Baker and Malis-with-malice

Dr. Richard Malis has a patient who has violently attacked other patients at least half a dozen times lately. In theory, one primary purpose of mental health treatment in an institution like EMHC is to keep crazy people from hurting themselves or others. But this patient of Malis-with-malice keeps on hurting others, and nobody does anything about it.

Today I found out that the latest casualty is my friend James Baker. James is an elderly African-American man who has been at EMHC for several dozen years (most of his life). Malis' dangerous, uncontrolled patient just walked up and cold-cocked him this weekend, sending him to the hospital! James only has one good eye, and the vicious, totally unprovoked blow to his head caused bleeding in that good eye. More medical evaluation will be necessary, as well as a very thorough investigation into why this patient of Malis-with-malice is allowed to wonder around the clinical unit freely to attack others at will.

Malis-with-malice tried to keep James Baker in chains for a long time, making it very difficult for him to get regular ophthalmology care for his glaucoma, until a Cook County Circuit Court judge finally put a stop to that. Now this violent patient, whom Malis just glibly allows to assault and batter people may have damaged Baker's one good eye. A casual observer might be forgiven for suspecting that this is on purpose.

Long ago, Rodney Yoder told me that psychiatric plantation overseers "dog fight" patients just for fun, and as a tactic of control. More recently, Barry Smoot has explained this as the characteristic "failure to protect," as reflected in the title to his book.

Anyone injured by Dr. Richard Malis-with-malice's violent patient should call me. You may have a civil claim.

Turley and the Yale Psychiatrist

I frequently read Jonathon Turley's columns because I agree with him about the indispensability of the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. Today, Turley takes Yale psychiatrist Amanda Calhoun to task for telling the public that it'll be just fine over the holidays, to cut off communication with your family members who voted for the wrong presidential candidate so you won't be "triggered" by hearing political views contrary to your own.

For Turley, this is a freedom of speech issue. He thinks we need more speech, more communication, more discussion, rather than speech controls and disconnection from family. He also thinks this is especially important in the context of elite universities like Yale. I certainly don't disagree with him.

However, I think the fact that Amanda Calhoun is Yale faculty is much less significant than the fact that she's a psychiatrist. She's encouraging family estrangement in the name of "mental health." I sure hope she gets sued for alienation of affection. (In fact, if anyone who reads this is negatively impacted by Amanda Calhoun's horrible advice for the holidays, or by similar advice of any other psychiatrist, call me, maybe I'll take your case on a contingency fee basis!)

It's not uncommon for psychiatrists to believe that their "expertise" is far more valuable than such a pedestrian thing as family. If only everyone were a good enough "patient" to take the drugs and electric shocks that psychiatrists prescribe, and to totally buy into the "diagnoses" of (fake) brain diseases, we wouldn't even need families, right? If only the psychiatric religion reigned supreme in the USA, we wouldn't need elections either.

Turley thinks Calhoun's view is political. It's not, it's psychiatric. The thing is, psychiatrists like Calhoun actually believe the only rational politics is to put them totally in charge.

They're wrong: that's prescribed harm, prescribed slavery.

More on "up for grabs"

My guy Gus has gone without any treatment plan review (TPR, or "staffing") in two of the last six months. This is a significant departure from established IDHS policy and practice, if not a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code.

In April 2024, Gus had no TPR because his assigned social worker, Xiaomara Ramirez, just refused to work with him after he suggested she was papering over the window of her office door so nobody would see what she was doing in there. (Actually, I was the one who suggested that, and I hearkened back to the social worker sex-with-patients flap circa 2017, which seemed darkly instructive.)

Then this month, October 2024, Gus' new replacement social worker, Joseph Basso, just didn't have time to arrange any staffing. After all, Joseph doesn't even work on the same clinical unit where Gus is housed, so the lines of communication are very slow or administratively awkward and responsibility is cloudy. Joseph probably doesn't want the thankless job anyway, and people higher up the food chain like Michelle Evans, or James Corcoran, have had to lie so much, every day for so long, that they no longer have the capacity to care.

Obviously there isn't much of a mental health treatment team for Gus at EMHC. In fact, it's becoming more obvious every week that there's very little legitimate mental health "treatment" for anyone at EMHC. 

There certainly is no recognizable teamwork toward the noble purpose promoted on that bronze plaque in the Forensic Program Building lobby: RELIEF AND RESTORATION, A PLACE OF HOPE FOR THE HEALING OF MIND, BODY AND SPIRIT. I don't recall seeing staff laugh out loud when they walk past that plaque on their way to their offices, but it seems like they must laugh to themselves.

