"Interfaith"

A friend invited me to an interfaith forum held in Phoenix, AZ last night, and I attended via Zoom. The subject was school shootings. Participants included Baptists, Jews, Hindus, and various others. I expected some religious views. After an hour I left the meeting a bit disappointed. (It probably continued for another hour or more, so it is possible that I missed all the good parts, being in a later time zone and too tired.) 

The first thing I had noticed was that everyone was first and foremost regretful and apologetic, over "the fact that this conversation has to take place at all." Geez, I don't know... if you really regret the conversation you find yourself in, why not just leave? We probably have to let people "virtue signal empathy" -- but I found it quite overdone. No matter what anyone had to say that could have been interesting or worthwhile, they had to start out with, "I'm so sorry..."

People who have been shot with real bullets would know whether that physical pain is worse than the emotional trauma of hearing about a shooting. I've never been shot, so I don't know. But victimhood is in enormous favor these days, it's almost like everybody wants to brag all the time that they hurt so bad, and I've become really sick of that!

The second characteristic of the dialogue which bored me to death was the clearly universal presumption that any possible solution to school shootings must lie with medicine or some other mechanical science. There was lengthy discussion of how much money security measures like scanners or metal detectors might cost, how expensive it might be to train teachers with firearms and where they would keep their firearms in the classroom, and many details of locked or unlocked doors. 

I didn't hear anyone question one particular statement: "We don't have enough mental health workers!" As if surely, surely a sufficiency of mental health workers would help prevent school shootings. I spend most of my days hanging out with mental health workers. They are almost all dull bureaucrats, and even the best and brightest of them have no idea what distinguishes good mental health from pure, evil insanity in any individual. They all figure it's something with the brain.

Not to mention, the advent of the very term "mental health worker," and the hiring of more and more of them to mostly recommend drugs for kids and push us all into a psychiatric view of ourselves and our world, is eerily coincident with the celebrated increase in school shootings! It's almost like psychiatry causes school shootings.

Anyway, my own disappointment with the part of this interfaith discussion which I heard before it was my bedtime was that there was no mention of any faith, or any religious morality or solution, at all. The Christians were asking in places of the dead after the One who is alive. The Jews never mentioned that the Lord is One. The Hindus seemed quite unconscious of any concept of Karma or spirituality.

There was a cop who made the single encouraging (for me at least) comment: "Personal interaction with the students is the number one priority." What do you know! It might be cops who can save the world.

Dunlap Day

This will be the second "official anti-psychiatry holiday" that I have suggested. (The first one was "Bye-bye Jeffrey Day", February 23). Now "Dunlap Day" will be October 24, as an annual remembrance of Adelle Davis' first LSD trip on that date in 1959. 

The celebrity nutritionist and author of such best-sellers as Let's Get Well (1965), Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954), and Let's Have Healthy Children (1951) became a Hollywood phenomenon. But she wrote one book which most of her fans never knew about. If not for the requirement by her regular publisher that she use a pen name and refrain from any publicity, this little-known book could have been, Let's All Trip on LSD!

The actual title was Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25, and the author (the pseudonym) was "Jane Dunlap." I wrote a history thesis about this at Northwestern University almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, which I later serialized on this blog, albeit a bit awkwardly in 14 parts (e.g., here, here, here, here and here).

I highly(!!) recommend the Dunlap book, if you can get a copy. It is almost shocking to read the justifications, theories, and public relations statements about psychedelic drugs from almost three quarters of a century in the past, and to notice that they are very nearly, sometimes close to word-for-word, the same things that are repeated today by the purveyors of a so-called "psychedelic renaissance."

I became aware of the Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) when I was at the 2019 annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco ("APAAM2019"), and I happened to meet and speak briefly with a woman whose name I didn't get at the time, but who I now suspect was none other than MAPS board member, and more recently a media spokesperson for the organization's vaunted "Psychedelic Science 2023" conference in Denver, Vicky Dulai.

MAPS has funded studies where researchers have been accused of professional misconduct, boundary violations and sexual abuse. The psychedelic renaissance enthusiasts are all worried that people like Vicky Dulai (or for that matter, that old wannabe-hippy Rick Doblin himself) will embarrass the movement and bring Nixonian enforcement tactics down on their heads to take away their beloved acid again, just like Allen Dulles took away Sid Gottlieb's acid in 1953, and like in 1968, when Congress found it to be a "cultural threat" and oh-so-tragically took it away from everybody. 

