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!

The Illinois State Police

In our plan to “burn Atlanta” (aka, sue Corcoran, Malis, Elgin Mental Health Center, et al for millions), the first target was originally to obtain the police report from the day the young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker scandal was discovered and the social worker was frog walked off the premises. We never quite accomplished that. Our lead PI Mike walked into the Illinois State Police District 2 headquarters in Elgin and asked for the report, but after some checking by the woman behind the counter, he was told that the report was under seal because it’s part of an active criminal investigation, and he was referred to Lieutenant Larry Martinez as the guy in charge. I don’t know whether she was supposed to reveal that, but it makes sense. Lt. Martinez finally called me after a couple weeks of voice mail messages, and within 30 seconds he repeated his mantra (“I can neither confirm nor deny that any investigation is in progress”) five times, word-for-word. What Old White Social Worker did is called sexual abuse of a disabled person, and it’s a class 3 felony in Illinois. Old White Social Worker should be prosecuted and she should go to prison for it. But Young black Ben isn’t the only victim. There is a much bigger story. My guess is, the Illinois State Police have little or no concern about any part of this beyond a single criminal charge, presumably against Old White Social Worker. This is precisely why Ben, his mom and his grandfather, my partner Joe, and our five PI’s, and our network of other patients in the Illinois forensic mental health system, and media contacts, etc., must burn Atlanta and march to the sea.

First of all, Old White Social Worker abused at least two more disabled people (Mansoor and Angelo) that we know of, and she assisted one of those two (Angelo) to elope from Elgin Mental Health Center and flee the country (that was probably a federal crime — Angelo’s escape prompted an investigation by the United States Secret Service at the time; he was an international fugitive and a child abuser).

But Old White Social Worker isn’t the only person who is in trouble. Illinois has very elaborate and strict rules about reporting the kind of sexual abuse that she perpetrated. We will obtain extensive evidence in depositions and court testimony, against many people who failed to comply with these reporting requirements because they wanted to protect their fellow plantation overseers and blame young black Ben and the other slaves, whom they believe to be somewhat lower orders of humanity (maybe three fifths or so...), after all. A whole bunch of people will lose their jobs over this.

Plus, any patient who was on Old White Social Worker’s case load between 2014 and 2017 probably has a credible claim for flagrant HIPPA confidentiality violation and healing arts malpractice. She was asking young black Ben’s opinion and advice on their treatment. Every day Ben was in her office, he had free access to other patients’ mental health files, as well as Old White Social Worker’s purse, cell phone, credit cards, etc. It’s a big scandal. There will be litigation for years. Lots of plaintiffs, lots of defendants. The media will go crazy with it.

So if I were Lt. Larry Martinez or Leo P. Schmitz of the Illinois State police (“Integrity, Service, Pride”), or Governor Bruce Rauner for that matter, I’d sure cut these corrupt slime balls loose real quick! Just saying.

Dehumanization: Kareemi & Malone

I was passively listening to “Good Morning America” (my wife’s standard wake-up fare, although she says that’s really not what she would prefer to be known for...) this AM, still all about the Harvey Weinstein/sexual harassment issue. A female attorney panelist answered a host’s question, “What is the first thing any woman should do if she’s confronted with this kind of problem?” Of course (!!) the answer was a slightly subtler version of, “Hire me and pay me lots of money...” I think it came out slightly more contrived, like, “The first thing she must do is find out what the law is that applies to her. It’s state law, always, and it varies from state to state.”

My thought was: What’s the matter with the first thing being, Kick the offender’s ass? Or how about, (if you want to be more civilized — some of us do): Tell the offender he’s being an asshole and he should STOP?

The law is merely social machinery. It doesn’t even work, except when live people make it work. You will never accomplish anything by using the law that you can’t accomplish by presenting a body, standing in front of a person fully visible, and changing their mind. I don’t care whether the person whose mind needs to be changed is an insane, violent felon, a sex feind, or a nice family member. It works the same way, regardless.

Anytime you’re afraid, and you don’t quite know what of, you can rest assured it’s yourself! If you cannot stand in front of another person and change his or her mind, it’s because you’re not certain of your own mind. The most fundamental, most debilitating fear, is of the evil that you yourself have done that you don’t want others to know, and that you don’t even want to remember.

