Thursday, June 25, 2015

To all staff, William White Cottage, Elgin Mental Health Center

June 25, 2015

White Cottage Clinical Staff
Elgin Mental Health Center
750 South State Street
Elgin, IL 60123

RE: Illegal harassment

To All Staff:

PLEASE BE ON NOTICE that unconscionable, frequent taunting and ridiculing of a patient violates standards of care and principles of mental healing. There can be no pretense of any “hospital” or therapeutic milieu, when staff take opportunities to flagrantly torment or make fun of the people they are supposed to be helping.

Many of you have witnessed certain staff sneeringly tell a certain patient on the unit, “You need meds,” or sarcastically moan when this patient walks by, “Oooh, poor girl…!” Disrespectful, offensive communication from one or two individuals (and everybody knows who does it) is nothing but provocation. It is worse than unprofessional. It really proves that the perpetrator doesn’t like or cannot do her job.

These incidents and examples of harassment are being documented, and legal action will eventually be taken. Anyone who doesn’t try to stop such behavior will be presumed to have encouraged it. Please feel free to call me on my cell at any time in complete confidence, if you have any questions or thoughts about this.

Staff should behave better than patients. If they can’t, they will probably have to go.

Yours very truly,
Randy Kretchmar

cc:       DHS General Counsel, CCHR International

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

To: Members of the United States House of Representatives House Energy & Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee

June 16, 2015


Dear Chairman Upton, and Members of the Committee:

You held a public hearing today, concerning H.R. 2646, the “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act”.  My concerns with that bill center on two facts which cannot be honestly disputed: 1) mental health treatment is only effective in inverse ratio to the amount of coercion it must employ; and 2) it is the flagrant, unreasonable medicalization of human problems in thinking, feeling or behaving that has dramatically increased stigma and disability.

In short, psychiatric drugs and shock work poorly for any purpose of improving human behavior or the human condition; and forced drugs and shock work so poorly that they are a horrific human rights abuse.  Despite persistent blind faith or “hopium” from such quarters as the National Institute on Mental Health, the verdicts of real science admit no future prospect for peace and happiness from psychiatric fine-tuning of individuals’ brains.

Perhaps one clear, ironic sign of utter desperation among proponents of continued psychiatric coercion and ascendant legal authority was a statement by Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, in his testimony before the Committee today….

Dr. Lieberman makes a habit of glorious prognostications about advances in “brain science”.  But the truth, which his peers at the APA and NIMH are consistently admitting these days, is that after a century of fully funded research, neither schizophrenia nor any other psychiatric “diagnosis” is any better understood or validated than it was in the days of Benjamin Rush!  Medical science has nothing to do with psychiatry, and it quite possibly never will.

Dr. Lieberman simply must scapegoat someone or something, to divert public attention from the truth.  Enter, “stigma” caused by a bogeyman, the “Anti-Psychiatry Movement” or the Church of Scientology.

I have been a full-time practicing attorney working exclusively in the mental health field for almost fourteen years.  I spend all of my professional time with mental patients (often violent psychotics) and their service providers, including many very well-intended and competent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, criminal court judges and state hospital administrators. 

I am also a life-long Scientologist, as are my wife of forty years and our three adult children.  If such a thing as “a virulent Anti-Psychiatry Movement” exists, and if as Dr. Lieberman suggests, such a movement can be blamed for the stigma of mental illness, then you may call me before your committee, because I should surely have to answer for that personally!

Jeffrey Lieberman’s assessment of the situation is disingenuous or flat-out mistaken.  And I beg your pardon, I have never been motivated in my work by financial designs.  I know many Scientologists.  They don’t pay me, or have any prospect of financial gain from opposition to psychiatry.  Quite the opposite, I assure you.  Publicly questioning such a social orthodoxy as the medical mental health model (however destructive and pernicious it may eventually be seen to be in the judgment of history) brings only expense, inconvenience and knee-jerk reproach from one’s own community.

Please consider the details of H.R. 2646 very carefully with a skeptical eye.  Listen to the perspectives of some people who are not so wedded to the current, rotten psychiatric establishment, people who do not deviously offer up mythical scapegoats and excuses for a hundred years of failure. 

And please try not to buy into Lieberman’s slander against my religion.

Yours very truly,
S. Randolph Kretchmar