Some of the freaks think it will be best to defend against this existential threat to a new version of Tim Leary's "internal freedom" by making sure there are lots of MD psychiatrists close at hand wherever and whenever people take psychedelic drugs. But my guess is, it will always devolve into another Supernova festival with terrorists arriving on para-gliders, or another innocent Tate-LaBianca Hollywood home soaked in blood. And just by the way, psychiatrists are about as far removed from the best intentions for "internal freedom" as it is possible to get.

Adelle Davis wrote that, "Many hundreds of people given LSD  have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory." There is a deep, and deeply tragic, irony in her evident favor (assuming the final word in that sentence wasn't just added by a derelict editor) of compulsion. 

Richard Helms thought LSD was "dynamite!" for the fight against godless communism. Cary Grant, Henry Luce, and (probably) Jack Kennedy all believed, this just might be a drug to save the world.

Sorry guys, but we'll have to do the hard, honest work of learning to communicate with each other. That's what Dunlap Day will be about, for somber Yom Kippur-type reflection, balanced against a more celebratory Passover-like tone or freedom feast on Bye-bye Jeffrey Day.

And I should always conclude: Psychiatria delenda est!

Ecstasy and Integration

Psychedelic drugs, and other psychiatric drugs, along with modern psychiatry and psychology themselves, are one single, monstrous creature of World War II and the Holocaust. "Ecstatic integration" is actually a term which might mean solving insanity, criminality and war. 

One need only google "the joy of the knife" and read a bit about Nietzsche's termination of Western philosophy and reason, to know that Jules Evans is spot-on when he writes that joyfully celebrating the rape and murder of innocents is "...another sort of ecstatic experience, perhaps the oldest -- celebrating the bloody humiliation and desecration of your enemy." 

And I recall, even with vestige guilt, the response of my own hero W. T. Sherman, to an aide's question about how it could ever be possible to deal with young Confederate radicals who would never stop fighting: "Kill them. Kill them all."

One also need only read rapturous descriptions of LSD experiences, published as early as 1959-61, to understand that a psychedelic trip can be "ecstatic" either in the sense of union with God, or love of pure cruelty. Ecstasy is extreme emotion which overwhelms a person, whether heavenly or satanic. It is a disconnection ("ex-") from any and all standing or held position ("-stasis") in reason.

Young Israelis high on MDMA and psilocybin at the Supernova music festival in the desert, and Hamas terrorists who slaughtered them to parade mutilated bodies and captives for cheering crowds in Gaza, were comrades on that Saturday: literally brothers and sisters in holy ecstasy!

Integration, whether in psychology or mathematics, means bringing or connecting separate things together, solving them, making them one. 

Any rational aspiration for ecstatic integration must begin with recognition that the set and setting of planet Earth requires constant alertness and constant willingness to resist irresponsible surrender to ecstasy. Whatever wonderful or monstrous experience we have, we must reconnect that, to the shared purposes of every human being in the world. Ecstasy is only acceptable if and when it can be integrated, if and when we can be one. 

I do not believe that Western medicine holds or can produce knowledge which will enable us to solve insanity, criminality and war. That was the delusion which settled over us in 1945; it was our reaction to the black gate and the hot mushroom cloud. It was a continuation, or one more surrender to ecstasy. Biology is a wildly entertaining game, but it will never reduce a living person to a mere brain, or to any particle. 

Ecstatic integration will never be produced in a test tube or seen under a microscope. We must become ethical individual beings who can freely come together and cooperate in creation.

As I am writing this article, I am told that a nephew and his children are finally in the air back to Chicago, from Israel. It was a traumatic several days for them, but they will be home in time for shabbat.

Adonai eloheinu adonai echad.

Remedios Tiu

Nurse Remmy: do you remember April 30, 2023?

It was a Sunday, and you were on an afternoon shift on H Unit. A female UST patient was causing trouble, demanding that she be given the particular PRN meds that she liked. Security had to be called several times, because the patient was not just verbally abusive and hostile, she was spitting on people. Technically, spitting on someone is criminal battery.

But of course, there's little point in charging a mental patient who's already unfit to stand trial on some other charge, with battery. It's also a practical truth that patients don't abuse or neglect staff; so nobody calls OIG to report a patient spitting on staff, right?

OIG reports are a tough subject. Any staff at a facility like EMHC has a very strict duty to call OIG within four hours, if abuse or neglect of a patient is merely suspected. That rule applies even if (perhaps especially if) the vaguest suspicion of abuse/neglect is about a friend and close colleague. It would be much harder, just hypothetically, for you to call OIG with suspicions about Marge Antona, with whom you work pretty closely, than for you to call OIG about some CNA who's not even a union member. Right?

But I don't think you called OIG about any abuse/neglect at all, on April 30. So you must not have suspected any abuse/neglect by anybody on that day. Right?