So-called “mental health professionals” are part of a machine. They are cogs in the wheels. The machine is totally mired in fear. It’s basic construction material is fear. The most fundamental evil act is to turn a living person into a mechanism (spiritual murder) for the purpose of owning and controlling them. This is precisely what psychiatry does, more than any other subject or discipline in all human history. A person is merely a brain, right? So we can poison that brain, shock it, slice it up, and control the person, right? They sell us this as “forensic psychiatry”, and we buy Elgin Mental Health Center (young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker, Corcoran, Malis, Chief Epperson and the Campbell family perverts and all!) in Illinois, with our hard-earned and rapidly-wasting-away tax dollars.

Speaking of which, I’ve noticed that articles on this blog get many times more readers when they mention and insult individuals by name (preferably in the headline). So here’s my latest high-value target.... K and L Clinical Units at EMHC were the scene of the young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker crimes of sexual abuse of a disabled person, plus flagrant HIPPA violation, plus disgustingly extreme intentional medical malpractice. Dan Malone and Faisa Kareemi are two of the “Mental health professionals” on those units. It so happens that right now they have a patient named Trevor, whose father is a good friend of mine.

Dan and Faisa are now telling Trevor that there’s no way he’ll ever be released from his psychiatric slavery unless he agrees to long-acting injections of psychotropic drugs. It’s a flat-out cowardly lie, of course: Trevor will never agree to that, and he’ll be released anyway, in about a month. Dan and Faisa are incapable of changing his mind about the “medication” because they are afraid, ultimately of themselves. They’ve turned too many living people into machines. Unfortunately for them, they are now high-value targets for me. (That goes double for Faisa because although she totally acts like an overseer on a plantation, she pretends to be a doctor in a hospital. One element in that elaborate pretense is, no doubt, a nice fat medical malpractice insurance policy, or indemnity by the Illinois Department of Human Services (same deal for my purposes). Kareemi has recently been visited by private investigators working for me on the Hurt case because of her connection to the crimes of the old white social worker. But I’ve known her for a long time. I’ve sat across the table from her, and her cowardice is more than obvious; it’s sickeningly, even physically palpable, stinking, when you’re in the same room with her. I’m not sure I know Dan Malone, but I look forward to knowing him!

James Patrick Corcoran for groundskeeper

In a staffing at Chicago Read Mental Health Center today, Dr. Corcoran only had enough courage to show up by speaker phone. It was a forgone conclusion perhaps, but recent email evidence has shown with certainty that Corcoran is the end of the line of responsibility in Illinois, for keeping “patients” locked up who don’t need to be. I.e., he’s the top-dog slave overseer, the buck stops with him.

The new Medical Director at Read (Rick somebody...) complained that he now has a lot of new little, technical things he has to do or account for because of things that happened recently, not even at Chicago Read, but at Elgin. I think this is a reference to the young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker thing. Oh well, Rick...

Chicago Read is kind of depressing. The clinical units are dark and box-like. The few windows look out to grounds that are dilapidated and overgrown.

At one point I asked Corcoran whether he’s the guy who’s supposed to mow the lawn. (It would at least be honest work, unlike his pretense of being a real doctor.)

He was still on the speaker phone but he didn’t answer that question.

William “Harvey Weinstein” Epperson

My last post was entitled, “Malis, Corcoran, and the Campbell Family Perverts”.  The truth is, I don’t know anyone in the Campbell family, and I kind of feel bad about summarily labeling all of them as perverts.  Especially Mariah, whom I suspect is a good young woman who works hard. I doubt she would have such bad taste as to bonk Bill Epperson (he’s really an ugly little shit of a man!) in the parking lot, unless she was coerced/sexually harassed. I know Elgin Mental Health Center is not Hollywood, but power is power and people are people. “People + power” sure can = “very strange sex”.

The Harvey Weinstein media brouhaha has demonstrated that young women can be captured by men who seem powerful. Maybe this is what happened with Mariah and the Chief.

Lots of Elgin MHC staff read this blog. I’ll say it right now: If anyone knows of a sexual harassment case, PLEASE CALL ME (847-370-5410). I’ll do my best to win monetary damages for victims and crucify perpetrators. And if it makes you nervous (don’t worry, it’s bound to) to come forward with something like this, just take a lesson from the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Think about how many other women have been, and will be, victimized. Be a hero, blow the whistle early. Whoever speaks up first gets off, and everyone else gets blamed.

Malis, Corcoran, and the Campbell Family Perverts

This is part five, of perhaps dozens still to come, in my article, “The Refinement of American Slavery.”

