This type of mental illness, psychiatry, antisemitism

I recently saw an interview clip with a Jewish student at Columbia University. This young woman was very impressive. She made a point, perhaps better than anyone I've heard or read, that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist arguments from last year's demonstrations on elite college campuses are in fact arguments against the whole tradition, theory and culture of Western civilization, which the American university system is supposed to stand for and perpetuate. 

It reminded me first of my friend Gary Kash's explanations of antisemitism: (in part) it's not racism against Jews, it's rather jealousy of other people's success, plus paranoia over possible secret conspiracies. There have been plenty of undeserved successes and secret conspiracies in history. We can all wonder about them, just as we can buy lottery tickets and fantasize about how to spend a couple hundred million dollars. But the exceptional stories never really explain and don't change our real circumstances now, in present time. We only make things better for ourselves or anyone else by creating and organizing, i.e., by what we think of as work.

When ideas inspire human action, it's because there is some truth in them. The truth in antisemitism and anti-Western or anti-American agitation is the natural objection to bad conditions in the world. People don't like the ugly deaths of innocents, or starvation, or disease, too much heat or too much cold, too much  or too little rain. The Abrahamic tradition has postulated for millenia that these bad things happen because people disobey God or because we have not attained sufficient scientific understanding. That explanation (btw, it's not two different ones!) arguably enabled our species to progress all the way from an animalistic existence to an ability to reach the stars or wipe out God's creation on earth. So judging by such a result there was at least some truth in the foundations of the West.

But we have apparently stagnated. At least that's what the anti-American, antisemitic agitators must believe. There's truth in that, too, most of us feel it. The worst stagnation is in mental health, and that stagnation relates critically to all the others, though it's rarely recognized except by groups lobbying for more money for peculiar versions. Those groups repeat useless shibboleths like (IDHS's), "There's no health without mental health," while doing nothing to improve mental health. In fact these days they habitually use the term "mental health" to mean mental illness (e.g., "She suffered from mental health..."), which is totally, amazingly stupid, beyond Orwellian newspeak. 

An example of this useless stupid-speak was heard this morning in the wake of sickening circumstances, a mass shooting in midtown Manhattan. Fox News featured analysis by former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker, who seemed to speak of some presumed psychiatric diagnosis of the shooter when he said, "This type of mental illness is the most dangerous kind because they can act with purpose, and almost, you know, r-rationality... they can plan. But yet, obviously there's some type of mental illness involved here." 

Swecker is an FBI expert in protecting the public, not a medical expert in mental illness. Thus he gets away with implying that some specific type of mental illness ("this type") has been defined and identified, perhaps by someone more knowledgable than himself; but then in the next sentence he can step back to reality ("obviously there's some type") by acknowledging it's really just the glib, popular presumption of laypeople, aka myth. Fox's audience doesn't even notice that this guy has no clue what he's talking about. He almost certainly has no solid evidence, at this early stage of investigation, that the dead shooter had an identifiable purpose or any level of general ability to plan. 

Why does the FBI talk that way, and why do we all just buy it?

There is a widespread feeling that we are at the end of some road. Our elite universities, the highest symbol of rationality and rule by human reason, are going nuts. The world suddenly hates Jews again, as if that can be a new solution. Nobody knows whether there is a difference between evil and brain disease. We don't want to work, we just want to get lucky.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last...

J. Duncan's case

I have a client, Junior Duncan (not his real name), who is currently suing various individual employees of the Illinois Department of Human Services for sexual abuse he suffered while he was in their  custody. 

Junior is no longer an involuntary mental patient: he is now in jail because he violated court protective orders. He says he just wanted to retrieve his clothes and other possessions (including important legal documents), from a woman who had started a sexual affair with him while he had been her "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center, aka "EMHC", the storied 19th Century psychiatric "hospital." That woman, the so-called "mental health professional"/perpetrator, later threw Junior out of her house after they had been living together as an intimate couple for months. Junior spent a long time on the street, and he was a mess (no shoes, no diabetes medication, etc.).

I believe Junior; everybody who knows how things work at EMHC easily believes him, and I'm pretty sure a federal jury will eventually believe him, too. This particular woman who put Junior out on the street was allegedly the second EMHC staff who had seduced him and used him as a sex slave while he was in custody. (I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome, Illinois taxpayers!)

I have long maintained, and most of the clients I've represented have agreed, that a psychiatric slave plantation is worse than prison. But currently, Junior says jail is petty brutal. He is held at Will County Adult Correctional Center in Joliet, on the misdemeanor charge for violating the court domestic protective orders. He's been beat up by guards a number of times, and medically neglected. 

One day not long ago he woke up on Thursday morning paralysed from the waste down. None of the jail personnel paid any attention. They probably presumed he was malingering, and after all, they all knew he was mentally ill, which means too crazy to think of as a regular human being. Junior didn't get better, though. He really couldn't walk. He attended a court hearing Friday morning in a wheelchair.

Several nurses or orderlies in the jail (see their names below) refused to help Junior until Friday night, by which time he couldn't stand up. Finally they shipped him off to the emergency room at St. Joe's Hospital, where doctors (also see names below) ordered emergency surgery after an MRI showed a tumor on his spine. Nobody heard from him for several days (his mother called me very worried) and it was not easy to find out what had happened. He is now recovering, but very slowly, because the jail is refusing to provide the physical therapy that was ordered. The jail is perfectly willing to risk Junior's chance of ever walking again, on the hope that he'll be released soon enough so they'll be rid of him and somebody else can be blamed, somebody else can pay.

