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!