"Patients" with no doctors at fake "hospitals"

If you're an involuntary "patient" in a psychiatric "hospital," you should probably have a psychiatrist or psychologist who is assigned to your "treatment" team... right? 

There are constitutional arguments that say, if the state is depriving you of liberty without convicting you of a crime, it must have a justification like protecting you or helping you, or protecting the community. This only becomes an issue in the context of so-called "mental illness," because that term means you "have" some disease or disorder that both absolves you of criminal responsibility and simultaneously renders you dangerous or otherwise unacceptable in society. In plainer terms, people are committed to state nuthouses for their own and everybody else's good, to be cured of insanity.

This would be evidence of our modern enlightened morality, kindness and tolerance, not to mention scientific/medical genius, if only the nuthouses ever did cure anyone's insanity, and perhaps if only the clinicians who work there for taxpayer-funded salaries and pensions actually knew what mental illness is. But they never cure anyone, and they don't have a clue what they're doing.

In fact, sometimes they don't even show up.

Illinois' psychiatric plantation system has such a shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists that these days, many patients ironically complain about not getting treatment. "Treatment" is AKA abuse or even torture, so a lack of it may arguably be a good thing. But defense attorneys and prosecutors lately even tell courts that criminal defendants should not be sent to these plantations because, whatever you may call treatment, abuse or torture, people who go to the plantations obviously are not helped. Choate Mental Health Center is especially discreditable, but other facilities are no better.

Take the Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard MHC, where Kasturi Kripakaran, Kathleen Treanor, Sara Broyles and Michael Gadson pretend to be legitimate helping professionals. I know a patient who recently called Dr. Gadson, after he officially claimed he was the psychiatrist heading that patient's treatment team. Gadson didn't want to hear any complaints or concerns the patient had, however. He was just angry that the patient knew his phone extension and was thereby able to call him in his office. He  said explicitly, he was "not allowed" to talk to this patient more than once a month!

The situation is inconsistent (at least) with the idea that a psychiatrist is in charge of a treatment team and the patient is the most important member. It's possible that Dr. Gadson has too many important administrative duties to pay any attention to real patients. And maybe this particular patient is suing him, so he's "not allowed" (by his lawyers!) to have regular communication with the plaintiff.

In any event, "treatment" for this patient is not happening. And critically, the Illinois Department of Human Services cannot do anything about that. But they never have been able to provide help for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. It has always been a scam on the taxpayers, who are easy to take advantage of because they've been convinced that insanity is dangerous, and they don't know what insanity really is, and many of them are afraid they or somebody in their family might "have" some.

But when we consider "mental patients" who get pregnant in state custody and are not allowed to talk to their psychiatrists, we have to wonder what exactly we're paying for.

Right?

On diagnosis being bullshit

"It's bullshit," was originally a comment by Allen Frances, the Chairman of the APA committee which wrote DSM-IV, to psychologist Gary Greenberg, in 2011. Keeping that point closely applied to the DSM itself is a good idea for two reasons.

First, the DSM is the single most important modern source by far, of the idea that mental illnesses are discrete medical conditions that can and should be diagnosed. It names hundreds of such medical conditions, and details precisely how anyone should decide whether or not any one of them exists in any individual. It is a manual (that's what the M stands for). It is strongly reminiscent, as I have frequently said before, of the Malleus Maleficarum, which preceded it by about 500 years.

Very few people read the Malleus any more. They may read more recent historical perspectives, analyses and commentaries about it; but there's no substitute for the whole medieval text itself, in a reliable English translation assuming a reader is not proficient in Latin. This was a manual eerily similar to the DSM. It continued in widespread use for the detection and prosecution of witches, and it remained in print, for about 300 years. (The DSM has only been around for about 50.) The Malleus was probably not known by common people in the 16th and 17th Centuries, at least not nearly as well as the DSM is known by the general population in the West today: the "Hammer of Witches" was a handbook only for the most educated and powerful men in Europe.

My point is that the DSM has had similar influence and cultural impact to the Malleus. Allen Frances' 2011 statement would be comparable to a hypothetical admission in the year 1500 by Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer that after all, there were no witches.

The second reason one might limit application of Frances' honest admission, "It's bullshit," is to save time and headaches. Psychiatric "diagnosis" evolved into such an incredible rabbit hole in the last seventy-five years that even trying to follow what is called research about it now becomes an endless maze of confusion and a very long journey through strange lands of arcane nomenclature and weird acronyms.

For example, "e-mhGAP-IG." You may laugh... but this stands for the World Health Organization's latest mobile app. It's intended to improve detection of depression in primary care, which has supposedly not been up to par in certain countries that only use the standard "mhGAP-IG" (an earlier non-screen, paper version of the same tool). Here's a research report all about it from no less authority than the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), published just last week!

I spent at least an hour going down this rabbit hole this morning. I never got a better understanding of anything being done in the real world, beyond the thought I had when I read the first sentence of this report, which identified a purpose, "to improve detection of depression." 

My thought, immediately, was that detection of depression isn't really detection of a fact, it's promotion of a theory or proposed explanation. Real diseases are actually detected by medical tests. Psychiatric disorders are merely alleged by evaluations from checklists in the DSM. Big difference. Huge!

Read this research report. By the end, you'll laugh at yourself for even caring what these ridiculous people are talking about, but you'll cry for the human wastage: so much blood, uncountable treasure, a century of lost progress in mental health knowledge.

And read the Malleus Maleficarum. Tom Szasz wrote a whole book comparing the European witch hunts to the modern mental health movement, and it may have been his best book.

Torquemada had "research," too. The Church and APA are scientists!

Stahl's Deprescriber's Guide--seriously?

One fascinating story from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting this month in Los Angeles is the mere fact that such a stalwart psychopharmacology authority as Stephan M. Stahl may be jumping on a bandwagon, which until very recently was widely derided as "antipsychiatry." Stahl must be one of the top  ten promoters of psychiatric drugs in the world! Why would he help "deprescribe"-?

Maybe it's an opportunistic business move for Stahl. His new book is due out in exactly six months, and it's expensive ($60 for a paperback of just over 500 pages). I may buy a couple dozen copies and give them out to clients and nuthouse psychiatrists. Any legitimacy attributed to getting people off psychiatric drugs is deliciously seditious in the context of the state plantation system. But I can't help thinking my friend Rodney Yoder will be absolutely sure that the real intention here is to own the deprescribing craze, i.e., own it to exploit it, or to make it disappear.