James Patrick Corcoran and Richard Malis were at a staffing today, for which I was late and thereby missed, much to their satisfaction, I’m pretty sure. My client is a “patient” whom I have represented for many years. He’s one of the guys on Corcoran’s list of most difficult patients because he is in full remission from Schizophrenia without drugs. That’s a difficult situation for Malis and Corcoran, because they deeply believe and promote the idea tha schizophrenia is an actual brain disease that has to be treated with drugs. Any “patient” whose presentation contradicts that orthodoxy is certainly difficult!

It’s more important to Corcoran and Malis to maintain control of the slaves than it is to improve them. They know perfectly well they can’t cure anybody’s mental illness: they’re not really doctors, they’re plantation overseers. Thus they don’t worry about young black Ben being abused by his old white social worker on a daily basis for YEARS, so much as they worry about the bad examples set by patients who get better without “medication”. That’s a much bigger problem. Especially considering that “patients” are owned, after all. Why not use the slaves? That’s what they’re for, and staff are entitled.

Speaking of which, there are whole families who work together at Elgin Mental Health Center, and sometimes they share corrupt habits. Like the Campbells. Craig Campbell drew a complaint recently from a female “patient” who reported him to the Illinois State Police for sexually harassing her. His wife Lorrie Campbell strip-searched a male “patient” not too long ago, for no good reason  (she probably just wanted to see a black man naked). Ironically, Chief Bill Epperson was present for that incident, and he later had sex in the parking lot (reportedly) with Craig and Lorrie‘s daughter Mariah Campbell. It’s a pretty tight culture at Elgin.

I was so disappointed to miss the staffing this morning, because I had planned to ask some very pointed questions about all this corruption. I imagined that maybe Corcoran and Malis would have had me ejected by security. Maybe Chief Epperson would have escorted me out of the building, and I’d have had an opportunity to confirm that the girl in the parking lot was Mariah.

I also would have loved to ask Bill why his luck could be SO bad as to get caught in a single quickie... when an old white social worker had gotten away with sucking the dick of a “patient” every day for three years. It’s kind of like, “Hey Bill! Are you just too damned STUPID to ever get away with anything, or what?”

Maybe Chief Epperson would have called the police to have me arrested. The default jurisdiction is with the Illinois State Police. Their Division of Internal Affairs is already investigating the young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker matter (although the investigator in charge, Lieutenant Larry Martinez -phone # 847-642-4466 will only say that he “cannot confirm or deny that any investigation is in progress.” This is the standard disclaimer, when criminal charges are likely! I might also have asked whether Detective Rick Sandoval ever filed a report, after interviewing the patient who complained about Craig Campbell’s advances. If not, why? Is Craig, or his whole family of pervert abusers somehow immune, as an insider who is entitled, just like the social worker? Just like the white Southern plantation class from a previous century?

Refinement of American Slavery, Part 4

Today my twitter feed is full of Stephen Paddock speculation. Nobody knows why the Las Vegas shooter killed fifty-nine innocent concert goers and put hundreds more in the hospital. Of course, he was “treated” by psychiatrists, that’s a mandatory qualification for mass shooters. In his case it was Valium, “mother’s little helper” straight out of the fifties when we all still believed modern medicine was the road to salvation. One “expert in benzodiazapines” speculated that the reason he was prescribed psychotropic drugs probably has more to do with what happened than the drug itself. But the prescribing psych isn’t talking, and it ought to be noticed that they never do. They cite HIPPA and privacy, but of course, the only person whose privacy was intended to be protected by HIPPA is dead. Dead bodies have no privacy, that’s for sure. They get laid out on a slab and examined inside and out, without a single “Excuse me,” by strangers.

Another speculation about Paddock had to do with his father being a psychopath and him being mean to his girlfriend at Starbuck’s. The roles of abused and abuser are not exactly interchangeable, but they certainly alternate and connect in time. Maybe Stephen Paddock was abused by his father. Maybe he was abused by the psych who prescribed the benzo. Maybe Paddock’s father was abused by a psych. The abused become abusers. The crew on K and L Units at Elgin carefully taught Ben to be a pervert. It happens systematically in psychiatric institutions. And guess what: the ultimate “reason” that Stephen Paddock was prescribed Valium was not a “disease” that the “medicine” would cure (and Chief Epperson was not “helping” the young STA learn her new job, either!)... it was rather, purely and simply, that somebody wanted a human machine they could control, a slave they could own. Same thing with Ben, his social worker wanted her own sex slave. Oops, it didn’t work out. It never does, because living individuals are in fact far too difficult to enslave completely or forever. The early history of the United States was the broadest experiment and the most convincing proof of the futility of such ambitions.

