Save Elgin! Save the mental health profession!

A couple months ago I wrote an article about how bad a group can go when its members fail to insist upon and enforce a standard of ethics among themselves.

Why does one staff at Elgin Mental Health Center still have a license as a social worker?

The Assoiation of Social Work Boards (ASWB) publishes a “Guildbook For Social Work Disciplinry Acrions” which includes the following section, subtitled, “Summary Suspension”:

It is recommended that social work boards be authorized to summarily suspend a license before a formal hearing should extraordinary circumstances exist which require the immediate protection of the health, safety and welfare of the public.  Under such authority, the board may summarily suspend the license of a practitioner without a formal adjudication. However, a formal hearing must be held within a short period of time specified by the statute (e.g. thirty days).  It is in this formal hearing that the individual will be afforded due process rights.

Isn’t it time?? A social worker took confessed child molestor Angelo to O’Hare airport and put him on a plane out of the country! So a pedophile has been walking the streets for eleven years, no way to know how many victims! The social worker might well decide to effectively abscond from Illinois herself, at any moment now, with her social worker’s license fully intact! That means she can get a job somewhere else that will enable her to start sexually abusing black men with impunity, all over again. There are dozens of credible people at Elgin Mental Health Center now, who can make sure this does not happen. File a complaint with the proper authority! Don’t just sit there and pretend you know nothing. You might end up being very sorry.

If the worst happens, it will be because everything I’ve ever said about EMHC being a slave plantation, NOT a hospital where anyone is ever helped by “medicine”, is understatement. The longer it takes for you guys to get honest and straight, the worse the fallout will become. For my own abolitionist puposes, so much the better! You may think you’d be “defecting” to my side and betraying your peers by coming forward. But in fact, you betray your supposed profession by remaining silent! 

The nice plaque in the public reception area of EMHC’s forensic Treatment Building reads, “This is a hospital dedicated by the State of Illinois to the welfare of its people for their relief and restoration; a place of hope for the healing of mind, body and spirit where many find health and happiness again.”

If that message is anything but an obscene irony, I would think that somebody within the organization of such a benign institution would choose to stop the ugliness created by certain staff! If nobody does, the message is a very evil lie, and you guys will just have to live with that, every day when you walk past the beautiful plaque.

Such weirdnesses always end. Well or badly, but always. For godssakes guys, at least get 
this social worker’s license suspended!

James Patrick Scared-and-Angry-Little-Boy Corcoran

WONDERFUL staffing today, for my friend’s son Trevor! He Thiems out in a couple weeks, becoming yet another proof that the Illinois forensic “mental health” system is a useless waste of resources (When a patient Thiems out, “treatment” has obviously failed, because its purpose was to get the patient out sooner.)

This began today with a dispute over how many people can attend a monthly staffing.

Section 2-102 of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code [405 ILCS 5/2-102]... is the authority on this....

The relevant language is: ”The treatment plan shall be periodically reviewed with the participation of the recipient to the extent feasible....”

The language is NOT (although they clearly wish it were), “The plan shall be periodically reviewed with all feasible convenience for the treatment team and their bureaucrtic bosses, and all feasible acknowledgement and respect for their unparalleled expertise, superiority and magnanimity.” 

It also does NOT say that Administrators may use the section to prevent anyone whom the recipient wants to attend, as retribution against people who have attorney Kretchmar representing them. This is really what they wish it said— they’d like to be able to say, despite how utterly contrary to the spirit and purpose of the law it would be, “Well if the attorney comes, we won’t let your family participate!” 

They’d also love to pathologize any patient’s choice of attorney, if only “agreeing with Kretchmar about psychiatry” were a listed symptom somewhere in the DSM. (The closest they can get to that is probably under the diagnosis, “Prodromal anosognosia - 295.001, a perfectly serviceable mental illness that I warned about, and actually  invented myself, several years ago.)

This statutory section is ostentatiously positioned under “Article I. RIGHTS”. Those rights are, of course, rights of recipients of services, NOT  rights of would-be human property owners who reside up in the big house on the psychiatric  plantation! “Rights” in human property ended 152 years ago in this country, by the outcome of a rather ultimate clarification, called the Civil War.

