Such good people...

Barry Smoot called to my attention today a recent "Response Letter" from Illinois Department of Human Services Secretary Grace B. Hou to IDHS Inspector General Peter Neumer. It is published, perhaps a bit triumphantly, on the IDHS website. They want everyone to know what good people they are, who are just bending over backwards to correct things they weren't responsible for themselves, bad things that they never knew were happening, and that they (of course!!) would never have permitted.

This comes to me on the very morning when I am filing a civil lawsuit in United States District Court in Chicago, which names both Grace Hou and Peter Neumer (along with two past Inspectors General and several other IDHS plantation overseers) as defendants. There is a fairly professional public relations operation in progress to isolate the recent disaster at Choate Mental Health Center from IDHS as a whole, and certainly to distance that flap from the basic function of state care for people with mental health problems and developmental disabilities.

The concept that the overseers hope the public will end up with is probably that the IDHS is an agency of well-intended and skilled professionals, although as in any large organization, a few bad apples occasionally make these good people look bad. Some "reforms" like surveillance cameras and more complicated reporting requirements will ensure that nothing like Choate will ever happen again, and all IDHS' slaves will be happy and well cared for.

It will not work, for two main reasons.

First, the people who work for IDHS are not skilled, and they don't remain well-intended for very long. So-called "mental health professionals" are furtive little mice who work for the state because as tiny cogs in the wheels of a large machine, they hope they will be unnoticed. Their families, neighbors and friends will not blame them for taking their salaries from the public fisc for jobs that they have no slightest idea how to do. They continue, every day, going to work and pretending that they can cure mental illness or fix bad behavior, crazy thinking and upsets, with medicine. They know quite well that they can't do that.

These people almost all started their careers on the intention to help. But they quickly failed in many small ways, until they became aware on some level that the whole project was a giant failure. Then they had to pretend, and lie, every day, to themselves and everyone else. That made them stupid (lying always does). A small handful of really bad people thus became able to control the group. The cogs and the wheels and the levers, and all the apparatus, now seems to just run. It's nobody's fault and nobody can change anything, no matter how bad it is. So it's best just to pretend it's not bad.

The second reason this won't work is, the public is pretty mean these days. We mostly look for who to prosecute, who to hate. The media help us, and make their bread and butter by stirring us up against each other for entertainment, like gladiators in a Roman circus. Medical experts are not safe from the guillotine now, if they ever were. Psychiatrists are just a perfect target, and IDHS has far too many of them perpetuating a very ugly culture of abuse and coverups.

The reforms that are really necessary for anything to change in Illinois include totally extracting psychiatry from mental health law, and establishing treatment regimes not based on bullshit diagnoses, harmful drugs, and the apotheosis of the brain. 

So when you think about these glowing congratulations and this calm rationality between two of the defendants in Mickey Russell v. Michelle Bogle, et al., just watch out for the sky to start falling.