If we take everybody off the drugs, we will inevitably saddle the forensic psychiatric system with the impossible requirement that clinicians must talk to patients. They hate that. They want to be doctors who are obeyed, not counselors who must listen or empathize. And anyway, it's too expensive (not to mention useless) to do anything with dangerous crazy people other than just drug them into sufficient disability so that they conveniently, without ugliness, disappear. That is clearly the modus operandi of Illinois' Department of Human Services.

In the meantime, I saw headlines this morning about North Carolina's psychiatric slave system, which sounds to me very similar to Illinois' plantations. It can be expected that horrible abuses will be found in every state if competent investigations are conducted. They might be. We are inches away from a widespread realization by the American public that the kind of "mental health" we have been sold since 1945 has been a harmful scam. Psychiatry as we have known it will cease to exist without forced "hospitalization" and "treatment." Tom Szasz predicted that long ago.

Involuntary psychiatry has long been lamented, at least on and off, as necessary. But it doesn't protect the public or serve justice. The drugs have long been lamented, at least occasionally, as imperfect. But they don't help anyone or cure anything.

These facts are being acknowledged, implicitly, even in the media and amazingly, at APAAM2025! There will be efforts to distract attention from the facts, but psychiatry may lose its status and power.

That would be a happy development indeed. Psychiatria delenda est!

Talking the British out of their illusions...

Menachem Begin supposedly told David Ben-Gurion in 1946, "You should continue to talk the British out of their illusions, and I will continue to drive them out of Palestine." 

Begin's organization, the Zionist paramilitary Irgun, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22 that year, destroying the British administrative headquarters and increasing British resolve to withdraw, opening the door for the founding of Israel in 1948. The quote is said to suggest the utility of combining disparate tactics of diplomacy and militancy, as demonstrated in the historic Zionist success.

I watched a celebrated YouTube debate yesterday between Dr. Josef Witt, who describes himself on X as an MD psychiatrist turned drug tapering educator and pharma doc from Utah, and Anias Aftab, a psychiatrist from Cleveland and author of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry (2024, Oxford University Press). Dr. Josef looks like an analog of Ben-Gurion, and Aftab, perhaps, like a 1946 British Palestinian Mandate administrator. The Begin role could be performed by some good friends of mine. I'll paraphrase: You should continue to talk the psychiatrists out of their illusions, and we will continue to drive them out of mental health.

The critical point which separates psychiatry from any legitimate future in mental health is quite contained in the word mental. It means relating to that element of a person that enables awareness, thinking, consciousness and intellect: mind, which closely shares etymology with meaning, but not with brain.

Psychiatrists believe there is no such thing as meaning or mind. They worship the brain, effectively as a magical object, although they are not neurologists who actually specialize in the brain as scientists and medical doctors. Psychiatrists call themselves medical doctors and desperately want the public to believe that's what they are, but they have degraded and demeaned the ethical rule, First do no harm! to First do something to the brain! By insisting that we all look in the mirror and admit that we see nothing but a machine, understandable and controllable by manipulation of reactions between chemical transmitters and receptors which define all meaning, emotion, personhood and creativity, they have tried to destroy the soul, insulted humanity, and drastically harmed civilized culture. They have perpetrated this harm with the full complicity of government authority and the reliable back-up of police power.

Reports from many conversations at this month's 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Los Angeles highlight a predominant unofficial theme: psychiatric drugs, including "antidepressants," "mood stabilizers," "anti-anxiety meds," and "antipsychotics," probably need to be re-evaluated. It turns out that they cause certain harms which were ignored, minimized and covered up for decades. This is an unfolding catastrophe. 

The public is losing confidence, doubting the legitimacy of psychiatry, as the false pretense of "safety and efficacy" is revealed by scientific evidence and prominent psychiatric survivor narratives all over social media. The promise of new drugs is suddenly very poor, as psychedelics are not being approved quickly enough to save the world. Research in general is threatened by lack of finances. A petition just went live for public comment with an official docket number on an FDA government website, calling for warnings about serious and severe risks from SSRI/SNRI antidepressants. 

We may be at what Laura Delano lately called "an inflection point" which will totally reshape the long narrative of religious freedom and science. If the Jews could have their own state after so many centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, who knows?

We might compare the idea that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills shouldn't be alienated from or condoned outside of religion with a claim that Israel is inextricable from Judaism.

(I trust my nephew Zev as a rabbi for perspective, I'll ask him.)

The Packard psychiatric slave plantation

One of the most valuable rights involuntary "patients" have, enshrined in Illinois' Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code [405 ILCS 5/1-100 et seq.], is the right to unimpeded, private and uncensored communication with anyone they choose. Section 2-103 of the Code presents a few, slightly elaborate qualifications or exceptions to this right, but the intent of the law is more clear from the careful, precise language of the qualifications or exceptions themselves. 

For example, the law makes the Director of any particular plantation (e.g., Sara Broyles at Packard) personally responsible for ensuring that this right is respected, and personally accountable to issue written rules and written explanations of any restrictions of this right.

In other words, it is very clear that the law does not intend for individual clinicians on the units to spontaneously make up rules about phone use or restrict "patients" from using the phones in any arbitrary way when they just feel like talking to any friends or family, for any reason. This is important, by the way. Section 2-103 appears in the chapter of the Code which is entitled, "Rights of Recipients of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Services." (Emphasis added.) It's a matter of rights, not merely an administrative detail. They have to let patients talk on the phone as freely as possible, and they have to organize and document doing so.

Well, there's this social worker on Lincoln South Unit named Michael Fitz who seems to believe he can gratuitously violate the intent and letter of this law, for his own purposes of (perhaps) proving that he can punish and harass a "patient" whom he doesn't like on any particular day or who causes a mere nuisance once in a while. Fitz may also need to prove he's smarter than the "patient", or failing that (since he definitely isn't smarter), prove that he can overwhelm that "patient" and treat her or own her as a slave. Packard is a plantation, after all. Fitz is an overseer, he's absolutely not any helping professional.

