Xiamara QUIT Gus' team!

Xiamara Ramirez left Gus' staffing in a hurry last week. She pretty well raced down the hall ahead of me toward the Administrative offices. I don't know for sure, but at the time the thought I had was, "Oh, of course! She's going to complain about Gus and me." We had just made the point that there was no way she could be Gus' social worker. For some reason beyond rational imagination, she had just been appointed to that job after Joe Basso had been transferred elsewhere.

Gus was distraught, because he had been led along the garden path for most of a year with assertions that the "hospital" wanted to conditionally release him, and that his treatment team was working hard to find him community placement, which was the only task left before a petition could be brought to the court. It turned out to be all lies. Xiamara's appointment to the same position she had ostentatiously resigned back in the summer of 2024 (as Gus' caseworker) was the final blow which revealed the lying and once again, perhaps finally, ended this patient's willingness to consider that anyone at EMHC ever intends to help him.

There was more proof of the complete corruption Gus had long seen. Soon after the staffing and Xiamara's dash to Administration offices, Gus started hearing that he would shortly be transferred to White Cottage. There's not that much wrong with White Cottage itself. It's just that a transfer will mean no conditional release for him any time soon. That's a huge departure from what all these guys had been saying for months. It's a dramatic betrayal, which I unfortunately may have aided and abetted, by encouraging Gus to be cool and to believe that Dr. Gill and the rest of the treatment team and the administration were honestly trying to get him released. Gus' mom died last year. His father is not doing well. His sisters want him to be able to help, and he loves his family.

One interesting bit is that the facility can't actually transfer Gus right now because he had a positive COVID test (he was in fact very sick), and he has to test negative before they can move him around. He recently went to a local hospital for another medical procedure in a van while the security guard, Paul Bennett (Badge No. 45), was coughing and sneezing all along the way. Badge 45 was even told by the hospital receptionist that he had to put on a mask (but he never did). I told Gus to get better, but don't test negative for COVID! Are they going to force him to take a COVID test the same way they brutally force people to take unwanted psychiatric drugs, just hoping the test will be negative so they can transfer him to White Cottage even if he'll make other people sick? That would be interesting, right? EMHC is a "hospital" (it's totally laughable).

Whoever is pushing this transfer is cynically harming Gus' whole family for no reason but retribution (or possibly for the convenience of the institution, or possibly to further some cover-up of why Xiamara was papering over the window in her office door contrary to regulations). They need to make an example that tells all the other slaves at EMHC and the other plantations, "Don't ever complain, don't ever snitch, we will get you for that!"

As Xiamara ran past me down the hall, I could almost hear her thinking exactly those words.

Xiamara really is back, OMG!

Social worker Xiamara Ramirez has her old office back, on low-functioning N Unit again. (I haven't heard whether she's papering over the window so nobody can see what she's doing in there.) Amazingly, she was recently re-assigned as Gus' social worker (!!) when Joe "dumb-as-basalt-rock" Basso was moved to another unit for reasons unknown.

Joe was unable to accomplish even the most mundane tasks for his "patient" and apparently chose instead to just flat-out lie about having contacted community facilities which might accept Gus into residential treatment programs when he may be conditionally released from EMHC. Joe claimed he had been talking to people about whether they might accept Gus at the following facilities: Lydic Healthcare Center, HSI, Ecker Center, Thresholds, and HRDI (possibly among others).

The reason Gus is willing to accuse Joe of just flat-out lying about doing his job... is that Gus got the list of facilities Joe claimed he had called, and then checked by calling each of them himself and being told they never heard of Gus, or Joe, or Elgin Mental Health Center. 

In a recent monthly staffing, I also accused Dr. Vikramjit Gill of just flat-out lying, because he said he didn't recall anything about Xiamara Ramirez having previously been unwilling to be Gus' social worker. Dr. Gill was the one who recruited Joe "dumb-as-basalt-rock" Basso to become Gus' social worker when Xiamara unceremoniously stopped talking to Gus and refused to have anything further to do with him, actually quitting her position on Gus' treatment team possibly because she blamed him for my having insulted her on this blog. I even put her name in headlines, back in 2025 and 2024. (See, here, here, here, here, and here, maybe among other mentions in other articles).