For three days in a row last week, EMHC was reported to be short some number of critical clinical staff: seven staff down on Friday; five down on Saturday, four down on Sunday, just on one unit! Morale is down the tubes even more than normal. People just aren't showing up, and sooner or later that will mean more than skipped monthly staffings. It will result in security failures and tortious malpractice. Patients and staff will be seriously hurt, and if somebody dies the media may notice!

The plantations in southern Illinois are even worse than EMHC. I just spent a day at Choate. Seasoned public servants there are throwing up their hands and even joining me to just poke sticks at the mad dogs who run the system. There's no hope for rational improvement, the only course left and the only real entertainment is to sit back and watch it all burn down. 

Writing this on Election Day, I can't help comparing the situation at EMHC to the scene in the United States. The microcosm and the macrocosm are alike horrible. In fact, the idea that all human problems of thinking, emotion, and behavior are malfunctions in the brain which medical doctors know how to fix with drugs or other brute force, is key to understanding both disasters. 

Psychiatry is a false and suppressive concept that has infected our whole culture. It's hardly surprising that nobody wants to hold a monthly staffing for Gus.

Who reads this blog?

I occasionally review the statistics of page views for this blog, which can be fascinating data. Just for example:

• The single article which has gotten more views than any other, out of 433 or so, is from October 8, 2010, entitled "DSM 5 Proposal". It has gotten 5,250 views, about 2000 more than the closest runner-up. One obvious reason is that it's been published for a long time; another reason is that I have repeatedly promoted this one on social media. I'd like to think people also find it thought-provoking. It speaks to the first of two very simple points I harp on about psychiatry: "Diagnosis" is bullshit; and "treatment" sucks.

• Every now and then I notice patterns in the views. They can be telltale, because the universe of my readers is pretty well limited to mental health professionals who work in the Illinois plantation system as overseers of psychiatric slaves. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in attention to an apparently random assortment of old articles that have not been viewed for many years. One such, just this week, is from April 4, 2016, entitled "Chart Note Rebuttal." In 8-1/2 years this particular piece of writing got a grand total of about 1,400 views, but almost 1000 of those were prior to 2018. The article popped up this week though, suddenly getting seven new views.

RefusingPsychiartry has been a subject of regulatory investigation recently, after allegations were made (primarily or exclusively by Robert Sharpe, M.D., a particularly vicious overseer at Elgin MHC) that it sometimes reveals private information of my clients, thus violating my duty of confidentiality as an attorney. To the best of my knowledge, none of my clients have ever complained of anything I ever wrote about them. Bobby Sharpe would of course say they're all mentally ill after all, so as a psychiatrist he knows better than they do what's good for them. He probably believes he should even advise them or decide for them who their lawyer should be, and he probably also believes there's no need for any mental health law after all, as long as an M.D. psychiatrist is available to take charge. Tragically, many judges and attorneys often act as though they agree,

There may be an organized effort to censor me, which I should take as a high compliment but for the nuisance. With some degree of paranoia, I now tend to review the blog statistics with thoughts about who at ARDC is reading which articles. The one attorney who has admitted to running an investigation into Bobby Sharpe's allegations against me certainly is reading it and I welcome that, although I haven't heard from that attorney in quite a while, and I rather expected more "meet and confer" after I promised to cooperate fully. 

In any event, I have always invited criticism and protest from anyone whom I criticize on RefusingPsychiatry. I have publicly corrected or removed articles which I came to believe, after they were published, were unfair or untrue. But the story I have always told, and will always continue to tell, remains that the Illinois forensic mental health system is hopelessly corrupt to a point that it causes far more harm than good. The plantations must be closed down, and the masters and overseers must be prosecuted or removed from all positions of power to control people under a false guise of "medical help."

When I call people "masters and overseers," I am only pointing at a few of the guys I know at EMHC or in IDHS. Most of those I've met in 22 years of work are good public servants who got into the "mental health" profession because they wanted to help. Vik Gill is a decent doctor; Vicky Ingram is a very well-intentioned administrator. Many others, even some I have sued, are basically good people. The problem is, they discovered after taking their particular jobs that it's not possible to help the way they had hoped to, from inside this corrupt system. Then they started justifying and equivocating and fibbing and hiding. Now they find themselves demoralized or confused, and others find them stupid.

Ninety-five-plus percent of the people at EMHC are good guys. It's only a small handful that I call "masters and overseers." Consciously and publicly comparing that small handful to the earlier bad guys from the beginning of the Ruffin-Tibbets Century is not mere rhetorical flourish: it is practical, because it generally enables prediction. Slavery based in bio-material delusions propagated as "science" will repeat certain social patterns, over and over again through history.