Yesterday at about 2:00 PM, Fitz's "patient" got a phone call from a friend she had not spoken to in a long time, who may not have even known she was "hospitalized" (I am heavy on the sarcastic quotation marks for this article) in Illinois. She spoke with her friend for about half an hour, and hung up. The friend called her back to continue the conversation after about twelve minutes. But Michael Fitz, who evidently had been meticulously clocking the phone time of this "patient", quickly interrupted to say in a hostile or impatient, arrogant tone, "You've been on the phone for an hour and forty-five minutes, and you have to hang up!" The "patient" complied, and Fitz went back into the office or nurses' station  from which he had been surveilling the phone use with an eagle eye, and wrote up a report.

Later, the evening shift staff on Lincoln South (who only must be presumed to have read Fitz's report) unnecessarily and unpleasantly admonished the "patient" that she had to "follow the rules and not spend so much time on the phone."

But what rules? As best we know there is no written restriction signed by Sara Broyles saying that no "patient" may spend more than some stated amount of time on the phone. The rule (Section 2-103) is unimpeded, private and uncensored communication with anyone. Not to mention, if Fitz actually wrote that the "patient" had been on the phone for an hour and forty-five minutes, that was a false report possibly amounting to perjury; and there was no one else waiting or asking to use the phone at any time while Fitz's "patient" and been on it. Fitz was just being a petty tyrant, acting arbitrarily out of spite. But of course, this is normal on the plantations. The slaves must be kept under control and dominated by any means.

Section 2-103 also mentions attorneys, and apparently gives them special importance as far as "patients'" communication access goes. (See, 405 ILCS 5/2-103(d).) A recent experience with the same "patient" and her social worker Fitz (among other overseers of slaves at Packard) illustrates how the spirit of the law, often, is frustrated by the plantation's desperate obsession to control the slaves.

Several Defendants in a federal case I have recently filed consider that they should remain as the Plaintiff's clinical team, and that they need not have their attorneys present in a treatment plan review meeting which I attend as an advocate for that "patient". This seems rather dicey to me, but I know several of the plantations are severely understaffed to the point that they are technically unable to provide mental health and developmental disabilities treatment as required by law. (I wrote about this in some detail recently.) So, maybe Packard is as severely understaffed as Choate, and their calculation here is, it's better for Defendants in a civil suit to take the chance that they may inadvertently provide evidence for civil claims, than to end up being criminally culpable.

The "solution" to this quandry, as best I can decipher, is to carefully clarify, or get me to admit, that I am only the "patient's" advocate when I attend a treatment plan review (TPR), and I am not acting as the Plaintiff's attorney for those minutes while the Defendants in the case are present without counsel. I went along with this the other day, even though I'm not sure I understand or anyone can predict all the implications. 

For practical purposes, of course it's all nonsense: first and foremost because the "treatment" the "clinical team" is supposedly "planning" in a TPR is itself pure nonsense, when they pretend to be curing a non-existent brain disease with their horribly damaging "medicine" but cannot even bring themselves to efficiently diagnose a condition as obvious and medically treatable as pregnancy, and they implicitly admit all that in an opposition attorney's presence, without their own state-provided counsel; secondly, in the particular case, these Defendants will settle or not according to the specific facts discovered, not according to shades of definition unless they want a jury trial with lots of media.

As I've written before, pregnancy is a stubbornly objective fact, especially when it's carried to term; and a child is an expensive responsibility that somebody will certainly have to pay for.

So prevent communication, severely control phone use, and maybe words will count more than deeds.

Right, Fitz? Right, Gadson?

Xiamara is back!

I am told that social worker Xiaomara Ramirez has returned to her old office on N Unit at EMHC. I'm not sure anyone will even admit that she was gone for several months, and they definitely won't ever say why. The big question is whether she'll return to her old habit of papering over the window to her office door so nobody can see what she's doing in there.

Xiaomara is perhaps the starkest example I have encountered, of clinical staff at EMHC who cannot take criticism from "patients" and believe they simply don't have to even speak to those lesser humans, those mentally ill defectives, those genetically inferior slaves who should be bowing and scraping every time an overseer steps out of his/her little tiny office into the day room cotton field.

On the other hand, maybe I completely misestimate Xiaomara. I really don't know her, and my whole picture comes from one patient who has a way of holding grudges. (He passes tests for the general truth of the details he tells me though, and the people on the units who try to discredit him are idiots and liars who cannot pass those tests.)

My threat of a Passover-type plague on EMHC staff and administrators has been defused, I think. The patient who was a perfect client for a habeas corpus petition was suddenly, mysteriously granted his court-ordered passes, without the knowledge of his public defender and without any hearing or even a motion by counsel. The judge reportedly just signed an order granting the passes because EMHC recommended them. It is a clear demonstration of the fact that the courts do what the mental health experts tell them, period. In countless monthly staffings over a period of decades, I've heard treatment teams tell patients, "Oh your fate is not up to us, it's up to the criminal court." But the sad fact is, judges have abdicated their authority to assess and dispense justice, in favor of a mystical facility that they say should "cure" bad behavior medically. They imagine or cynically pretend to believe that such ability resides in the special knowledge and talents of psychiatry. This is delusion or fraud.

People seem to be confused. They just point at each other when forced hospitalization and coercive "treatment" is questioned. The court points at the doctors and the doctors point at the judges. "Don't ask me, ask him!" When something is clearly wrong, nobody is responsible, they're all just doing what somebody else says is necessary, and nobody ever knows why or whether it's right.

We take people who do really bad things, people who disgust us or terrify us, and we send them away. The age-old social mechanism of banishment was understandable and practical. The problem in modern times is that we have to feel like our "science" has made us better, like we have evolved into a rational, more capable species. EMHC isn't a prison, it's not exile, it's a hospital. Right?

That's bullshit. Illinois taxpayers spend about a billion dollars a year to make themselves fell better about experimenting on, torturing or abandoning their fellows. The bronze plaque in the EMHC forensic program building lobby is the perfect symbol of such hypocrisy and debilitating self-deception.

No wonder Xiaomara Ramirez doesn't want to be seen!

