I had a staffing at Elgin Mental Health Center for a client who's had a tough time of it on-again-off-again. He's had various diagnoses, been put on various drugs, and almost killed. (I wrote about this same guy as "Mr. D" back on June 23.)
The psychiatrist in charge of the treatment team (Dr. C) had been contacted by Mr. D's family attorney (not me), and asked why there appeared to be so many different diagnoses over the short one-year period the guy has been at Elgin.
During the staffing, Dr. C made the point that for purposes of getting Mr. D a conditional release, he was very confident that he could thoroughly support and justify his own diagnosis. This comment, of course, did not answer the reported attorney's question about why there had been so many different dx's. Either I had missed something or Dr. C was being kind of evasive, so I asked him if he had any feeling for why the family attorney, as an attorney, had asked about the multiple diagnoses. He shrugged and smiled, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe he figured I had put the guy up to it (which I had not). Simultaneously I realized, maybe the family was preparing a malpractice action (which they probably should).
Well anyway, there ensued a somewhat longer discussion relating to this than I had intended. It was mentioned that it's not particularly unusual for a patient at Elgin to be diagnosed with various different mental disorders by different doctors over a period of years.
It also came up that it's somewhat unusual for a criminal court judge to pay a lot of attention to the nature of any particular diagnosis, but it's not unusual for a judge to expect such things to be pretty settled and stable for a while before a patient is released. This was the specific context in which Dr. C said he could thoroughly support his own dx for Mr. D.
Then came the (in my opinion) bombshell comment from Dr. C. I wrote it down word-for-word.
"Diagnoses are not really so important. Symptoms are what's treated with psychotropic meds."
Many people do know this. But in these circumstances, it was a highly incriminating admission. The psychiatric slaves at Elgin Mental Health Center, Chester Mental Health Center, Alton Mental Health Center, and all the other state nuthouses in Illinois, are always told that they must understand they have mental illnesses, which are legitimate brain diseases, which require lifelong medical treatment. They must take medication, or they will never be released.
These often unwilling "patients", and their families, and the public, are told over and over again by very professional salesmen and PR experts and TV advertizing, that mental illnesses are just like any other illness. Elgin has all of the propaganda of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) prominently displayed and freely available to anyone who comes there. All state mental health workers are trained to think this way, expected to implicitly believe in this orthodoxy.
Supposedly there is "stigma" attached to mental illness. But man, I can tell you, I myself am severely stigmatized, not for being mentally ill, but for (supposedly) not believing in mental illness. Countless times, I've apparently earned the scorn of state employees for questioning the objectivity of a psychiatric diagnosis or for saying it's all arbitrary.
Now here's Dr. C: "Diagnoses are not really so important."
What he means is, psychiatric diagnoses have NOTHING to do with whether and in what way anybody ever gets "treated" by mental health professionals. Psychiatry is not help, but covertly coercive control. The dx's are all justifications after the fact, subjective b.s., pseudo-medical, anti-scientific ... fraud.
Sooner or later society is going to catch on to this, and there will be some kind of hell to pay.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've casually mentioned that I do not "believe in" mental illness to others and never heard from those people again. Just like that.
ReplyDeleteI don't think one can BE a health professional. nurse, technician, etc. without taking and passing school examinations in which one asserts MI to be real, objective, disease (brain or otherwise). If one cannot pass school. oone cannot be licensed--BY THE STATE.
I know this because I had contemplated going to nursing college. But then I realized I could not be awarded a diploma UNTIL AND UNLESS I pledged allegiance to a belief in MI as "disease"-literal disease. I earn my living now rehabbing houses and as a landlord--honest work where I don't claim to believe in nonsense.
A person CANNOT BE a social worker until and unless they claim (on college testing) to believe in MI as brain disease. Or a "licensed" occupational therapist, masturbation therapist, go-to-church therapist, finger painting therapist, watch TV therapist, or any of the other "therapists" licensed by the state to "treat" bums and prisoners in madhouses. The STATE requires full allegiance to this lie before it will grant the requisate licenses. This is one of the reasons I believe in a free market in medicine as well as seperation of state and medicine.
You sit with a pack of some of the dimwittedest kool-aid drinking morons at these TPRs Randy. And the others are merely dishonest scoundrels.
And I know as I grew grey-haired at their hands.
"...And I know as I grew grey-haired at their hands...."
ReplyDeleteA person can amass a fortune and then lose it. He can go back to work again and then regain all the money he had lost. But he cannot regain the time it took to do all of this. It has been lost forever. Time is a nonrenewable resource and its value cannot be measured even by money.
That's what's so sad about psychiatrists. They feel that they can monopolize and misappropriate another person's time because how that person acts is unhealthy as defined by their pedestrian tastes. Stealing another person's time is one of the definitions of slavery, I think.
I know you probably don't have a spot-free record, Rodney-- none of us really do-- and you may have deserved a time out, I don't know, but you didn't deserve a never-ending vendetta served up as help.
Any way let me get back to commenting on the post. And I'm sorry if I'm putting this a bit crudely-- but what I hear you saying, Kretchmar, is that the shrinks are pulling shit out of their ass as they go along. Tell us something we didn't already know. It's all so science-y.
From what I've found, they make one pie in the sky claim and if they don't get the desired response, they make another equally outrageous claim, generally the exact opposite of what they just said.
But hey, forming a dialectic is a game the whole family can enjoy. I can play, too. But at the end of the day, when all is said and done, everybody's done nothing except go round and round in circles and nothing of any value has been added to the general welfare and happiness.
I hope they get the bejesus sued out of them. Having a pharmacist in the victim's family is a definite plus. I worked as a pharmacy tech for a while. The pharmacists I worked under didn't seem to have much use for psychiatrists and psychiatric drugs. Don't even get me started on what they said about drug reps.
A person cannot BECOME a pharmacist UNTIL AND UNLESS they swear an undying belief in MI as dictated by college and state licensing exams. Randy deals with an entire assortment of clowns (masturbation therapist is not something I invented) whose livelyhoods depend on fealty to this precise catechism.
ReplyDeleteHowever, most of the shrinks, and all but the most feebleminded of the rest of the "treatment team", privately admit that MI is all bullshit. Trust me, I listened to their private conversations through my cell door for twelve years.
Incidentally, the state/polital class of persons and its/their thugs do not allow anyone to sue them in the courts comprised of more of the states thugs. (A judge is just another thug.) Again, I learned that first hand time and time again.