Now we have young black Ben, who learned under his old white social worker’s complete duress that the way to deal with his situation was to disconnect - to decide that he just didn’t care about anything any more, and that sex is perversion that people use to control each other. He has to walk a long, long way back from that, before he’ll have any normal life or normal relationships.

Illinois psychiatry is sex, drugs, control, institutionalized abuse. We pay for it, probably because we have a deep, fundamental instinct to own slaves. That’s the only reason tragedies like Las Vegas happen, and there just isn’t any medical explanation or cause to discover.

SALACIOUS UNFOUNDED RUMOR

Obviously, the title of this post is intended as a disclaimer. But some rumors turn out to be true, and this one is especially pertinent and ironic.

The individual who is in charge of security at Elgin Mental Health Center, and who said under oath he is investigating the "young-black-Ben-and-old-white-social-worker" story -- Chief William E. Epperson,  -- is now said to have been caught having sex with a female staff member in the parking lot. It could be predicted that the  tryst the "Chief" was caught in will turn out to have involved a young and attractive junior staff member, over whom Epperson had seniority and impressive official altitude. Just like with Ben and the social worker, it's ultimately about control and perversion; certainly not about anything like normal, innocent human attraction or love!

There is plenty of information regarding victims of sexual abuse of patients other than Ben by staff at EMHC (including but not limited to one particular social worker). There will be other perverted and shameful, illegal incidents that come out. Many staff members' professional and family lives will be ruined, though my own preference would be that it not get quite so bloody among (relatively) innocent civilians.

The thing is, EMHC looks like Atlanta to me; the Illinois forensic mental health system is Georgia, and I am Billy-the-Frickin'-Torch Sherman! There will ultimately be a long list of incidental casualties on the course of my march. People can reliably avoid being on that list of casualties only if they help me burn the plantations and free the slaves: otherwise, I'm sorry for that inopportune stray minnie ball and that indiscriminate party of overzealous bummers. "You might as well appeal against a thunderstorm as against these terrible cruelties of war. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

Sawicki Closing Arguments, 10/06/17

FIRST OF ALL, I WANT TO SAY THAT I HAVE STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT THIS CASE AND CASES LIKE THIS. I WILL MAKE ARGUMENTS NOW THAT I BELIEVE ARE NECESSARY FOR ZEALOUS ADVOCACY, BUT IF ANYTHING I SAY COMES ACROSS AS OVERWROUGHT OR OFFENSIVE I HOPE THE COURT WILL BE PATIENT.

YOUR HONOR, WE ARE AWARE THAT THIS COURT WOULD HAVE GRANTED THE UNSUPERVISED ON-GROUNDS PASS IN A CASE LIKE THIS IF ALL PARTIES HAD BEEN IN AGREEMENT. THAT SUGGESTS THAT ANY PERSON WHO DIDN’T WANT MR. SAWICKI TO PROGRESS TOWARD RELEASE, FOR ANY REASON, HAD AN IMPLIED EFFECTIVE VETO.

BUT LONG SETTLED LAW SAYS THAT THE STATE CAN ONLY HOLD SOMEONE INVOLUNTARILY IN A PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTION IF, AND AS LONG AS, THAT PERSON IS DANGEROUS TO HIM OR HERSELF OR OTHERS DUE TO MENTAL ILLNESS. MR. SAWICKI IS ACKNOWLEDGED BY EVERY EXPERT AND EVERY CLINICIAN WHO HAS TESTIFIED IN THIS MATTER, TO NO LONGER BE MENTALLY ILL AND DANGEROUS. HIS SCHIZOPHRENIA IS IN FULL REMISSION, HE’S SHOWN NO SYMPTOMS OF PSYCHOSIS FOR MANY YEARS. IN OTHER WORDS, HIS TREATMENT HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL, IT’S OVER, AND IT’S TIME TO RELEASE HIM. THAT IS THE ONLY REASONABLE CONCLUSION FROM THE EVIDENCE, AND IT’S THE ONLY CONSTITUTIONAL APPLICATION OF THE LAW, UNDER THE PRECEDENT OF FOUCHA V. LOUISIANA, 504 U.S. 71 (U.S. SUPREME COURT, 1992).