Junior is litigious. As I have written elsewhere, this could be good evidence that he is no longer mentally ill. I'm not sure he will ever renounce the status, though. He thinks he needs it to maintain certain privileges and immunities. My tendency is to try to change his mind about that, but I'm his lawyer, not his minister or therapist. I know he didn't end up in his current condition because of "mental illness." He ended up in this condition because he was abused, defrauded, and enslaved by psychiatrists under a cynical guise of "treating" mental illness with snake-oil (fake) "medicine."

The offending and otherwise involved personnel at Will County Adult Correctional Center include several Wellpath agency-contracted employees, and several medical professionals at St. Joe's Hospital in Joliet. I haven't had time to repeatedly debrief Junior on all details, so I can't be sure these are all bad guys: Tom Ranovsky, Rakeya Smith, "Nurse Donna," Erica Paterson, Dr. Tiffney Luckett, "Dr. Rachel," Dr. Gandhi, and Tamir Hersonsky, M.D.(N.B., I think the final two names are surgeons at St. Joe's who are good guys.) This who's who will shake out by the time any new lawsuit is filed.

The situation is not mental health. It's bad people who fail to help others. No amount of scientific research, no new drugs, and no improved legal procedures, will ever turn people who have chosen to be bad, into beneficent doctors and public servants.

Rational argument, protest, Fuller Torrey

About fourteen and a half years ago, I wrote an article which has been the third-most popular out of more than 450 on this blog. This was my reaction to E. Fuller Torrey's claim in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that to reduce mass shooting incidents in America all we need to do is validate psychiatry, and then consistently lock up and drug the people whom psychiatrists "diagnose" as mentally ill and dangerous. 

I argued, maybe too rationally, that Torrey was a fanatic, proposing the use of supposed "medicine" to punish and restrain people; and by such proposal, he proves psychiatry is not, or at least not entirely, a medical specialty, and it is definitely not help. I said, and am still convinced almost a decade and a half later, that Fuller Torrey will ultimately be held responsible for far more harm to society than any mass shooter. What is called "forensic psychiatry" (involuntary "hospitalization" and court-ordered/forced "treatment") is a giant dodge for modern people who are afraid to protect themselves and their families and unable to witness anything un-pretty in their wimpy, over-protected lives.

People are desperately afraid of insanity. They are willing and even anxious to turn over the whole subject and all its myriad implications and phenomena to "experts". If a child from a suburban family "speaks in tongues" without religious upbringing on that phenomenon, it's probably "schizophrenia" which a "doctor" should "treat". Everyone bemoans, but also ignores the facts, that there is no cure for "schizophrenia" and any two "properly diagnosed" (i.e., strictly in accordance with DSM criteria) schizophrenics may have no symptoms in common at all. The "expertise" we are so happy to turn these problems over to is bullshit, as openly admitted by some of the field's most prominent practitioners.

I reviewed the old blog article today, immediately after reading Betsy Levy Paluck's long Atlantic piece, "The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest," which centers around predictable left-liberal issues like climate policy and reproductive choice, but also offers very valuable insight that applies anywhere on any political spectrum. What the author calls "a spiral of silence" is the snowballing tendency for silence to beget silence in conversations that approach controversial issues. People get more and more careful to never hurt anyone's feelings or let any voices ever be raised, until everyone just stops talking about anything but the weather for fear of stating a minority opinion. This undermines the kind of informal "common knowledge" about what other people think, which is essential for a democratic society.

Paluck suggests that we should speak up and become politically involved: i.e., we should protest. I think that is even more true for involuntary "patients" in state nuthouses than it is for regular people who are not accused of any "mental illness" imagined to make them "dangerous to self or others." Many of my clients are protesters, against the meds they hate taking, against the condescending, dehumanizing attitudes of so-called "mental health professionals," and against the ugly corruption, outright perjury, and wasteful bureaucracy in the psychiatric plantation system of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

I can describe grim details of endemic sexual abuse in state-operated institutions: female social workers have oral sex sessions with their male "patients" three times a week for years, only steps away from doctors and administrators specially trained to detect, prevent and report those crimes; male STA's and librarians seduce female "patients" and pass them around to each other like real chattel slaves; female "patients" get pregnant in the institutions and nobody knows whose fault that is, so there are well-worn routines for coercing them to have cheap abortions or hysterectomies; and the harm piles high as everyone, EVERYONE, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil, as their Illinois Attorney General's office, taxpayer-funded legal counsel argues that they are all immune from any prosecution or civil claim, as experts who must be accorded discretion and who can never be contradicted by lawyers or mental patients (God forbid!!) about their almighty professional judgment or their "medical" diagnoses and treatments.

The bottom line is, most people think that everyone else rationally believes involuntary mental patients to always be the problem, and their overseers, the mental health professionals, to be the only (albeit occasionally, rarely, slightly imperfect) solution. So nobody ever discusses the things I see every day in my practice of law. Good, normal people don't know anything about state psychiatric "hospitals," and they don't want to know. This is why protests by psychiatric "patients" are probably increasing and need to increase a lot more. 

The question is whether such protests will be noticed. "Not taking your meds" was long agreed to be an unsocial behavior. Laura Delano and Cooper Davis were first of all protesters, just because they stopped taking meds. They are getting noticed, big-time now. I sent Laura's book to a patient who is protesting from inside Packard Mental Health Center yesterday. (I had to cut the hardcover off and turn it into a paperback so security won't have an easy excuse to withhold it from my client.) 

If Unshrunk is released in a paperback format, I'll buy a dozen for clients who'll be protesting, "...Takin' it to the streets!" What a party, man....

Then God help the IDHS nuthouse administrators.