In one other article from July, 2024, which has been very popular because of its racy headline, I made the point that sexual abuse of mental patients is absolutely endemic in IDHS psychiatric institutions, because those facilities are not really hospitals, they are slave plantations. The staff act as though they believe that the patients are their property, to be used for whatever benefits might be available. To me, it even harkens back to Sally Hemmings having Thomas Jefferson's babies. I mentioned Xiamara Ramirez in the context of accusing the whole system of such slavery. Maybe I shouldn't have, because I never believed Xiamara's door window was papered over so she could sexually abuse her patients. But it's the kind of thing people think of when they can't explain why she breaks the rules. It's such a corrupt environment that all manner of perverse  corruption almost has to be suspected any time anything looks odd.

Dr. Gill remembers that time, and the problems of Gus and Xiamara in 2024. In the recent monthly staffing, he specifically queried my mention of psychiatric slavery as "an over-exaggeration," maybe for Xiamara's benefit as she continued to sit in the room even after Gus had asked her to leave and made a very direct point that she cannot be his social worker. So I was disappointed that Vik would flat-out lie and pretend he recalled nothing about the whole brouhaha. But he's often between a rock and a hard place. He doesn't like many things about the institution, or at least he pretends he doesn't to me, and he keeps saying he's about to retire, but he never does. Who knows, maybe Xiamara has some kind of effective pull with the administration at EMHC. Maybe she's an agent of James Patrick "The-Almighty-Statewide-Forensic-Medical-Director" Corcoran, and she ran straight to him for air cover,with a new complaint about Gus and me, as soon as that staffing was over! (But this is speculative to a point of absurdity, of course!)

One fact remains. Gus has been told that his treatment team was working on a conditional release packet for the better part of the last year. But nobody has actually done anything. Either Joe was just too dumb-as-basalt-rock to try to find a placement, and lied when he told Gus he was working on it in order to cover his own incompetent rear-end, or there's a whole program from somebody else that is actually intended to mislead Gus and me.

Just incidentally, I noticed that a white KIA Seltos with Illinois plates had taken Corcoran's sacred parking place at EMHC the other day. Somebody is playing with fire!

Weird, weird thing, I sure can't figure it out! Someday it'll all be part of a book.

The following article was written partially before, and then finished shortly after, the December 4, 2025 conference of Inner Compass Initiative in West Hartford, CT. It intentionally recalls and emulates Tom Hayden's Port Huron Statement, written in June, 1962, for the Students for a Democratic Society. 

This is not published as a statement by or for any person or group, it's just my own personal thought. People who may choose to agree or adopt it pay me a high compliment, but I should not even claim credit or authority as the only author. Many phrases are taken or adapted from actual comments at the conference, by many very smart and inspiring people.

We may be at a historical inflection point. Fundamental change is in the air, and it makes me happy.

______________________________________

West Hartford Statement

We are people of several generations, nationalities and traditions, raised in a common cultural context of increasing deference and respect or obeisance toward human reason, lately confined in a strict, oppressive structure of "healthcare" under arbitrary authorities of Western medicine.

Across planet Earth, we grew up in confident expectation of increasing freedom and dignity for individuals. The Twentieth Century's scourge of total war had hopefully been stymied, if not eliminated after the darkest lessons of 1945, by new institutions of international law and justice, and scientific progress. Science was our friend if not our religion. But unfortunately, we have studied science only well enough to be consumers of its heavily marketed machinery, and not well enough to understand its purposes and philosophy in relation to human health.

