As many people know, my partner and I are currently litigating five federal lawsuits which all allege sexual abuse of patients and/or other endemic corruption in psychiatric facilities run by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS).
Some of those lawsuits have progressed well into the discovery stage. It's amazing what's coming out! Not the least surprising is the naivete of the attorneys representing the defendants.
We have recently been told, inter alia, "IDHS takes its obligations to protect the confidentiality of its patients seriously." This was an excuse for spending a ridiculous amount of time "redacting" medical records and other subpoenaed documents before turning them over to us. What took them many months could have been done in ten minutes by a blind man!
IDHS has one motive only, for "protecting" confidentiality: they need to keep their slaves invisible, nameless and faceless, so that when those slaves go free (which of course they eventually will) no one will recognize how they were disabled or who abused and dehumanized them.
As my law practice has demonstrated to me for over twenty years, most of these so-called "patients" actually beg for public attention to the injustices they suffer. The people who are highly allergic to any publicity are the psychiatrists and other clinicians and administrators. Syed Hussain, Richard Malis, James Patrick Corcoran, Robert Sobut and their ilk are desperately hiding from their victims, from the public, and from themselves. IDHS "protects confidentiality" for those guys.
The IDHS and (especially) the Illinois Attorney General need to look more closely at this situation. They need to extract themselves. When clients or employees are lying, forwarding the narrative of the lie makes an attorney or administrator complicit in crimes. Maybe the recent Giuliani suspension should teach a lesson about keeping the party line out of loyalty but in the absence of truth.
I've spent most of my life honing an instinct, and a habit, to be strongly and instantly attracted to things that don't make sense. If most people are like me, they more naturally tend to put their attention on things that do make sense, things they can understand. But the things they look away from are exactly what will sneak up on them.
Today's NY Times includes a Nicholas Kristof column about a 63 year-old black musician who has talked hundreds of racists and white supremacists out of the KKK. He has the robes and hoods and Nazi flags that have been turned over to him as souvenirs, to prove it.
While I may or may not believe that doing this sort of thing will bring peace on Earth, or even peace in our time, I sure do look forward to a post-Covid resumption of in-person monthly staffings at Elgin, Chester, and Chicago Read Mental Health Centers! I like to sit across tables, behind locked doors, in the same room with psychiatrists and psychotic killers and perverts.
It makes me feel safer.
And coincidentally, it helps me comply with Illinois Supreme Court rules of professional conduct.
Yeah, the "clinicians" were always claiming MY right of confidentiality even after I waived it in writing. I believe most of them actually believed the legislature created the "right" specifically to shield THEM from public oversight. But, as I have so often observed, "the rights of mental patients" is as absurd as, say, the rights of Auschwitz inmates. To be either is to have no real rights at all.
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