelson might only be as obnoxiously childish as she has been in Gus' recent staffings because "Love Unit" K is just a uniquely treacherous place to work. I don't know what troubles Rachel worries about, or what terrors keep her awake at night, and I probably shouldn't be offended by her. Who knows? Maybe she's only months away from retirement with full pension, and scared to death it will all be ruined if something is discovered about her, like... failures or intentional refusals to report suspicions of abuse under OIG Rule 51? Bobby and Stoyki were the real liars and idiots in this case, Rachel was just a loyal but worried second lieutenant with little or no authority.

I will have some suggestions for the next Love Unit K staffing for Gus. It should be possible to do this in a business-like way, without people embarrassing themselves and desperately needing respect as professionals. I conferred with a close friend, a long-time business executive, on how to organize meetings which everyone knows have some chance of becoming very acrimonious. He understood the situation from many years of experience in corporate board rooms and negotiations, and he had some practical perspective when I described Gus' disastrous staffing today.

(More to follow.)