As our leaders and our elders declared wonderful victories over infectious disease and discovered many fundamental keys to the structures and functions of biological bodies, we came to question whether our own basic nature was indistinguishable from that of other animals, or even cells. The importance of divinity was increasingly difficult to discern. We studied chemistry and engineering instead of arts and humanities. Communication became a science, and ironically, research into it was thereafter financed by the military. The golden age of advertising was as much a creation of the national security establishment occupying 5th Avenue, New York, as were the psychedelic 1960s in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. The ostentatious moral conformity of Ozzie and Harriet covered up secret agendas and nightmares. The Cold War ended but history was not finished after all, and we never figured out why. Now we find ourselves hopelessly caught in the quicksand of the most confusing, bitter and intractable divisions since 1968, perhaps since 1860 or 1789. The issues surprised us, or at least we pretend not to have seen them coming. But we have no time or inclination now to sit quietly and think, while even close friends and family threaten to hate us for our opinions. Everyone is out at ideological barricades or economic extremity.

As we contemplate whether to accept a vaccine, whether to allow our children to be screened for mental illness in school, whether we can safely and intelligently use artificial intelligence (whatever that is) without breaking some rule or law which we didn't even know existed, or whether our possessions and our very lives can ever be safe and secure, we hunger desperately for stable guideposts against which to evaluate our own thinking, emotions and behavior, and the thinking, emotions and behavior of our fellows. But such guideposts, if they ever did exist, are certainly missing now.

Many of us have witnessed heartbreaking, massive harm to people we love and to ourselves, from attempts to treat all human problems in thinking, feeling, and behaving medically. The rolling disaster of SSRI "anti-depressant" drugs has chemically excised sexuality from the bodies and lives of young people, and saddled millions of previously normal men and women with neurological injuries that cripple them into middle age and beyond. We were not told of the potential harms by those who knew they existed, so we could not give informed consent to be treated with these drugs. Rather, we were assured for decades that SSRIs "rebalanced" the chemicals in our brains. It was a lie. Now it seems credible that SSRIs caused suicidal ideation and behavior, not to mention random, unexplainable violence like school shootings, to increase. The drugs we were told could protect our children instead may have put them in terrible danger for over thirty years!

Some cannot help but wonder why the brutal torture of electroshock ("ECT") continues to be allowed in civilized societies under such a cynical guise as "a last resort treatment for severe depression." Literally cooking a person's brain by repeatedly forcing high electrical voltages through his/her skull is so obviously harmful that the public finds it difficult to believe this practice has continued. In response to the instant startled question, "But they don't really still do that, do they?" the liars typically reassure us, "Oh no, it's not the same, it's a completely different procedure." Then we discover to our horror that modern ECT is worse than what was depicted in old movies like Cuckoo's Nest. The muscle relaxants and anesthesia make it look less barbaric for the benefit of participating clinicians and observers, but the brain damage is more severe, because higher voltage is required to induce a grand mal seizure in a drugged patient.

Now at last, somewhere deep in a pharma research lab, men in white coats are working hard to make a saleable mental health "nuclear option" of psychedelic drugs including LSD, psilocybin, Ketamine,  ecstasy and many others. Psychiatry has frequently replaced one class of harmful drugs with another, claiming each innovation was a "breakthrough" that would finally show mental disorders to be curable "illness-like-any-other" and usher in a new age of truly scientific treatment. The Inquisition's auto da fé was a highly technical 15th Century improvement on the earlier Roman crucifixion, as a cure for the insanity of witchcraft or heresy. By the 19th Century people began to prefer the magic of science over Christian miracles, and modern medicine was the new salvation. Opium, alcohol and quinine were in use alongside prayer during the American Civil War. Penicillin and sulfa became the new "miracle antibiotics" in the 1920s. By the 1950s the Salk vaccine worked against the polio epidemic, and Thorazine was the first of many great hopes against schizophrenia (which itself remained a sacred artifact of psychiatry, never any discovered brain disease). Finally the APA's DSM replaced the venerable Malleus Malificarum. But all this so-called "progress" in psychiatry never improved results for humanity. We spend more and more millions or billions researching drugs to heal our souls and find only drugs that fail to heal the damage from earlier drugs, plus ça change.