REALLY up for grabs! Addendum 2

On March 3, 2025, Judge Ron Motl of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Madison County conducted a hearing on the ability of the Illinois Department of Human Services to provide any safe or therapeutic environment for the care and treatment of mentally ill persons at Choate Mental Health Center. Sworn testimony from 5 witnesses, all current employees at Choate, showed that IDHS in fact has no such ability. The case was No. 2024MH322, In re S.B. It was cited in detail, with transcripts attached, in a Motion by Allen W. James, Attorney for the Guardianship and Advocacy Commission, filed on April 22, 2025, in combined cases Nos. 2025MH5, -6, -8, -9, -10 and -13, in the circuit Court of Union County. Allen James' office number at Choate is (618) 833-7025, for anyone who would like his opinion of what I am saying in this article. He may have important disagreements with my views.

Choate is severely understaffed. No psychotherapy is being provided for patients. Professional staff consist of 4 social workers (only 3 are licensed), no regularly scheduled on-site psychiatrist, one remote psychiatrist, no psychologists, and perhaps a score of nurses, for all shifts and all clinical units. There are over 70 patients to be served at Choate. This situation basically means Choate cannot be considered to provide effective mental health treatment in a least restrictive environment as required by law. Choate only provides incarceration, and "patients" are not supposed to be incarcerated, that is unconstitutional.

But the thing is, it's the same situation in all IDHS mental health facilities. There are differences in manner or degree, but Chester, Elgin, Chicago Read, Packard, Alton, and Madden are ultimately no better than Choate. None of these plantations is a legitimate hospital. No one goes there for medicine or help, unless they are forced to by a court. IDHS has no ability to provide any safe or therapeutic environment on any of these psychiatric slave plantations.

Elgin has been rationing toilet paper for weeks. Joe "dumb-as-a-rock" Basso argues with Gus about how many sections he needs. (Gus should ask Joe if he wants to come into the stall himself, to wipe....) There's no library use, because the librarian finally got fired for sexual harassment of patients after Michelle "expert-in-sexual-trauma" Evans missed noticing his widely known behavior for many years.

Drs. Kashe, Treanor, and Gadson down at Packard are just mean as hell to anyone (even pregnant patients) who doesn't worship them and toe the line. At Chester patients die (and not from mental illness). Chicago Read is falling apart physically, the building would actually be condemned if it were a normal residential facility. But the almighty James Patrick Corcoran, "Statewide Forensic Medical Director," has his own reserved parking place which he will happily kick your car out of, even if he hasn't used it himself for weeks.

These are just examples, and there are an unlimited variety of more examples. Everywhere in the system, the staff are demoralized, paranoid, confused.

People think this is a complicated problem. It's not, it's a very simple one. The psychiatric plantation system pretends to be a medical endeavor to help people and protect people, when in fact it's a social control operation to remove people who are dangerous or disliked. That fundamental lie makes the scene appear too complex to solve.

The bottom line is, both medicine and the law are discredited. This is bad for society. It may be just a part of the larger political scene that we're all getting so sick and tired of these days in the USA.

Or it may have substantially caused the larger "catastrophic failure of confidence in authority." (See my musing from 15 years ago: https://refusingpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2010/01/psychiatry-and-national-health-security.html)

This is why psychiatry must be destroyed. 

14 Nisan

The day the Jews were told that Pharaoh would allow their departure from Egypt is 14 Nisan on the Jewish calendar, which falls on April 12th in 2025. So in that sense, today is the anniversary of our freedom. But relating the Exodus story to our lives today is obviously a much more interesting exercise than celebrating one historical event.

Our Passover seder tonight will tell a story of long and brutal slavery, ending after ten plagues with a miraculous mass escape from a vengeful army into the desert. We are not supposed to think of this, and we are explicitly instructed not to tell our children about it, as something that happened to our ancestors in the remote past, but rather that this was our own experience in our lifetimes, like last year or the year before, or maybe just before Covid or a couple years after 911. 

Part of the ritual is to spill one drop of wine from our cups for each plague the Egyptians had to suffer for Pharaoh's intransigence before he finally let us go. We cannot be oblivious to any harm to any people, even our enemies.

When the kids ask why this night is different from all other nights and why we enact such an elaborate drama during a family dinner, we must explain, "This is important; I want you to know what God did for me when he brought me out of Egypt: I was a slave, and now I am free."

The story goes on through the trek across Sinai, disgraceful golden calf debauchery, the delivery of Torah, the gift of the Sabbath, and arrival at the promised land. There are so many lessons in Passover. Some families will elaborate on these lessons for most of the night, and others will edit things and get to dinner. The religion is an awesome, almost incalculable reservoir of human beauty and understanding.

But only a day before Passover this year, I sat in a legal conference room at EMHC with Gus, the "high-maintenance patient" I've worked with for years, Dr. Gill, the failure at medicine, Joe "dumb-as-basalt" Basso, a young blonde nurse named Tim, and an old hag psychologist, Dr. Ronnett. A plague threatens to cause suffering among these plantation overseers in Illinois. Their bosses' lawyers had successfully limited the task of defending against a certain kind of litigation for decades, but due to particular circumstances in Gus' case, that task may become onerous and expensive. It will be a plague, I think.  

I mentioned Passover to Vik Gill, Margarete Ronnett, Joe Basso and Nurse Tim yesterday because it's time for the psychiatric Pharaoh to let slaves like Gus leave Egypt. I threatened  these guys with this plague: a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The masters up in the big house will not be happy if such a petition is not quickly and easily dismissed.

Suddenly the masters may have to zealously defend habeas petitions because the overseers, by their admissions and omissions in Gus' case, rendered the processes of forensic mental health defective in several aspects required by law. They inadvertently proved that however lawful an original commitment may be, a slave may be constitutionally entitled to sudden, expedited discharge. And it's not only Gus: many psychiatric slaves are in the same situation. The plantations are losing control.

So I might spill an eleventh drop of wine from my cup tonight. I should not celebrate my freedom in complete disregard for its costs to others.

Incompetence or bad intent? (Tim C, RN on N Unit at EMHC)

"Never ascribe to bad motives those things which can just as easily be caused by incompetence." This is one maxim of investigation into bad results occuring in bureaucratic contexts.

