Amazing amazing

Another Elgin Mental Health Center staffing, same day as (actually immediately following) the one I wrote about on Friday, July 9th. Same psychiatrist, Dr. C....

My client, Mr. N, is a foreign national. He's been at Elgin 3-4 years now, NGRI on an aggravated battery charge, Thiem date circa 2028. Never took meds. I don't remember what his Axis I diagnosis is. (But of course, with Dr. C, that's "not so important".)

It took a long time to convince Dr. C that this guy could progress toward expanded privileges and even conditional release without ever taking "prophylactic" psychotropic meds. I went to court once and took Dr. C's deposition. More recently, though, N was finally on a treatment program which consisted of therapy groups only. It still always seemed to me, until this staffing the other day, that Dr. C would make it take as long as possible for N. He seemed in no rush to admit that this patient, with whom absolutely nothing was wrong medically, psychologically or any other way, was progressing at all.

Anyway, first item in the staffing: the facility has a letter of detainer from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. INS wants N, so the Illinois Department of Human Services will give him up.

But ... what of the fact that N is still in need of mental health services on an in-patient basis?

Well, Dr. C says that's no problem. Since INS wants the patient, it'll be easy to convince the criminal court he's suitable for conditional release. If INS didn't want N, he'd be kept at Elgin for more treatment, but a letter of detainer from a federal agency is apparently an instant cure for N's mental illness. It's all a matter of clinical psychiatry, of course.

Or rather, it's all a matter of forensic psychiatry. The "clinical" pretense is only there as marketing. This is not medicine, it's carefully euphemized punishment for and restraint of crime. Psychiatrists who work for the state are not doctors so much as they are jailers and hangmen.

And guess what? Their work only confuses everything and everybody. This system is a disaster and a fraud. It should be torn down, the foundations should be ripped out, and the ground should be plowed with salt so nothing will ever grow there again for the rest of time.