Psychedelics are explicitly soul drugs. They are well known to completely scramble the point of view that an individual has managed to assemble through his/her years of living, working with, fighting and loving others, and relating to the world. They remove a person's mind, in the extravagant hope that a better mind can be covertly patched in by "experts" who arrogantly claim to know best what is good and true. The experts attempt to implant their version of goodness and truth into humans they fear and despise as naive, bestial and prone (in their vast majority), to taking over whatever control of the world had previously been successfully hoarded by the experts. Alternatively a new mind might be patched in by random environmental forces impinging through pure happenstance. The person "treated" with psychedelics might become a holy superman, or Charles Manson: it's Russian roulette, maybe a final "breakthrough" in mental health by one shot that kills the field forever. Even the APA has nightmares now, despite their own raw will to power.

Some might argue that the political realm is the only important reality. They say we must each choose to stand either on the left with Comrade Lenin or on the right with Charlie Kirk, since middle-ground liberalism and practical conservatism alike have disappeared into nostalgic irrelevance. The latest claim is that mental illness is all a reaction to a bad society, so we must cure it by enforcing either broad social justice or God's Plan. Thus, why not revolution? Maybe this time the new boss will not be the same as the old boss. These urgent proponents ask us with some justification, where after all did meticulous reason and forbearance for error with careful, gradual correction ever get humanity? What was the end result of science, if not 1945: the black gate at Auschwitz and the hot mushroom cloud at Hiroshima?

However, others of us do not wish to descend into such deadly cynicism. We recall or envision better times and partially understand the reasons things changed for the worse. We may not have all the answers, but we believe we have a few, and we imagine that the downward spiral of the mental health of humanity can be stopped.

A key philosophical position which we commonly hold is that the study of the mind and solutions to human problems in thinking, feeling and behaving do not, and never did, naturally or necessarily belong to any medical specialty, and they are not owned by medicine generally. Between 1860 and 1960, Western civilization established a dominant cultural preference for materialistic theories, frames, and explanations of all things. We might complain now that we cannot even say the words God or soul, and everyone seems to believe that the mind and the brain are the same thing. We argue that this is an epic violation of epistemic justice. Ours may be only a negative argument, identifying a mistake or wrongness in current ideas. But if the identification is accurate, it opens the door for creative change. There are answers from the past, and wisdom beyond medicine or biology. Exclusion of that older and broader wisdom for its apparent inability to generate massive pharma profits from new drugs merely devastates human culture.

We notice that a new generation may not be supinely accepting the harm or invalidation of  their own capacity as knowers. Their elders' prejudices may not deflate their credibility when they speak. They may demand a higher collective understanding of spirit, mind, and humanity extending far beyond fatuous DSM "diagnoses" and faux "anti-psychotic," "anti-depressant" or "anti-anxiolytic" "medicines" which require false theories of brain chemical imbalances to be invented by ad agency copy writers, to defraud the public into the mass self-drugging which makes hundreds of millions of normal people psychiatric patients-for-life for pharma profit.

It is our common intention that psychiatry be brought back under the law. Involuntary treatment must be entirely abolished from our statutes and legal precedents. The difference between help and control must be explicitly acknowledged, while both are understood as legitimate social tasks. A human being cannot be told she is being "helped" when half a dozen security personnel hold her down for an angry nurse to pull down her pants and stab her with a syringe to inject a drug she hates. Torture can be understood as such, as can retribution, or prison sentences, when others have been made angry or afraid. But it is never help. Confusing help and control is a cowardly act of someone unwilling to be an agent of social change and incapable of confronting a fellow human being. It demeans both medicine and law.

We would also agree to relinquish excuses that have long served those who would avoid justice they may fear will be too harsh. "Mental illness" and "insanity" are only buzzwords that rely on pretended "expert" knowledge to deny an element of intent. The language is entirely unnecessary. A criminal jury can always decide the issue of a defendant's intent better by common sense than based on the opinion of any mental health professional. Juries are intended to decide the guilt or innocence of a peer by common sense, not by medical (psychiatric) pseudo-sense. The nobility of our adversarial process lies largely in its refusal to pretend that jurors can or must decipher ultimate objective Truth. A person who is charged with an offense must be presumed ultimately responsible for his or her own behavior.