The thing that seems problematic to me is the fact that a (non-union, African-America) CNA did get charged with felonies in Kane County for an incident on April 30, involving the psychotic UST patient who was spitting on staff all day. How do you think that happened?

It may seem like it's more or less water-over-the-dam now, in the sense that those criminal charges were eventually dropped. But I can't help thinking, it's very interesting that those charges were ever filed. Something about it makes no sense. There are also such crimes as making false reports to the police, conspiracy to obstruct justice... (I need not elaborate). And sometimes people get roped into complicated stuff that shouldn't be considered their fault. 

Anyone can call me if they have any information, excuses, clarifications or comments, etc. The truth might just save a lot of people some expensive trouble, it usually does. And I can be very easy to get along with when I'm being told the truth.

More on Latwon & Gabby; contraband cell phones, administrative transfers

On Sunday, Sep. 24, 2023, Latwon had Gabby's cell phone in his room for a while. He was observed exiting his room (2nd room on the left, if you're walking from the day room on K Unit) with the cell phone, which he had put in the pocket of his shorts. He was looking around for Gabby, apparently thinking he should return the phone to her without being observed. Gabby was busy, so Latwon furtively slid the phone onto the counter via the nurses' station window on the west side of the day room. Anybody noticing it could have thought, well, Gabby or whoever the phone belonged to probably just left it there.

Gabby has some reason of her own for so favoring Latwon (and maybe one or two other patients), by allowing him to have contraband access to her cell phone despite the obvious risk of her job. Maybe she's just totally unaware of rules which say she shouldn't even have her phone on the unit, let alone give it to a patient, let alone let a patient have it and (presumably) use it unobserved, long enough to take it to his room and secretly return it to her later.

Or alternatively, maybe she has some financial arrangement with Latwon; maybe he pays her to use her cell phone. Or maybe she's in love with Latwon. It's not like such corrupt things never happen at EMHC (especially on Faiza Kareemi's K Unit -- long known as the "love unit"). 

In fact, Illinois' psychiatric slave plantations are so rife with this kind of corruption that a federal judge could suggest (in a written opinion!), the distinct possibility that sexual abuse of a patient by staff might continue for years with no one ever intervening to stop it, everyone choosing instead to bury their heads in the sand and cover it up.

What kind of a maleficent institution is this? Why do we pay taxes to support it? Why would any medical professional ever degrade him/her self so horribly by working for it, under an obscene pretense of "help?" What damage does this cause, by creating cynical victims who will hate the system forever and refuse to participate in a society that is so oblivious and so stupid as to invent the system, and tolerate it?

Meanwhile, the petty soap opera continues at EMHC, recently over contraband cellphones hidden in bathrooms which can't even be connected to a particular patient, so nobody even knows whom to punish. With no proof against a particular miscreant, the solution becomes just punish everybody. Make them all go to the gym for a mass security search while their rooms get turned and lots of their property gets confiscated, even though most of it is not contraband at all.

And of course, transfer patients around between units, don't ever let them have a stable location or any stable relationships or therapeutic community! Make them move constantly to demonstrate the administration's total control. Never mind actual written policy about transfers, just call it an "administrative decision," never countenance questions or attempt clinical rationale.

More and more, EMHC "patients" (actually slaves) will hate you people. There will be more and more non-compliance, more and more complaints, lawsuits, hostile media, calls to the Law Offices of Kretchmar & Cecala. More and more so-called "mental health professionals" (plantation overseers) will be personally targeted and choose to leave.

This is your future, guys. "Life sucks and then you die." Sherman is coming and he will burn your city. Sleep well!

Sharper

Bobby "Boris Johnson" Sharpe still hasn't gotten a haircut, he's still sporting that blonde, unruly thatch. I was tempted to tell him just before a staffing today, that I am overdue for a grooming myself, and I need to make an appointment. It's something we have in common. But I don't think he would have appreciated it.

Bobby answered a question from James Corcoran today, "Who is the doctor on this case?" with a pathetic protest, "Hey, I'm only here two days a week...." This confirmed my earlier information that he's non-union, outside-contracted staff. Most regular nuthouse employees don't appreciate the non-union usurpers of valuable overseer jobs. I may have imagined it, but I think I detected some disrespect for Bobby from Dr. Corcoran, too. It's possible that the two of them just never met before.

The fact that the plantations have to hire non-union guys is very encouraging. I was delighted by a post on my Twitter ("X") feed yesterday, by someone named Hamilton Kennedy (@hmltnknndy): "Psychiatrist alleges that 'the consumer movement' is leading to psychiatrists and other clinical staff leaving the workforce in droves because of being personally targeted and attacked. Says no one wants to work in mental health anymore because of consumer movement."

