Dead men tell no tales

Dan Mojziszek died yesterday in a hail of police bullets, a perfect example of the amazing results regularly obtained by modern psychiatry as practiced in Illinois institutions.

I know the forensic clinical unit at Elgin Mental Health Center where Dan was treated (P__ Unit). I know the psychiatrist whose "patient" he was (Dr. H__). His social worker may have been Jennifer M__, and one of the security therapy aides he dealt with on a daily basis may have been Barb S__. These people are true-blue, unionized bureaucrats and true believers in the state psychiatric religion.

When they failed to help this particular patient, now a dead man, they were just doing their jobs.

Here's the way it works. Dr. H__ is a young and potentially charismatic psychiatrist. He immediately changes or arranges the psychiatric diagnosis of any new patient to justify his own preferred treatment, which is psychotropic drugs for bipolar disorder.

Any patient at Elgin who does not want the particular drugs Dr. H__ prescribes, or who does not agree that they have the particular brain disease Dr. H__ says they have, is unanimously seen by Dr. H__’s treatment team as thereby displaying the exact symptoms of the disease Dr. H__ diagnosed. Those symptoms in turn confirm the diagnosis and require the drugs. Often there is absolutely nothing more than this circle, to the whole "clinical" process.

Consider one symptom of brain disease discussed in a treatment plan review I once attended at Elgin. The patient involved (not Dan Mojziszek) was said to have become “hypergraphic” after he had stopped taking his medication. This appeared in a hastily prepared report, and I asked Dr. H__, initially without any real cynicism, what exactly it meant. He responded, “Hypergraphic means the patient writes too much.”

Well, I was dense or cantankerous. I ventured further: “What is too much, Dr. H__? How can you tell if somebody writes too much, I mean, what if they’re Steven King or something? Has anyone on the treatment team read what this guy wrote to see if maybe it’s creative, or rational, or anything else? This is in a report as a symptom of a brain disease, so what exactly is writing too much?”

Dr. H__ made a condescending effort to placate me, answering with a straight face: “Writing too much means writing more than is necessary or appropriate.”

I was annoyed. The murderers and perverts at Elgin are locked in there under court order and must learn to be polite to their captors in highly creative ways. I on the other hand had no such motivation. Dr. H__ seemed illogical, arbitrary, or purposefully insulting to me. We had to have an argument.

“What is writing more than necessary or appropriate, Dr. H__? Are you talking about a quantity of words, or a number of pages? Is there some standard or baseline quantity of writing that somebody somewhere has established for all writers, or is there a formula of some kind that gets applied to an individual writer?” I got a little sarcastic. “Did you just make this up yourself? What does hypergraphic actually mean, if it’s supposed to be an objective medical symptom that’s being observed, and if it really has anything at all to do with any illness?”

He finally explained it. “We do compare it to a baseline. The baseline is the amount of writing the patient did before, when the symptoms of his mental illness were in remission because he was taking the medication I told him to take.”

Almost everybody pretends to go along with this in the nuthouse. It's the gulag story. They all know on some level it's a big lie, but they can't see any other choice.

Dan Mojziszek went along, because he wanted to get out. He told Dr. H__, "Yeah sure, Doc, I BELIEVE in bipolar disorder, I'll always take my meds, I promise." They let him go.

Of course, Dan didn't really believe. None of them do. Dr. H__, Jennifer M__, Barb S__ and/or whoever was on Dan's team on P__ Unit never taught him anything, because they were only supposed to drug him into sufficient disability that he wouldn't be able to drive without a license anymore. That's their job, given to them by us, the taxpayers. That's the plan: dehumanization.

So I have no idea whether to offer these people my condolences for their dead patient, or my congratulations.

But I know this plan is a bad one, guys.