So Trevor had a right to participate to the extent feasible in the staffing today, which is the legally prescribed “periodic review” of his treatment plan. He made it very clear that he wanted both his father and me (as legal counsel) to be present. But in the event, Dr. Corcoran (Medical Director of EMHC) and Dr. Ingram (head of court services) met Trevor’s Father and me in the lobby and said only one or the other of us could be allowed ro attend. 

I asked why, and Corcoran said, ”It’s our policy.” I asked if the policy is formal or written anywhere, and he refused to answer, though he briefly let it slip that it was a recent policy handed down by the legal department (meaning, presumably, by General Counsel CorreyAnne Gulkewiz, whose office is certainly up in the big house, at 100 West Randolph, Suite 6-400, Chicago, IL 60601, 312- 814-4692. But Dr. Corcoran rudely refused to answer any questions from Trevor’s Dad or me, arrogantly asserting that he just didn’t have to talk to us, and insisting that we decide immediately which one would come in to the staffing. I ended up following him through security toward the conference room. I casually suggested that he discredits himself when he acts so afraid of answering simple questions.

This got to him! He didn’t quite squeeze his hands over his ears and go running down the hall screaming, “Blah, blah, blah, I’m not listening, I can’t even hear you...” the way an 8-year-old would — pretty close, but not quite (maybe next time). In any event, it was still pretty clear to me, and probably to several others, that he just cannot confront me AT ALL. He was an angry, scared little boy! I never saw this side of Corcoran before, I’ve only known he was a pathetic liar (even under oath!). I guess the traits are not independent of or unpredictable from, each other.

Shortly after the staffing began, Corcoran interrupted to ask me directly, “You’re not recording this, are you? I said no, but in fact, I did record every word, every facial  expresssion and every moment, with the smallest and most accurate device ever  (mentally).  

One extremely incriminating  statement was made by Wayne Beyer or Dan Malone (I’m not sure which, they might be kind of hard to tell apart  — if both  both are obese, bearded, red-faced, with a terrible attitude — Dan is the Social Worker in charge of the case, and I don’t know why Wayne would have been in this staffing.  

Trevor was explaining that he finds Alcoholics Annonymous  to be less than “helpful” because it is too much covert Chisistian evangelism. The objection is not uncommon or unreasonable, it’s more like an “everybody knows!”

The so-called “treatment” team wanted to get Trevor to do and believe according to their religion (psychiatry), and Wayne/Dan didn’t give up easily on AA. He began some formulaic disclaimer about it, but Trevor reiterated that he was not, and would not ever, be willing to comply with that element of the recommendations. Wayne/Dan insisted the recommendations were only to help Trevor.  I interjected that if he really wanted to help, he should stop nagging about something that Trevor was very clear on.  

The comment that inspired was probably the most incriminating thing said in the whole staffing: “Well. I’m trying to help him with his perception of AA.” In other words, “Trevor, don’t trust your own perception, mine is better, so just adopt it and pretend it’s your own.” Of course, this is classic brainwashing! Trevor, fortunately, has high enough integrity tha he won’t take that horrible invitation. He’ll remain true  to himself, and he’ll be much more able to stay straight with the world for that.  

But speaking of whose perception is better, it is the highest irony that the other person in the room, Faisa Kareemi, M.D., is the psychiatrist who failed miserably to perceive three years of daily sexual abuse occurring right under her nose on her own clinical unit, With her supposedly superior perception, she yet failed to perceive that at all!

And... I’m coming for you Jim.  

How Could This Happen?

Almost everyone would automatically ask how the Ben-and-staff incident could happen in a state institution. This divides into two questions: first, how could Ben have been kept in a “hospital” for years longer than he needed to be there? Second, how could the state’s best experts in mental illness and psychology have missed the fact that there was something seriously wrong with the staff?

When someone is found NGRI for a violent crime, they become the effective property of forensic psychiatric authorities. NGRI acquittees are not subject to criminal law, because they aren’t culpable: their mental illnesss caused the crime, they didn’t do it on their own. Treating the mental illness is thus the only allowed project. Courts don’t do that, and they don’t tell anyone else how to. Part of the problem is there’s no test whatsoever to show that someone has a mental illness or to show that he/she doesn’t have it or doesn’t have it any longer. 