I don't know about some whole "consumer movement," but I try hard myself and I tell the people I advocate for, to always name individuals. Indeed, as I have said before, when I put a name in a headline, my articles get more readers. I'd sure like to think I have occasionally influenced an overseer to leave Illinois' psychiatric plantation system and find honest work.

Living individuals are responsible and cause things to happen, bad or good. Sometimes a group can be alive enough to make a change or a specific effect, but a capable group always has a name, and it always has individuals with names as members and leaders. No generality, or circumstance, or condition, or rumored or fabled movement, ever does anything. Whenever anyone says "they," always ask "who?" Shit doesn't just happen, it comes out of somebody's butt, and that somebody has a name and a face, and an address and a phone number, and connections to other somebodies.

So why is Bobby Sharpe willing to work on the slave plantation? Maybe he's a failure in his private practice, which I believe is located at 2160 South First Avenue, 101-1740 Loyola Medical Center, Maywood, IL 60153..? If anyone wants to refer new patients to him to help him be more successful, the number is 708-216-9000. But beware, Bobby's only given two stars out of five, on FindaTopDoc.com. (I don't know why, maybe it's his hair.)

It's no long stretch to think guys like this get scapegoated in a place like EMHC. I know a CNA who recently found herself inexplicably charged with crimes, not to mention pilloried in the media. This might have just been an opportunistic misdirection by somebody who was afraid they would be blamed for some corrupt event or activity, of which there are constant, almost unlimited examples. The whole culture of medicalized "mental health" is a veritable cesspool of abuse and neglect. People don't even realize they are being malicious. It's all just evil and mean.

My advice to this Bobby Sharpe guy would be short and sweet: Get a haircut and an honest job!

Does Malis-with-malice torture people?

State psychiatrists like Malis-with-malice usually don't administer forced drugs themselves, and when they petition a court for an order for forced drugging, they often don't even know who will actually do it to the patient. (I'm quite certain this is contrary to the intent of the law, by the way.)

But the MD psychiatrist on a clinical unit has so much important paperwork to fill out and other bureaucratic nonsense to pursue, that he rarely has time for an actual, live patient. 

Alternatively, guys like Malis-with-malice might not want to see forced druggings, because they are occasionally ugly, like torture, totally contrary to the whole idea of medical help.

The model of beneficent "treatment" which predictably helps people to recover from mental illnesses sure doesn't seem to apply when a "patient" violently resists drugging and must be subdued by force. I don't know how many patients do violently resist, but I might admire those who do, and I'd like to think I would fight to the death myself.

Certainly, if we find ourselves physically ganging up on someone we are supposed to help, holding them down so a needle can be forced into their body by some goon (not the "doctor") against their screaming protest, it is darkly laughable to to count that as a victory for modern medicine or the rule of rational law! 

Forced drugging reveals abject failure, and its victims don't come back to thank us for merciful cures. Rather, they protest, and sue, and die.

Malis-with-malice does not act like any scientist or any doctor, when he orders someone else to brutalize his patient, and then doesn't even stick around to watch. At best, he shows himself as a pathetic bureaucrat in a corrupt, incompetent, byzantine state system; a cog in the wheels of a cruel leviathan. The complexity of so-called "diagnosis" and "treatment" of mental disorders is fully legendary in our culture these days. No one who actually looks at it imagines it to be a good, just, or brilliant thing. None of us can be proud to pay our taxes for Elgin Mental Health Center.

Unfortunately, pointing to obvious faults in the system doesn't tell us what to do about people who insist upon pissing off the neighbors. If there's a person we don't like, can't understand, don't know what to do about... well, we should at least be honest. We shouldn't indulge in the pretense that Malis-with-malice knows what he's doing and only means to provide the best care he can for his poor, crazy patient. 

Malis-with-malice can do nothing but parrot pages of drug information and nuthouse "policies" which he chooses, or invents, for some opportunistic excuse. Malis-with-malice is not capable of helping another human being!

When a court chooses to ignore the reality of psychiatry's coercion and abject failure, it should at least require that any "doctor" who asks for an involuntary medication order must be present to see what happens when the order is carried out. If there is ugliness and violence, that must be confronted as an inherent part of the risk/benefit equation. 

Nobody should be allowed to sit behind a desk down the hall or down the street and pretend they don't know. It's like the death penalty: maybe we'll be willing to kill a person who has been evil enough, but we only have that natural right if we can kill them ourselves, even with our own hands.

It's funny how students of nursing or law are happy to sit in on court hearings for involuntary medication petitions, and judges and nuthouse administrators are happy to let them do so.

Nobody ever watches what happens later. That's not allowed. but It should be required.