Without legally forced "hospitalization" and "treatment" and without the "insanity defense" (excuse) for crime, psychiatry itself may not survive in its current form. If it does survive, we expect it will be unrecognizable, having been radically altered from the modern version of slavery it now comprises, to some kind of real help for troubled people.

We are not against help: we are against lies and violence. The psychiatry we have encountered in our own lived experience is almost all lies and violence. 

We look for and intend to create a better world.

Dr. Pepper? What a nuisance!

Here's a question that is just screamed, every day, from Kiley Developmental Center: Are staff so stupid and incompetent that they endanger the lives of the disabled residents they are supposed tp help, or do they do cruel and obviously harmful things to those residents out of spite? Hopefully, from the view of my client, that question will not soon become: Will they be found civilly liable for a wrongful death, or will they be prosecuted for homicide?

My client's adult child is autistic, and has seizures which can be dangerous. She is prescribed anti-seizure meds, to be given twice a day with a can of Dr. Pepper and a straw. The doctor's prescription actually says, "...to be given with a can of Dr. Pepper and a straw," because it's a routine that this autistic patient is used to and very dependent upon, to take the meds. When the routine is not followed, or when the patient notices that it is altered arbitrarily (as best she can understand), that is a sure trigger for upset and hostility with staff. 

No can of Dr. Pepper with a straw? Maybe there's an argument and complaints, maybe no anti-seizure meds get taken, and the patient has a breakthrough seizure, goes to the hospital emergency room, aspirates vomit, gets pneumonia.... It's not a small matter, it's dangerous. Everyone at Kiley has been alerted and briefed that each morning and each evening this patient gets a newly opened can of Dr. Pepper with a straw in it, to take her anti-seizure meds.

It wouldn't seem to be very difficult to arrange this... the facility regularly gets paid thousands of dollars for their "care" of this patient; cans of Dr. Pepper are certainly available at stores right in the neighborhood; the instruction is actually part of a medical prescription written by a doctor! Why would it get screwed up, let alone consistently screwed up enough to make my client fear for her child's life?

But that is what happens. Frequently, my client's adult child doesn't get the can of Dr. Pepper and straw. Staff thinks gee, why not just pour some Dr.Pepper into a glass, isn't that more efficient? Well no, not when the patient ends up in the hospital because somebody was incapable of understanding the situation and  trying to be "reasonable".

Or maybe staff just feel like asserting their own control on the clinical unit, the patient's mother be damned. After all, staff are the professionals who know best about everything, right? I recall one comment about the "legitimate needs of the facility." Maybe staff think this patient's fresh can of Dr. Pepper with a straw to take a pill is just "maladaptive behavior" that they are entitled to manipulate or beat out of her. 

But if somebody dies, what will they think? "Oh well, we did our best?"

Kiley Snake Pit Adenda: The Evil John Cosgrove, Kinga Mucha

I noticed long ago that when somebody thinks you might have caught them, or that you might suspect them of doing something bad, they will go almost nuts trying to distract you and others from what they're afraid you might find out. They'll get very critical and unaccountably or disproportionately upset. The "doctor" I dubbed "evil John Cosgrove" in my last article reacted precisely this way, when I suggested in front of a dozen of his professional colleagues that he was pretending to have read records or reports which didn't exist. 

Evil Cosgrove said a certain patient had a record as being unusually prone to falls ever since childhood. That could explain why the patient always has visible bruises and abrasions every time her mother visits her at Kiley Developmental Center. Of course, another theory might be that the bruises and abrasions are evidence of Kiley staff slapping her around, punching her, knocking her down and terrorizing her on a daily basis to control her for the faux "legitimate needs of the facility" whenever she exhibits what they feel is "maladaptive behavior."