However I must admit, I didn't really see the regulatory action against me coming out of Bobby Sharpe's hostility. I didn't mean to corner him so badly, and I didn't predict that he would have to turn quite so rabid.

Surprises are the spice of life.

Is IDHS just up for grabs or what?

Here's a wild hypothetical. What if they were to move 24 of the "worst of the worst" from the Chester plantation to the Choate plantation in only a few days? Chester is where they put the multiple ax-murderers, and Choate is supposedly just for innocent, developmentally disabled consumers, not forensics.

I think the guys from Chester's Baker Unit will eat the brains of the over-stressed Choate staff, and party at will with the vulnerable patients there. Without Chester's max-secure restraints, they might even go AWOL and cruise the beautiful Anna community for some entertainment.

Who would think this plan will be anything but a disaster? An idiot or a desperate madman? I think a lot of people are on their way out, in good ways or bad.

Good Yuntif, Gmar Tov

I remember a sermon from 45 or 50 years ago, which has stuck with me ever since. Rabbi Harold Stern of Congregation B'nai Emunah in Skokie noted that since Yom Kippur fell on Shabbat that year, we would not blow the shofar. He was initially apologetic, because he knew the children loved the dramatic sound of the ram's horn, and perhaps the thrill of that ancient clarion call was the biggest compensation they received for sitting obediently in temple all day, in dress-up clothes, through the mostly Hebrew service.

B'nai Emunah was a Conservative Congregation, not Reformed, but it had a large number of "three-day-a-year Jews." Most people fasted on Yom Kippur, or at least pretended to. The kids got out of school for the High Holy Days. Many of their mothers kept kosher homes, but they went out to restaurants for dinner and didn't always mind cheeseburgers. The men were of the "greatest generation" who fought through France or drove Higgins boats to Pacific beaches and then, having survived, returned home to obediently make money and babies for America. Some of them worked on Saturday.

Harold Stern was a very capable religious scholar, but he was an absolutely brilliant politician. His congregation was wealthy and large, and he was paid very well for many years, despite growing cultural cynicism and the youth rebellion that was in full flower by the time my wife and I were in high school. Stern later convinced the mother of a close friend not to attend her daughter's wedding because it wasn't Jewish; and in 1975 he told my wife and me that if I didn't go through elaborate rituals and grueling study to properly convert to Judaism (which he made a point of saying he wouldn't recommend anyway), then he would never officiate at our wedding. He was sort of a Jewish version of Richard J. ("shoot to maim") Daley or George Wallace to us. It seemed incomprehensible that he could get away with being so arrogant and mean, and yet be so respected for so long by our parents.    

The ultimate crowning-blow offense was when Rabbi Stern was appointed to officiate at my wife's grandmother's funeral. He refused to even consider any statements or recollections by family members as part of the memorial. These were people who had loved the deceased Bubbie all their lives, but Stern insisted that he knew what to say and he didn't need or want any advice or suggestions from anybody.

In retrospect, Harold Stern ruled his flock of almost 1000 families with guilt. They knew they were not Jewish enough and their children would be even less Jewish. Their parents and grandparents were frowning on them from their graves. They had somehow left it to the Orthodox to replace the Six Million. B'nai Emunah's people would remain negligent in many duties, despite their rabbi's best efforts. They were ignobly assimilated, and the congregation finally merged with another shortly after the end of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps ironically, its architecturally beautiful building was sold to an Assyrian foundation, and it now hosts classes teaching an ancient Middle Eastern language that is not Hebrew.

Nevertheless, that one sermon about why we don't blow the shofar when Yom Kippur comes on Shabbat established Rabbi Stern as an important religious figure for me. Blowing the ram's horn is itself work; but what of carrying it  to and from the synagogue? We are commanded to "Do no work!" on the sabbath; and we are also told to blow the shofar at the conclusion of the Day of Atonement. How do we choose which is the more important duty?

In God's eyes, the heroic, dramatic actions performed rarely or just once a year are not as holy as the routine weekly disipline. It's the ordinary, not the extraordinary stuff that counts most. We can dream all we want to about winning the lottery or an epic battle. But in the final analysis our happiness comes from mundane production of value added each week in life. If we can create our world in six days, then on the seventh we should rest: create time, plan for that weekly sabbath, not Christmas and New Years.

