Good news or just more repression?

Elgin Mental Health Center is offering COVID19 tests for all patients on a voluntary basis. That's a good thing. But of course, it has to be done in the context of a slave plantation mentality to ruin the whole picture.

To date there has been less of a corona virus disaster in Illinois forensic mental health facilities than might have been expected. I predicted a real shit show, and it hasn't happened. Apparently there have been handfuls of cases here and there, or even less than a handful at Elgin. Somebody deserves credit for that.

I'm told that a meeting was held on N Unit announcing to patients they could get tested. One of the guys I advocate for spoke up with the audacious opinion that all staff should be required to be tested. This is a very reasonable idea, whether or not it's completely practical given union concerns, etc.

The patients are easily monitored and their possible exposure to the virus is totally controlled, because they don't go anywhere. They've been on lockdown for months. Almost all activities and "treatments" (other than drug dispensing) have been cancelled. But the staff leave every day, and no one knows with whom they are in contact, whether they social distance, etc. Anyone concerned about an epidemic inside the facility should have their attention on the staff first and foremost.

I can't see how my client's suggestion at the meeting about testing was anything but logical, and in the obvious interests of just about everyone. The only people whose interests are contrary to that suggestion are those who want to say that my client is subhuman, lacking any right to speak up about staff at all under any circumstance, necessarily irrational, and badly behaved from his "mentally ill" brain that needs constant drugging.

There were a couple such people at this meeting, and they just jumped all over my client. His completely reasonable suggestion was considered to be "hostility" caused either by: 1. his bad brain, or 2. his association with me. (Good luck with charting that, guys, or alleging it in court!)

As to 2., yes! Of course the patients on N Unit appear hostile to staff due to their association with me. By association with me, they derive some hope of freedom from psychiatric slavery. The staff would allow them no such hope, that's the design of the system.

Dr. Vikramjit Gill, the N Unit psychiatrist, has been very reasonable in my opinion, in a number of cases. He definitely helped Sean Gunderson get his conditional release. He knows I am not quite so dogmatic about psychiatric drugs as some of his colleagues may think. He and I have had a fairly cordial relationship and some interesting conversations.

Now Dr. Gill tells this particular "patient" that he has changed for the worse, and maybe it's all because he's been talking to me.

Gill has to say that, he is required to think that, by a boss somewhere who can threaten his job and even his professional reputation if he doesn't toe the forensic psychiatric mafia line.

It will get worse for a while, but when abolition is final, Gill will be free, too.