I checked around for these alleged records of proneness to falls since childhood. They don't seem to exist. I asked evil Cosgrove about the records. He responded by immediately becoming critical of me and all lawyers, and acting unaccountably upset. It was a tip-off. Maybe evil Cosgrove knows staff were beating that patient, and he is covering up crimes (possibly including rape). Or maybe not: but evil Cosgrove sure is nervous!

Kinga Mucha sent a false report to Illinois child protective services, threatening possible action against my client's guardianship of her disabled adult child. When she was questioned about this false report, by which time she had been advised that it was false and that forwarding it was a crime, she insisted that either, a.) the report was not really or not completely false; b.) she had corrected it; or c.) she hadn't intentionally filed it anyway, she was only following procedures. These were mutually contradictory excuses which weren't necessary to begin with. A simple apology and a factual correction or clarification would have sufficed to solve the problem. I think the issue was some allegation about refusing to provide medical information. In any event it was proven to be a falsehood; Kinga was basically left holding the bag.

Kinga repeatedly beseeched anyone who would listen: "I haven't done anything wrong!" She was a little hysterical about it, unwilling to even admit having made any innocent or careless mistake. She insisted that the issue was black and white: she was RIGHT and my client was WRONG. It was irrational, thus suspicious. Who knows, maybe Kinga was ordered by higher-ups to find evidence against my client that might threaten her guardianship of her adult child. It's not like Kiley/IDHS had no incentive, my client was a continuing nuisance to them.

Some would say that as a lawyer, as a professional, and officer of the Court, etc., I shouldn't caricature or insult people on the internet. I say they shouldn't torture and enslave people they are paid (with my taxes!) to help, and they shouldn't allow their peers to do that, either!

I've spent 24 years advocating and representing people who are beaten down, insulted and dehumanized. Who wants to help?

Psychiatria delenda est!

Kiley Snake Pit, Wade Frasier

Of the several Kiley staff I recently met at an Annual ISP Meeting for a disabled adult resident, the most difficult person to dislike was Dr. Wade Frasier, Unit Psychologist. He seemed professional and smart (or at least clever in the circumstances). He didn't interrupt or talk over anyone, as best I recall. He looked me in the eye several times. These are unusually positive personality and behavioral features for a snake pit employee. I found myself reflexively wondering why this gentleman had lowered himself to work in a snake pit.

There was no mistake, however, in assuming that Kiley Developmental Center, the state-operated facility under the purview of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) located on West Dugdale Road in Waukegan, IL, is absolutely a snake pit, as defined by Google: "noun... a place of overcrowded squalor, especially a poorly run mental hospital." 

Admittedly, I had made my own prejudiced presumption that Kiley was a snake pit before I ever went there, based on a conversation I'd had with my friend Alan, who happens to be a long-time director of a private not-for-profit which gets very good results helping the same population that state facilities seem so hopelessly unable to help. When I mentioned that I had a client whose child was at Kiley, Alan actually grimaced and said, "Ooh. That place is a terrible snake pit!"

Other than Dr. Frasier, just about everyone else in that big annual meeting was predictably dull, disgruntled, even clearly incompetent. Kinga Mucha, who valiantly attempts to be a very pleasant woman, almost immediately called my client's daughter by the wrong name, while gratuitously asserting the predictable platitude, "Of course, we are all on the same side...." (Nice example for the caseworker in charge, right?) An evil Dr. John Cosgrove reported that the patient had been "...prone to falls since childhood, per records." (I asked him what records, and he did his awkward best to cover up the fact that he had no idea, he'd totally fabricated or imagined those "records" himself.)

Tyson the dietician reported the patient's normal fare and current weight. But he had no record of her weight over the previous six months, and (incidentally) no awareness that he could have just asked my client, the mother, who weighs her daughter whenever she visits at Kiley, about twice a week.

There was a skinny "Home Manager" whose name I don't recall, who tried hard to explain or excuse obvious staff neglect of their patient with inappropriate or irrelevant claims about "the needs of the facility" and my client's daughter's "maladaptive behaviors." These are favorite phrases, repeated incessantly, which nobody ever thinks need to be defined and which are perhaps intended to sound like authoritative medical/scientific/administrative lingo, but which I think are pure, unadulterated bullshit. They merely identify the speaker as a robotic cog in the machine with no ability to think at all. The only legitimate "needs" the facility has are better staff who will actually treat the people entrusted to its care and teach or enable adaptive behavior.