On February 24, 2025, an N Unit staff named Tim C spoke with a doctor from an outside medical facility who called to consult with an EMHC doctor, regarding why an EMHC "patient" had not received prescribed medication. The doctor calling in mentioned that the "patient's" blood pressure was very high and the medication had been prescribed to deal with that specific problem. Why was EMHC incapable or unwilling to treat a clearly serious medical problem with the medication the doctor had prescribed? 

Tim is a nurse, and he blithely suggested that this particular patient was probably just clenching his fist to fake the high blood pressure reading. The doctor calling in was taken aback. Did this nurse think he was incapable of getting an accurate reading from a blood pressure cuff?! What kind of "hospital" or prison medical unit was this?!

It turns out Tim previously worked in security at EMHC, so maybe he was more into playing cop than playing medical professional. The security department at EMHC was reportedly very happy to get rid of Tim and his sarcastic, "know-best" attitude, when Tim was finally transferred to his current clinical job on N Unit. The outside doctor who called in on February 24 reacted to exactly the same, obnoxious attitude.

Just because Tim C might plead incompetence as opposed to intentional denial or attempted denial of necessary medical treatment (i.e., abuse!) for an EMHC "patient" (i.e., slave), it doesn't mean he's not in lots of trouble if that "patient" suffers some serious consequence due to the lack of treatment. When Tim glibly suggested to the doctor who called in to EMHC that the patient's blood pressure really wasn't high, he was questioning the doctor's competence as well as willfully or carelessly obstructing or discouraging proper medical treatment.

At the present moment there's no legal claim to which this evidence might be attached.

But we'll see.

Laura Delano and Unshrunk are a big deal!

This Psychology Today article is the latest of several extremely high-profile book reviews of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance by Laura Delano (New York: Viking/Penguin Random House, 2025). Others are from New York Times, and Washington Post. It has been a grand total of two days since Laura's book was published, and already I can't even keep up with all the media attention it's getting.

I met Laura Delano many years ago at a conference in Portland, OR. I've corresponded occasionally with her ever since, and I had pre-ordered Unshrunk, so it was delivered to me the same day it was published. The first couple chapters, along with the media reaction, have already convinced me that this is an extraordinarily important book. Not only that, it's a delightful read despite the serious and socially problematic (perhaps dark) subject it presents.

I could actually predict (and hope) that Unshrunk will have major, lasting cultural impact such as I recall from The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (circa 1968). That book seemed to more or less inspire the whole modern environmental movement, which had previously just been about Sierra Club-type interests in "conservation". Greenpeace and other radicals since the 1960's had very little in common with the earlier Teddy Roosevelt generation and the national parks crowd, who were a far cry from the SDS or the Black Panther Party.

I'll keep reading and see what I think, but Laura's book may turn out to be the biggest anti-psychiatry event since Jack Nicholson played Randle McMurphy in the 1975 film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Anyone who doubts the impact of that film only needs to know that almost 1000 results will come up from a search for the title... on the American Psychiatric Association's website (which is not otherwise much about movies).

Judith Warner's Washington Post review asks, with obvious anxiety which she evidently expects her readers to share: "But what if she (Laura Delano) starts giving out life-and-death medical advice? What if that person, who also happens to be supersmart, attractive and compelling, is handed a bullhorn just when her message aligns perfectly with our post-covid, 'D.I.Y health' zeitgeist? What if she publishes a book at the very moment when her anti-expert, anti-science — in this case, anti-psychiatry — perspective aligns with U.S. government policy?"

Laura herself repeatedly claims that she wants little or nothing to do with radicalism. She explicitly denies being anti-psychiatry, or even anti-psychiatric drugs. Are the reviewers who clearly worry about her book afraid? If so, why?

Maybe they should be afraid. Laura Delano is a natural charismatic leader, just a bit like Randle McMurphy (or as I've said before, Mario Savio). She may change people's minds in a big way with her book.

And I say, psychiatria delenda est!

REALLY up fpr grabs! (addendum)

 

Mental Health and AI

"Artificial Intelligence" is first of all an obvious oxymoron. Machines simply are not intelligent in the sense of any living ability to create new stuff from nothing. Artificial means related to an artifice, or a clever, perhaps deceptive device, an expedient, or even a cunning trick. Intelligence necessarily indicates the ability or action of understanding, comprehending.

A machine does not understand or comprehend: it can only create a persuasive artifice of understanding and comprehension. Artificial intelligence, no matter how useful or dangerous it may become, cannot simultaneously be a machine, and alive.

An article in today's Chicago Tribune highlights a legislative effort in Illinois to regulate, among other things, the use of AI in medicine and mental health. State Rep. Bob Morgan of Deerfield is quoted: 

“(I)f somebody is going to hold themselves out as a health care professional they actually have to be a health care professional. But in this situation, AI is stepping in and not disclosing that they’re not a person. And they’re advising people on their health care, their behavioral health. And we’re going to put a stop to that.” 

I might ask why behavioral health advice should have to come from a licensed health care professional? What if a friend tells me I should be generally more polite so as not to upset my friends, or I should get a haircut or shower more often, or I should relax about politics and not watch the news so incessantly, but just do the sudoku and ken-ken puzzles in the paper? Isn't that behavioral health advice? Would my friend be violating the law which Rep. Morgan proposes if he/she is not a social worker or a psychiatrist/psychologist?

Kyle Hillman, a lobbyist for social workers, also pipes up to say:

“I’m sure this (AI-based advice on mental health) is something that individuals that just aren’t ready to make that call might look to. But it’s just not something that’s safe. We would never consider this as an option for physical health. Like, ‘hey, I have a laceration on my leg. I’m going to call an AI chat doctor on how to put stitches in my leg.’ … It’s not something we would do.” 

I think AI is a much better and much safer way to go, for behavioral health advice, than calling any random social worker, Ph.D. psychologist, or M.D. paychiatrist! It's far less expensive (which is probably why most people consider it). But even more importantly, behavioral health cannot pretend to be objective science. If medications are part of it, you certainly want somebody on hand (a pharmacist?) who is familiar with drug actions and reactions and interactions, etc. But that information is all available on line, too, it just lacks the perspective relevant to a particular individual in a particular situation.