NOW THE STATE MAY SAY WE DIDN’T PROVE THAT MR. SAWICKI IS NOT MENTALLY ILL AND DANGEROUS BY CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE. THEY WOULD BE TECHNICALLY CORRECT TO SAY THAT, BUT OF COURSE NO ONE CAN EVER PROVE THEY ARE NOT MENTALLY ILL. THAT’S A NEGATIVE AVERMENT THAT ISN’T SUSCEPTIBLE TO CLEAR AND CONVINCING PROOF. I CAN’T PROVE I’M NOT MENTALLY ILL. YOU CAN’T PROVE YOU’RE NOT, MS. BOWDEN CAN’T PROVE SHE’S NOT.

OF COURSE, YOU AND I AND MS. BOWDEN ARE IN A DIFFERENT SITUATION THAN MR. SAWICKI BECAUSE WE NEVER KILLED ANYBODY AND HE DID.

NEVERTHELESS, MR. SAWICKI WAS FOUND NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY, SO HE CANNOT BE PUNISHED. HE CAN ONLY BE TREATED IN A SAFE ENVIRONMENT, THAT’S THE STATE’S ONLY LEGITIMATE INTEREST AND ITS ONLY LEGITIMATE ROLE NOW. AND WHAT IF THERE’S NOTHING TO TREAT, WITH HIS SCHIZOPHRENIA IN REMISSION? “IN REMISSION”, BY THE WAY, IS COMPATIBLE WITH NO LONGER MENTALLY ILL, PURSUANT TO A RECENT FIRST DISTRICT APPELLATE COURT DECISION IN PEOPLE V. GUNDERSON, IN WHICH THAT COURT CITED LEVINE V. TORVIK, 986 F.2D 1506 (6TH CIR. 1993), OVERRULED IN PART ON OTHER GROUNDS BY THOMPSON V. KEOHANE, 516 U.S. 99 (1995).

IF THERE’S NOTHING TO TREAT, WHY WOULD ANYONE STILL WANT TO KEEP MR. SAWICKI AT ELGIN MENTAL HEALTH CENTER FOR $800/DAY ON THE TAXPAYER? THAT IS A REALLY GOOD QUESTION. JAMES PATRICK CORCORAN TESTIFIED THAT MR. SAWICKI IS ONE OF THE TWELVE MOST DIFFICULT PATIENTS IN THE FACILITY, AND ONE REASON WHY GOOD M.D. PSYCHIATRISTS CANNOT EVEN BE RECRUITED FOR THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR JOB. SO HOW IS HE SO DIFFICULT, DESPITE BEING AN APPARENT TREATMENT SUCCESS? WELL… I SUGGEST THAT HE’S “DIFFICULT” PRECISELY BECAUSE HE HAS RECOVERED SO FULLY… WITHOUT PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS. THAT MAKES HIM A SORT OF DISSIDENT, AND A THREAT TO THE ORTHODOX CULT WHEREIN EVERYBODY MUST TAKE DRUGS WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, AND EVERYBODY MUST BELIEVE IN MENTAL ILLNESS THE EXACT SAME WAY.

DR CORCORAN, AND MAYBE A HANDFUL OF OTHERS AT ELGIN, WOULD PUNISH MR. SAWICKI FOR BEING SUCCESSFUL. AND THEY ARE ACTUALLY TRYING TO RECRUIT THIS COURT TO HELP PUNISH MR. SAWICKI. BUT IN DOING THIS, THEY MAKE MISTAKES AND THEY COMMIT FRAUD UPON THE COURT.

I CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO A RECENT COURT REPORT AND COVER LETTER, DATED AUGUST, 2017. THIS IS AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT, SUBMITTED AS EVIDENCE AND THEREFORE AS IF SWORN UNDER PENALTIES OF PERJURY. THE FINAL SENTENCE IN THIS REPORT STATES THAT A HEARING IS SCHEDULED FOR SEPTEMBER 29TH, 2017. THE TROUBLE IS, ALTHOUGH WE DID HAVE A HEARING ON THAT DATE, IT WASN’T SCHEDULED UNTIL SEPTEMBER 15TH. SO HOW EXACTLY COULD A COURT REPORT DATED AUGUST INCLUDE THAT INFORMATION, WHICH DIDN’T EXIST AT THE TIME THE WRITERS SWORE THEY WROTE IT? I POINTED THIS OUT TO VICKY INGRAM MYSELF, ABOUT A WEEK AGO. I BELIEVE THE OCTOBER REPORT THAT MS. BOWDEN ENTERED TODAY WAS SURPRISINGLY PROMPT, COMING ON THE SECOND DAY OF THE MONTH. YOUR HONOR MIGHT REALISE WHETHER THIS IS COMMON OR RARE, OR PERHAPS UNPRECEDENTED. IF THEY ARE SO CARELESS AS TO PUT A COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY UNTRUTH IN WRITING AND THEN HAVE TO SCRAMBLE WITH A NEW REPORT TO COVER THAT PROBLEM, THEN SHOULDN’T WE ASK WHAT ELSE MIGHT THEY BE UNTRUTHFUL ABOUT?

WE SUGGEST AT LEAST ONE OTHER THING…. THEY ARE UNTRUTHFUL ABOUT THE REASON THEY PUT MR. SAWICKI’S PETITION FOR PRIVILEGES ON HOLD. IT DOESN’T SEEM TO MAKE SENSE. THERE WAS NO EXISTING RULE ABOUT TURNING OVER ALL PASSWORDS, EVEN PASSWORDS TO FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS, WHEN MR. SAWICKI WAS USING THE COMPUTERS IN THE LIBRARY FOR RESEARCH. THE RULE HE IS ACCUSED OF BREAKING WAS REWORDED OPPORTUNISTICALLY AFTER THE ACCUSATION, AND THE DATE WAS CHANGED, JUST LIKE THE SO-CALLED “AUGUST, 2017” COURT REPORT. IT CAN REASONABLY BE ASKED, WHY WOULD THEY GO TO THE TROUBLE TO DO THIS?

PART OF THE ANSWER IS, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING THAT COULD BE EVEN TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO COMPUTERS OR DIGITAL INFORMATION IS AN EXTREMELY HOT SUBJECT RIGHT NOW AT ELGIN MENTAL HELTH CENTER. THEY ARE CONFISCATING EVERYONE’S COMPUTERS, EVERYONE’S DIGITAL MEDIA AND EVERY CONCEIVABLE STORAGE DEVICE, BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID CERTAIN EVIDENCE WILL GET OUT – EVIDENCE CURRENTLY BEING INVESTIGATED BY THE ILLINOIS STATE POLICE, OF SYSTEMATIC SEXUAL ABUSE OF PATIENTS BY STAFF. IT MAY BE RECALLED THAT I QUESTIONED FRIDA DUNPHEY ABOUT WHETHER SHE WAS AWARE THAT IF ANY SEXUAL CONTACT OCCURS BETWEEN A FEMALE STAFF MEMBER AND A MALE PATIENT, IT IS THE FEMALE STAFF MEMBER WHO GETS PROSECUTED FOR A FELONY CHARGE. MS. DUNPHEY ANSWERED MY QUESTION INSTANTLY, BEFORE THE STATE COULD EVEN OBJECT. OF COURSE SHE WAS AWARE! SHE HAS PROBABLY SEEN THE EVIDENCE HERSELF OF CERTAIN INCIDENTS … EVIDENCE THAT THE MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC WILL CERTAINLY INTERPRET TO SHOW THAT THIS INSTITUTION, THE OLDEST AND MOST WORLD RENOWNED STATE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL IN ILLINOIS, IS IN REALITY A SLAVE PLANTATION OPERATED FOR THE CORRUPT PERSONAL BENEFITS OF STAFF.

BUT THAT’S A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CASE, WHICH ONLY TOUCHES ON THIS ONE BY ACCIDENT. IN FACT, MY CLIENT HAS STRONGLY URGED ME NOT TO MENTION IT AT ALL. SO LET ME JUST QUICKLY OUTLINE WHAT THIS CASE IS ABOUT AND WHAT THE SEVERAL RECENT HEARINGS HAVE ESTABLISHED, TO MAKE THE CORRECT PERSPECTIVE EXPLICIT ON THE RECORD.

