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??