These points are totally subjective and up for grabs. They cannot ever be absolutely proven one way or the other, they can only be interminably argued. If a psychiatrist or a treatment team tells a judge, “Well, he’s somewhat better, but we think maybe he probably should go to another substance abuse group, and he did have a ‘verbally aggressive’ incident last month....” or “He’s not enthusiastic about medication, so we’re not really sure about his insight....” - Then the judge will easily go with the prosecutor’s view that there should be no official progress until those “problematic points” are remedied. They’re not really problematic points, though, they’re negative comments by people who may have motives outside of objective medical evaluation. 

We’ll find out in discovery how many times staff inserted such things into Ben’s record, just to keep him around for motives that were illegal and discreditable as hell. (Those motives are disgustingly apparent in the many emails she sent Ben, some with pictures, in late 2016. Ben’s mother recalls various meetings wherein staff offered frustrating excuses for no court date, no privileges, no progress. All the paperwork and bureaucratic processes were run by the staff. Nobody else wanted her job, so they let her do it. It was a piece of cake for her to make it seem as though Ben wasn’t quite ready to leave; other things, paperwork, etc., always had to be done first. And the staff did not want Ben to leave! She told him at one point that she was putting cash aside, so that he could buy a car when he left Elgin, and the two of them would still be able to get together. (Coincidentally, that $28,230 which this staff was paid by the state after she was fired, is a credible price for a serviceable new car.... And she didn’t really even have to admit she’d been fired until the media started running this story after our press conference on Nov. 2!)

So the status of the project to treat Ben’s mental illness was left substantially in the hands of the staff, the trusted social worker. And why was she trusted? There certainly were people who had a responsibility to predict whether she might use her position to sexually abuse disabled people. They failed to pick up any clues or exercise the necessary precautions.It’s a related shortcoming to the complete lack of objectivity about whether any person is mentally ill, of course. Not only are state psychiatrists unable to truly identify what causes bad behavior and unable to reliably remedy it, they are equally incapable of predicting it among their own employees whom they see and  evaluate every day! 

So we, the taxpayers of Illinois, pay approximately a billion dollars a year for complete bullshit. And there’s another $100 Million or so that comes from Medicare and Medicaid, on the basis of Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO) accreditation of EMHC, which stands for a (fraudulent!) guarantee of “evidence-based” behavioral and mental health care, as well as, of course(!) effective policies to prevent/stop sexual abuse of patients. Clearly, based on repercussions of Ben-and-staff alone, EMHC should not be accredited. We, and JCAHO, have to fix this! We need to take all the money back!!)

And the public needs to come to a very unpleasant conclusion: What is widely billed as an “investment in mental health” is in reality “juice” we pay to extortionists for “protection”. The American Psychiatric establishment, which is trying to rebrand itself but has been trusted for many decades, in our creations of the Illinois Department of Human Services and Elgin Mental Health Center, is a new type of mafia which is profiting from the plantation system we are all naively willing to call “mental health care” and “hospitals”. They have no idea what mental illness is, they can’t do anything about it, and they can’t even avoid putting dangerous, very sick people in inpositions of trust!

"Upset"

Apprently the N Unit Administrator of the Day called all "Patients" together this morning for an announcement. It was said that if anyone were to see snything "upsetting" on the news, they should talk to staff about it right away, and somebody will help them.

I told the individual who informed me of this that she should go to one of those wonderful helpful staff and tell them she was very upset by the WGN story of sex slavery at the Elgin plantation, and that she wants some counseling for her upset, right away!

I'll look forward to hearing about what such counseling consists of! How will they reassure people, "Oh, don't worry about these crimes that are being committed! It's alll under control and we're here to help you with modern psychiatry."

I imagine there were overseers on plantations along the route through Georgia, who had comparable announcements for the slaves they were in charge of, "Don't y'all worry none now, 'bout Sherman's Yankees. They ain't comin' here, cuz we got a strong Confederate army under General John Bell Hood just up in Augusta, and those boys in gray will look out for us all!