Anyone who has a doctor (or a priest or coach...) who knows them and has given them good advice in the past, is certainly being reasonable to choose that health care professional over an un-person AI program. I just don't believe the decision should be enforced by law. Maybe that's only because I almost never go to doctors myself. And even though I don't admit to any scary symptoms at this moment, maybe I'll die tomorrow of something that could have been prevented. But I am 73, and for the last 50 years, I've virtually never bothered with or worried about tedious and unpleasant medical errands like proctology or cardiology or cholesterol tests. I never check my own blood pressure. Maybe it's a fair exchange.

Modern medicine does not represent the best prospect for personal salvation or social progress. The field even brags, I think, about being a system, or an objective, mechanical process for evaluation and decision making that can make everyone happier. That's a machine, or it aspires to (ideally) be a mere machine. What we need is creativity.

Our problem with so-called "artificial intelligence" is merely that we are unwilling to be alive, creative, and responsible.

And it's far worse in so-called "mental health."

Bob Morgan and Kyle Hillman are wrong.

REALLY up for grabs!

I've been hearing complaints recently from the IDHS plantations that toilet paper is rationed and nobody can do their laundry because there's no soap. I also had a "patient" (slave) call me to complain that psychotherapy cannot be provided any longer. Treatment is now being refused because there are no funds to pay for overtime. Clinical staff are not showing up for work, units are undermanned and it's not safe.

Downstate, there have been several recent cases when defense attorneys asked criminal courts not to place their clients at Choate MHC because it's so understaffed that it's dangerous and treatment is simply not possible. In at least one hearing recently, defense counsel called three separate Choate overseers (aka, "clinical staff") as witnesses to testify about how bad it is there for the slaves.

I got a call from a client just yesterday who was very frightened because she was assigned a new roommate who is unstable. My client is several months pregnant, and she's afraid there is a plan to traumatize her and cause her to loose her baby. The overseers probably would be greatly relieved if she had a miscarraige, because it's clear they are at fault for her pregnancy in the first place. They haven't been able to coerce her into an abortion, and they are quite impatient/unhappy about having to provide proper prenatal care for anyone, much preferring to follow the regular routines of just just drugging everyone into compliance and zombified sub-humanity, and punishing them when they cause extra trouble. This one will be a real shit show for the Packard plantation, however: when that baby is born, he or she should get a free ride to Harvard on the State of Illinois, and that's a whole lot of extra trouble!

The question of where a bunch of money went, that was supposed to buy toilet paper and laundry soap or pay for overtime psychological counseling, is unsettled at EMHC. Maybe it was stolen by the librarian who was recently allowed to retire with a pension based on his final, near-six-figure salary, after sexually harassing and abusing patients for many years; or maybe the thief was Nick Callapocalypse, who was supposedly the administrator responsible for ordering toilet paper, laundry soap and other supplies. I don't know Nick Callapocalypse, or even if my version of his name is close. I am told however, that whatever his name is, his "mismanagement of funds" caused him to be removed from his position, even though he was a loyal sycophant of Hospital Administrator Michelle Evans.

The "shortage" of psychological counseling doesn't seem to me like it should have anything to do with overtime. "Patients" are only held involuntarily on these plantations to be helped with "treatment" which includes not just psychiatric drugs or shock, but also counseling that might actually improve their mental and emotional/behavioral conditions. If the masters cannot provide counseling, the slaves are being held under unconstitutional conditions, in violation of their Fourteenth Amendment rights to substantive due process of law. The people running IDHS presumably know this as well as I do, so they have to schedule counseling where it is prescribed, overtime or no overtime.

An official publication entitled Patients and Support Persons Information Booklet, updated in 2023, tells the public that every clinical unit housing psychiatric slaves will have a staff psychologist to provide counseling. Well, guess what, that's just not true now. It might not have been true when it was written.

Housing male and female slaves on the same hallway and taking no responsibility to prevent or deal with entirely predictable unplanned pregnancies, rationing toilet paper and failing to enable laundry for a whole population of severely mentally ill people, allowing or failing to prevent staff financial misconduct and sexual abuse of patients for years, understaffing supposed "hospitals" to a point where they resemble medieval prisons.... These are signs of an enterprise which the public will sooner or later frown upon with a vengeance.

And incidentally, dealing with such crimes against humanity will not even require any Illinois version of Elon Musk and (the federal) DOGE. I note the Chicago Tribune headline just this morning announcing an eight-figure settlement agreement in a Federal lawsuit over the failure of DuPage County to effectively care for a 50-year-old mentally ill mother in their custody, who ultimately died as a result. Very likely, the DuPage Sheriff tried to defend by saying the state nuthouses just didn't have room, so he couldn't get the woman transferred to a proper mental "hospital".

But the state nuthouses are at least as hopelessly incompetent and downright dangerous as county jails ever were. The whole, laughingly-called, "forensic mental health system" is up for grabs.

No toilet paper for godsakes!

Scumbags, etc.

I have represented clients who were credibly accused (by opposing counsel) of being scumbags, predators, blackmailers, wreckers of havoc upon society... and I dislike all those types of people; but the people I dislike most are those who think I'm stupid.

Clearly, anyone thinks I am stupid when they try to tell me that a man is at fault when he is in involuntary custody (to be treated for insanity) of a woman who has legal authority through her state institutional employer to constantly monitor the man's thoughts, mental and emotional condition and his most intimate behavior. If that woman is a state employee who ends up having sex with the man for her own selfish benefit, she completely ruins any possibility for a therapeutic milieu, and her action is a crime that turns what is supposed to be a "hospital" into an effective slave plantation. 

Blaming the man for the sex in this circumstance is (ironically) misogynistic, dehumanizing, ridiculous, and (most importantly) contrary to the law. A staff member who has sex with a patient at a psychiatric institution commits a felony, and the patient does not. It does not mater at all who is male and who is female or who is horny. Some people seem to believe that men always enjoy sex, that sex is always a benefit for men, no matter the circumstances (e.g., of power, coercion, force, drugs). Implicitly they think women are never sexual predators. This is contrary to wide human experience.

If my client is some irredeemable, anti-social scumbag, maybe he was made that way by being abused. And surely, any "mental health professional" who has sex with a patient whom she is being paid to help heal from such mental disorder as rendered him NGRI, is equally an anti-social scumbag. Most people, and most lawyers, don't want to work very hard for one anti-social scumbag against another. I have chosen to make that a major part of my legal practice.

