Sometimes we have to spin the words a little

Vik Gill recently tried to talk my guy Gus into taking a psychotropic drug, under a very cynical ruse that it would help him get out of EMHC. This would be pure PR, not medical treatment in any Hippocratic or scientific sense whatsoever. Gill explicitly told Gus he could just agree to take the minimum dose (one 5 mg. Abilify tablet per day), so it would look good in his psychiatric chart like he was "with the program," and then he could stop taking it as soon as he's conditionally released.

The fact is, many community treatment facilities will not accept a transfer from state psychiatric slave plantations like EMHC unless a "patient" is on psychotropic drugs. It apparently makes no difference whether the drugs are doing anything beneficial or not, it's just that everybody knows a psych slave is supposed to be drugged. Vik Gill knows better, but he's too much of a wimp to say so. During Gus's staffing yesterday, Gill told me several times, "Sometimes we just have to spin the words a little...."

The first time he said that was after I had asked why he wrote the prescription of Abilify for Gus, whom he has long admitted shows no sign of psychosis despite taking no psych meds for sixteen (!) years. The "doctor" kind of hemmed and hawed, said absolutely no one in the whole EMHC facility likes Gus, and ventured the possibility that Abilify might sometimes make somebody think before they speak or act. I asked if that was a treatment benefit or a side effect, perhaps listed in the Physician's Desk Reference or the promotional/informational insert from the manufacturer, Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company..? Gill answered, "Well, sometimes we have to spin the words a little." In fact, neither Abilify nor any other psychotropic medication has ever been FDA approved for treatment of personality disorders. The prescription was well beyond "off-label." It was medical nonsense in fact, simply a lie.

Gus did start the medication. He took a little purple pill several days in a row, and then he noticed effects he didn't like, so he started flushing the pills. When he let me know he was doing that, I told him don't flush the damned pills, that dishonesty will sooner or later cause more trouble than it's worth. (Not to mention, it also wastes my taxes and puts trace amounts of aripiprazole in the water supply.) He realized he'd made a mistake, and started just secretly saving the pills instead. He brought the last three little purple tablets to the staffing and handed them over to his psychiatrist.

It was officially decided during the staffing that Gus would no longer have this goofy "prescription" for "medicine that makes you think before you speak or act." Dr. Gill wrote out the changed treatment order as we sat there in the conference room.

As I was walking down the hall to leave, the doctor called out after me: "Sometimes we have to spin the words, Mr. Kretchmar." I turned and looked back, and he had a big smile on his face. I waved and acted friendly. I have long thought that I like this man. But for a split second, I felt something akin to George Smiley's unholy vertigo, and wondered if I was looking at a latter day Adolph Berle.

In any event, what Vik Gill calls "spinning the words a little" evidences several arguments I've made and gotten much push-back for over many years. Elgin, Chester, Alton, Packard, Chicago Read, Choate and Madden Mental Health Centers are not hospitals. They are plantations using slave labor to pile wealth for the Illinois mental health industry! 

Psychiatric "diagnoses" are not medical facts. They're cynical political or marketing strategies. 

Involuntary psychiatric "treatment" is not medicine. It's covert social control by cowards unwilling to bring justice.

I'm sorry, Vik: you're a criminal. And I do like Gus, so that's one.