The current thrall of psychedelic drugs, and psychiatry's broader apotheosis of the brain, show our continuing human demand for a short-cut or a catalyst to give us mental health and spiritual salvation without a necessity for religious work and study, and tedious planning and collaboration. This is precisely the wrong instinct. 

The "miracle of modern medicine" is a graven image. Psychiatry is the golden calf most offensive to God.

Have an easy fast and keep the sabbath holy.

The Ruffin-Tibbets Century

I'm not sure how to relate this idea to mental health or Elgin Mental Health Center or Gus, but if you can bear with me, I'll try.

On April 12, 1861 at Charleston Harbor, Edmund Ruffin, having paid good money for the privilege, fired the first cannon shot against Fort Sumter, thereby opening the American Civil War. Ruffin was a wealthy planter who served in the Virginia State Senate, and a fanatically ideological proponent of African slavery, who truly believed (along with perhaps half the population of the United States at the time) that the Antebellum South's "peculiar institution" was ordained by God. 

In only a few years, Ruffin's view had been decisively proven wrong, and Abraham Lincoln expressed a different version of God's will: that every drop of blood ever drawn by slavery's lash should be repaid with another drawn by the sword. At Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, Antietam, the Wilderness, and on so many other bloody fields, Lincoln's version of God's will was grotesquely done. The United States was not the same country after that inferno.

A bit more than four score and four years after Ruffin's demonstration of his faith at Charleston, on August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets flew an American B-29 bomber named after his mother to Japan and killed more than 150,000 people with a single bomb. Tibbets never regretted doing this duty and later wrote, "Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don't care whether you are dropping atom bombs, 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it."

Only a few days after Tibbets had facilitated the final end of World War II, the United States effectively ruled the world. American ideals and political philosophy had only a single competitor, which American leaders quickly understood as a new existential threat they called "Godless Communism." But the planet was not the same, and morality was a very different subject, after humanity had arrived at a godlike ability to destroy everything and literally end the history of our species.

This century (84 years), bracketed by Ruffin's and Tibbets' separate dramas, was a pivotal moment in the far longer saga of Abrahamic faith irregularly collaborating with scientific reason. Humanity always wanted an Authority higher, or a necessary factual frame more real, than ourselves. We no longer have that. Our story, from the binding of Isaac to the Manhattan Project, is over. (Now we have such a weird thing as so-called "artificial intelligence," and we somehow convince ourselves to be terrified of our own created machines.)

The whole world is new, and it's a frickin' mess. This startles us and dismays us. It reduces our ability to live, partly because we do not recognize what has occurred. The old story is over. The Christian "golden rule" and mathematics alike have become almost irrelevant. We must create new things from scratch.

The way this probably applies to EMHC is, you guys can forget about anyone (and I must say, especially Gus!) believing you're even trying to help. They have learned that "help" means control and betrayal as much as anything else. You can also forget about anyone thinking your professional skills and your education give you any knowledge that they should be interested in. It's just too obvious to all these days, that "you don't know shit" and neither does anyone else. I don't suggest people are right in those attitudes, only that those are their attitudes.

What's necessary is a thing called two-way communication. In his book, Dianetics 1955, L. Ron Hubbard explained it as a very specific formula, a technical action that can be learned and drilled: "cause, distance, effect, with intention and attention, and duplication at effect of what emanates from cause," going first in one direction and then reversing to go in the opposite direction, between two people.

The easiest thing a person does is change his/her mind. In the interests of a better game, any of us will change our mind at the drop of a hat, and we can just as easily change it back if the new offered game doesn't turn out to be as good as we had hoped. Every problem, every conflict or unpleasantness, is dependent upon an absence or failure of two-way communication; when that absence or failure is remedied things get better, life gets better in any circumstance.

The current political culture of intolerant rage has everyone on a hair trigger to dismiss, fight and hate another person the moment they are revealed to be, e.g., a Democrat or an antipsychiatrist, at which time all communication must be refused. It's a hopeless, losing strategy.

The successful influencer does not promote their own opinion with magical power: they understand and suitably acknowledge the opinions they encounter in the world, and they create from those viewpoints of other people, at least until those other people know they are understood, until they become less anxious about changing their own minds and therefore more willing to turn the communication around.

Here's the real connection to mental health. Force is the ultimate losing strategy. The Ruffin-Tibbets Century finally taught humanity that exact lesson. Manipulating brains with drugs or electricity is force and it makes things worse. Only two-way communication by individuals unafraid of force changes minds and improves conditions.

You guys have law and guns, but if you can't change minds by communication alone, you will certainly lose.

And that's the lesson of history!