The reason is not because it pays well! It's partly because nobody else is doing it, partly because I believe, whether I am realistic or delusional, that I have some special ability to tell which of two anti-social scumbags is worse; and it's partly because there is a lot at stake for the future of my community and the world.

The claim by psychiatrists that they have a better understanding than laypeople of human cognition, emotion and behavior is the most destructive fallacy in many centuries. The scam has garnered ill-deserved respect and authority for psychiatry. The public generally think of psychs as doctors rather than overseers of slave plantations, which is a much more accurate description for what they do. The drugs they have infested into our society are tragically debilitating and dehumanizing. Their apotheosis of the brain as the asserted source and only reality of the individual is spiritually and heuristically abominable.

After the first half of my life, I determined to combat psychiatry for the second half. I organized my new war around a maxim from Thomas Szasz: one need only abolish the insanity defense and outlaw involuntary treatment to precipitate the total attrition of psychiatry as we have always known it. The insanity defense and involuntary treatment ultimately live in state-operated institutions called "mental health centers." So that is where I went, and that is where I've been since I became a lawyer.

As the rabid abolitionist in Chester, Elgin, Alton, Choate, etc., I quickly noticed several useful things: 

1. State-employed mental health professionals are insecure and incompetent. They cluster together in the isolated institutions with eccentric cultures because they fear outsiders will notice that they don't know and don't like their jobs. They hide in the state bureaucracy so no one will see them or blame them for being useless and cruel. They lie under oath. They are pitiful. Those who aren't so pitiful leave and get honest work. An extremely rare few try to change things, but they are never successful for more than a year or two.

2. The flawed theory of mental health causes people to become criminal. Blaming every human failing on a malfunctioning or inferior brain justifies immorality and lack of discipline. Why not have sex with the beautiful young black boy? He wants it, the middle-aged social worker wants it, too. Uncontrolled and banned responses to natural desires are imminently justifiable when everybody in sight is "treated" medically for their personality failures and even their petty foibles, not to mention psychotic or dangerous behavior.

3. No one cares. The public wants nothing to do with insanity, they are terrified of it. When I tell my neighbors what I do they are initially fascinated, and they might even imagine I'm some noble crusader for justice. But if I see the same person a week later, they've forgotten all of it. They'd never visit EMHC to find out whether it's a hospital or a slave plantation; they're happy to pay their taxes and not think about it.

My experience over the last couple decades has made me extremely secure in whatever optimism I do retain. Sometimes that's not much, but it can always, and does always, come from face-to-face communication with patients and staff. As long as I am able to personally engage, I am not afraid, or stupid.

Fear of insanity comes from no face-to-face contact with crazy people.

They're all basically good.

Pregnancy!

This is clear, objective evidence. When a woman who is in IDHS custody because she was adjudicated not guilty of a violent crime by reason of insanity (NGRI) or unfit to stand trial (UST) for such a crime gets pregnant, somebody committed abuse and/or neglect. There simply is no way around that claim. And there are people who can and should be found liable. The state should have to indemnify those people. 

If the woman does not want to terminate her pregnancy, and if a baby is born, that child should probably get a free ride to Harvard on the State of Illinois.

Because of this hard reality, there will certainly be people who will try to convince any pregnant "patient" on an IDHS plantation to get an abortion. And they'll certainly look for a scapegoat for the abuse and/or neglect which is incontrovertible. The first impulse will be to prevent anyone from finding out. The second impulse will be to blame the two "patients," who will be restricted and mercilessly persecuted to the fullest extent of rules and regulations. And the third impulse will be to isolate administrative higher-ups from blame by focusing it all on the most junior staff down on the clinical unit. This last gets very complicated, and things tend to fall apart.

It is happening right now at Packard Mental Health Center in Springfield. It has probably happened many times before at Packard, Elgin, Chicago Read, Madden, Alton and/or Choate. It won't happen at Chester, only because there are no female "patients" to get pregnant there. There might be graves and secret records at some of these places. It might be uncovered and go public soon as a very ugly story.

If a female patient is told, by her psychiatrist or social worker, or by anyone, "The baby is only going to be in DCFS custody anyway, so you should terminate," that is more (mental/emotional) abuse. And it can get worse. If the female patient is put in danger from other, perhaps unstable or violent, patients, or if she is medically or nutritionally neglected and loses the baby because of that, some people might call it murder or conspiracy to murder an unborn child.

The taxpayers of Illinois have a right to find out how often this has happened, why it happens, and what should be done about it. It ruins mental health.

I know one likely "expert" to ask: Dr. Cash?

An EXCELLENT cultural sign?

I saw a TV ad this morning which included a graphic of a leaf (I think) and an advice: "Find your trash in therapy," which after a second or two changed to, "Find your self in therapy." I didn't see who paid for the ad. There was no other CTA (marketing lingo for call to action), and nothing specific for anybody seeing the ad to do. So the only likely effect intended by those who created the ad and bought the media, was momentary wondering about what trash and what self.

Maybe this is a harbinger of changing social attitudes in mental health. If so, it makes me very optimistic. I would really love to find out who the people are who created the ad, and what they think the value of running it on TV might be!

My wife and I have a very good friend who is a Ph.D. psychologist and full-time practicing professional therapist. Diane insists that she does not share my "extreme" views on psychiatric drugs, because many of her patients appear to need them. However she agrees with me that mental, emotional, and behavioral problems are not, or at least not strictly, medical issues. She also shares my near horror about the prospect that psychedelics will become a replacement for antidepressants in psychiatry.

Speculating about this "Find your trash" ad, my wife (who is actually a renowned, top expert in marketing) suggested that the intent might be to tell people needing help, "Look for a Diane, don't go a psychiatrist who will just prescribe drugs."

Although I do not believe there is significant value in the supposed "science" of psychology for any purpose other than selling things to reactive people, I certainly trust Dianes to cause less harm than Syed Hussain, Daniel Cuneo, Corcoran, Malis-with-malice, and the other plantation overseers who perpetrate the crime of psychiatric slavery against humanity.

