Sunday, November 15, 2020

COVID19 on Illinois psychiatric plantations

Reports from several psychiatric slaves being held on different plantations in Illinois have recently been increasingly alarming. For a number of months it seemed that someone in the Illinois Department of Human Services was doing an excellent job of keeping the pandemic out of forensic mental health facilities. As recently as last week, I personally told Tom Zubik at Elgin that he should be congratulated for avoiding the shit show that was predicted.

Well... all of a sudden there are problems. Mental health center staff are the ones who bring the virus in; they’re the people who have to be monitored closely. Zubik specifically admitted that to me. (Obviously, involuntarily “hospitalized” “patients” don’t go anywhere. They are already locked down and should be easy to quarantine.)

Today I was told that twenty-five staff at Chester Mental Health Center are positive for the virus. The slaves are trapped, and panicking. It’s hard to imagine how any John Brown Harper’s Ferry event would materialize in that maximum-security facility, but some sort of rebellion seems imminent.

At Chicago Read Mental Health Center, Marci Webber reports that a girl named Josie with COVID 19 was recently brought onto the B-South clinical unit and put in a four-person room to infect a couple of roommates. Josie was shortly transferred to a two-person room directly across the hall from Marci and allowed to cough all night long with the door open. One of the roommates from the first room (named Esmerelda) is coughing now, too.

Marci is maintaining an extensive catalogue of specific examples, times, places, names and instances of quarantine violations to which she has been an eye-witness. Wosena Oliver-Smith, a morning charge nurse (there should be an umlaut over the “o” in her first name but I can’t find it with this software; try not to think of double lightening bolts with square ends), was overheard chatting happily about how Josie does in fact have Covid. Josie is not effectively quarantined. She eats with everyone else, and walks around the unit freely (wearing a mask, but no gloves). Marci tries to ask questions and suggest reasonable quarantine procedures, but unit staff are basically taught to hate her, for being a dissident. So she gets absolutely no help to avoid infection.

In the meantime, the overseers are recalcitrant. They frequently go without face masks, they don’t enforce social distancing on the unit, it almost seems as though they would be quite happy if Marci got sick and died. Wosena the Krankenschwester takes great delight in refusing Marci an N95 mask... In any event, they can be expected to just “chart” patients for complaining long before they take any kind of trouble at all to protect them from COVID. In fact, that’s what they are ordered to do.

After all, Marci and all the other “patients” are subhuman, fit only as property.