In addition to Dr. Frasier, I was impressed by an African-American woman who had really nice corn rows. She sat directly across the table from my client,and made a very practical suggestion or two. She offered to meet and confer whenever I wanted if I thought she could help with anything. She also warned me sternly, the way my wife probably would in similar circumstances: "Don't be mean, be nice!" The evil Dr. Cosgrove by contrast, merely snarled on his way out the door as the meeting ended: "Grrrr! That was a complete waste of time."

But Kiley is indeed an unrepentant snake pit. The buildings are in desperate need of paint and repairs. Many staff are in desperate need of getting fired, sued, or prosecuted. Their motto appears to be, "Never fail to get retribution against any parent who attempts to advocate for their child!"

I don't know why Wade Frasier demeans himself to work there.

The Doctors' Trial

United States v. Karl Brandt, et al., was the war crimes trial in 1946-7 which resulted in a court decision including ten rules about medical research on human beings that became what we now call The Nuremberg Code. Full transcripts of that trial are available on line.

It's hard not to notice when reading this material that there is no way forensic psychiatry in Illinois ever comports with the Nuremberg Code's principles of voluntary informed consent. In particular, the first principle of the Code states that a human subject of a medical experiment (compared for present purposes to a human subject of custodial medical treatment)... 

...should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

The difference between a subject of medical research and a patient in mental health treatment cuts different ways. On one hand it could be said that if a treatment procedure is accepted as meeting the standard in a given medical specialty (here psychiatry), then the patient is not presumed to be at such high or unknown risk as the subject of an experiment, undergoing an entirely novel procedure of completely unproven efficacy and unpredictable side effects. Thus, "free power of choice" probably comprises more critical variables for the research subject than for the patient in treatment.

However, this analysis presumes scientific integrity and beneficent art in the medical specialty (psychiatry). In other words, it presumes that schizophrenia, e.g., is a valid diagnosis that could be scientifically falsified and reliably cured by standard treatment. Unfortunately, such presumption is unwarranted at best. It is really a forlorn hope that common elements of "fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" can be effectively covered up to avoid prosecution or civil liability.

If the treatment of mental, emotional and behavioral difficulties were as good as the treatment of a broken bone, or cancer or heart disease or diabetes, that would be one thing. It's altogether another thing, when sparse or non-existant psychotherapy, drugs and shock are only "treatment" in a commonly laughable sense, and when "diagnosis" is acknowledged by the medical specialty itself to be bullshit. Here in mental health, the "free power of choice" is at least as important to the fundamental ethic of primum non nocere as it is in medical research. 

The "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center is arguably at as much risk of manipulation and abuse in 2025, from social workers, STAs, psych nurses, and doctors... as was any inmate at Dachau in 1944 (from all the same types of supposed professionals and bureaucrats). Indeed, I have litigated a lengthening list of federal lawsuits involving such allegations, and I'm pretty sure I can continue to bring cases for an unlimited number of future plaintiffs, for the rest of my life!

In 23 years, I have never had a client who failed to conclude that he/she would have been better off pleading guilty to charged crimes and accepting an honest prison term, than landing in the hands of psychiatric clowns and vindictive, little state employees who tragically degrade medicine and law.

Nobody who pleads Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) and goes to a "hospital" for help with the mental illness said to have caused them to commit a serious crime ever got off with an easy sentence. Their creeping disability and dehumanization until a distant Thiem date is a far worse punishment than prison.

Going into it, they are not informed. As I wrote over sixteen years ago, patients at EMHC think the nuthouse is a softer prison, and the treatment plan is their punishment option, chosen by someone they can't identify now, at a moment in court they don't quite recall.

Their plea is not voluntary, and the Nuremberg Code is violated.