There is much argument and frequently vicious allegation on my X (Twitter) feed, back and forth between British mental health professionals loyal to either orthodox psychiatry on one side or psychological models of "treatment" on the other. I always like it when the psychologists seem to be winning the argument. But that's not because I think they're substantially right about anything other than the fact that psychiatry is fundamentally harmful, and I'm sorry to notice that they are rarely willing to even state that view plainly.

I believe that psychiatry has finally failed as a supposed medical specialty. There were various times in the past two centuries when that could have been, and was, said. But right now, unlike e.g., in the 1960's, Western culture is generally cynical about medicine and science itself. This cynical moment will be a brief opening, because science is mostly on the side of truth and medicine is mostly helpful.

But maybe it's a chance to strike an effective blow toward abolishing psychiatric slavery, coercion and fraud. Maybe the ad I saw this morning is a good sign!

Maybe people will think about what trash, and what self.

Therapy, not violence.

On dangerously cold days....

 Does anyone wonder, while walking 100 yards across a full parking lot against a frigid wind, why this parking place, close to the door, must remain unused day after day?

The Librarian and Michelle Evans

In four separate monthly staffings for patients at EMHC in the last two days, the issue of the librarian came up. The facility library is a generally undervalued resource for patients, who are almost completely restricted from internet use, and of course, cannot have computers in their rooms. The ways that normal people get information in the real world are simply not available; "patients" are in fact cut off from much communication with the world. This is classic milieu control as described by Robert Lifton. It is the most basic feature of an environment geared to impose thought reform on individuals.

I believe this is actually contrary to the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code, at least in principle. In any event, access to the library becomes an even more critical right, and denial of such access is a particularly cruel mechanism of control, similar to close restriction or overregulation of telephone use or mail, or even solitary confinement (called seclusion in psychiatric "hospitals").

I've never surveyed how many or what percentage of "patients" at EMHC use the library frequently or at all, and how important they consider it to be to their own mental and emotional welfare and recovery. It occurs to me that it might be extremely important. Thus, making the library a dangerous or unpleasant place at EMHC could become a strategy for control or punishment.

If the EMHC library were a place (just hypothetically) where "patients" were often required to dodge sexual harassment or grooming to become sexual abuse victims, that would be a serious human rights violation. On the other side of this, if a staff at EMHC were a sexual predator, the very best job he or she could hope for might be Librarian. 

Vulnerable people could be found in the library, and privacy could be easily arranged. If (just hypothetically) a librarian at EMHC had a special proclivity for African American women as objects of erotic interest, he might be tempted to give out his private phone number to the young, pretty ones. He might spend evenings telling them how special they are, and how he'd love to be with them. He might operate that way with impunity, for years.

But the thing is, Michelle Evans is a long-time EMHC clinician (social worker) and current Hospital Administrator (i.e., the top dog, the master up in the big house with the most authority on the whole plantation). She is very highly qualified as an expert in identifying and dealing with sexual predators, and has been on the board of directors of the not-for-profit Illinois Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, since 2014!

Barry Smoot told me he believes there is much more sexual abuse of patients in IDHS custody than almost anyone even imagines, certainly far more than what gets reported to OIG. Barry and I were recently talking about what records might reveal the number of female patients who became pregnant in, say, the last five or ten years, while they were in IDHS custody. Of course most of the time, the men who get them pregnant would be other patients, not staff.... Right?

But with an expert like Michelle Evans, even a librarian couldn't get away with that at EMHC.

Right??

Happy New Year!

Gus: So tell me Joe... What can I do to make our relationship better and more productive?

Joe Basso: What?

Gus: Tell me what I can do to improve this social worker-patient relationship between you and me?

Joe Basso: (Long pause...) Well, um....What do you mean?

Gus: I just mean, is there anything... something that I can do to make this better, so that you and I can work together?

Joe Basso: (Looking away, looking up at the ceiling...) Uh... I'm not sure what you're talking about.... What do you mean by that?

This conversation, or a very close, nearly word-for-word version of it, actually occurred this morning on N Unit at EMHC. Gus is the guy whom everyone (at least according to Vik Gill) supposedly dislikes more than any other patient. Joe, officially assigned as Gus' caseworker, actually doesn't even work on the same clinical unit. He was assigned to Gus after Xiaomara Ramirez apparently became worried that Gus might accuse her of doing unethical things with male patients in her office, while the window in the door was papered over so no one could see in.

Gus never did accuse Xiaomara of any such misconduct, he only mentioned the obstructed view through her office door window, which was in fact against clear facility policy. I was the one who recalled an earlier pattern of misconduct by an EMHC social worker. A male patient was sexually abused, several times a week for years, in an office just like Xiaomara's, on a clinical unit just like N Unit. That social worker was convicted on felony charges and sentenced to a prison term. The state was then forced to defend various individuals who worked within steps of the door to the office where the sexual abuse occurred, against claims that they failed or refused to prevent the resulting harm. That civil case was litigated for nearly seven years before it finally settled.

But in any event, Xiaomara kind of freaked out, and insisted on dumping Gus from her case load some months back. Joe Basso was the low-ranking staff conscripted to take over. His office is on M Unit, which is separate from N Unit. Gus cannot go over to M to talk to his social worker, and Joe doesn't come to N any more often that he absolutely has to, so they don't talk much. It's awkward, clearly not very attuned to any therapeutic purpose, and Joe seems to resent Gus for that. But after all, Gus is disliked more than any other patient at EMHC, as certified by Dr. Gill, M.D. psychiatrist. Thus, Joe can feel easily justified for disliking Gus, too.

The thing about all this is, it's a painfully clear demonstration of the fact that the so-called "mental health professionals" who man the psychiatric slave plantations for which Illinois taxpayers spend about a billion dollars a year really have no idea what they are doing. They are not real doctors who have real scientific medicine to help anyone recover from real illnesses. They are shysters, merely desperate to feed at a rapidly dwindling public trough.

At best, they are apparatchiks who wanted to help people a long time ago, but don't think about that anymore because they're only hiding in the machine, hoping no one will see them so they can survive long enough to get a pension.

Gus sees them. When he asks Joe Basso what he can do to help things improve, Joe can't even think with that question. All Joe wants is no trouble. Help is incomprehensible.

This state should abolish psychiatric slavery. Close EMHC!