MR. SAWICKI WAS FOUND NOT GUILTY OF MURDER BY REASON OF INSANITY BY THIS COURT IN 2003, AND ADMITTED TO THE FORENSIC TREATMENT PROGRAM AT ELGIN WITH A THIEM DATE OF 2058. BASICALLY, THE COURT RULED THAT HE WAS NOT CULPABLE FOR SHOOTING HIS FORMER SUPERVISOR DEAD, BECAUSE HIS MENTAL ILLNESS MADE HIM DO IT. THUS, THE ONLY JUST THING TO DO WITH HIM WAS TREAT HIS MENTAL ILLNESS. THE COURT RIGHTFULLY LEFT IT TO THE MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS AT ELGIN TO DECIDE EXACTLY HOW HIS MENTAL ILLNESS MIGHT BEST BE TREATED, AND I HAVE HEARD THIS COURT SAY ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS THAT IT IS EXTREMELY RELUCTANT TO SECOND-GUESS THE EXPERTISE OF THE DOCTORS.

AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS, THE MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS AND THE DOCTORS  DECIDED THAT THE BEST TREATMENT PROGRAM SHOULD INCLUDE UNSUPERVISED ON-GROUNDS PASS PRIVILEGES, AND THEY PETITIONED THE COURT FOR THAT. THE COURT ORDERED A SEPARATE EVALUATION FROM THE TENTH FLOOR, AND THOSE MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS ALSO DECIDED THAT THE BEST TREATMENT PROGRAM SHOULD INCLUDE UNSUPERVISED ON-GROUNDS PASS PRIVILEGES. IF WE HAD GOTTEN TO A HEARING QUICKLY ENOUGH, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN AN AGREED ORDER.

THEN CAME THE UNFORTUNATE ALLEGATION WHICH WE HAVE LITIGATED THROUGH FOUR DAYS OF HEARINGS AND VARIOUS WITNESSES. MR. SAWICKI WAS SAID TO HAVE MISUSED HIS INTERNET ACCESS VIA THE DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAM TO TRADE SECURITIES ON-LINE. THE APPLICATION FOR THE PASS PRIVILEGE WAS SUPPOSEDLY PUT ON HOLD DURING AN INVESTIGATION INTO THIS. THE INVESTIGATION CONSISTED OF EXPERTS IN SPRINGFIELD WHO CHECKED AND CATALOGUED ALL THE WEB PAGES MR. SAWICKI HAD VISITED ON LINE. A LOCAL TECH GUY AT ELGIN THEN REVIEWED THAT CATALOGUE FROM SPRINGFIELD, AND SUMMARIZED IT. SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS TESTIFIED ABOUT THIS EVIDENCE. IN THE END, EVERY WITNESS INVOLVED IN THE ALLEGATION AND THE SUBSEQUENT INVESTIGATION TESTIFIED THAT THEY HAD NO INFORMATION TO SUBSTANTIATE THE ALLEGATION. NOBODY WAS EVEN WILLING TO ADMIT THAT THE ALLEGATION HAD EVER COME FROM THEM TO BEGIN WITH. WE ALSO PRESENTED AN EXPERT WHO TESTIFIED THAT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN POINTLESS AND TOTALLY IMPRACTICABLE FOR MR. SAWICKI TO TRADE ON LINE DURING HIS DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAM COMPUTER TIME. THE BOTTOM LINE IS, MR. SAWICKI DID NOT ABUSE HIS DISTANCE LEARNING COMPUTER TIME TO TRADE ON LINE, AFTER ALL.

SO, WITH THE ORIGINAL ALLEGATION PROVEN FALSE, THE REASON THE PASS REQUEST HAD BEEN PUT ON HOLD HAD TO BE CHANGED, OR ACTUALLY, FALSIFIED AFTER THE FACT. IT BECAME A SLIGHTLY VAGUE ALLEGATION THAT SOME RULE OR RULES WERE VIOLATED. THEN DR. CORCORAN ALSO GRATUITOUSLY  SUGGESTED THAT MR. SAWICKI MIGHT BE ONE OF THE TWELVE MOST DIFFICULT PATIENTS AT ELGIN, WITHOUT SAYING WHY. MAYBE ITS BECAUSE HE IS A CLEAR EXAMPLE OF SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T NEED DRUGS, OR MAYBE ITS EVEN BECAUSE HE HAS ME AS HIS LEGAL COUNSEL. NEITHER OF THOSE ARE REASONS TO PUT HIS PASS ON HOLD. THEY WANTED TO PUT HIS PASS ON HOLD, SUPPOSEDLY, BECAUSE OF AN ACCUSATION WHICH CLEARLY WAS UNTRUE. MR. SAWICKI USED HIS COMPUTER ACCESS FOR EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS SUPPOSED TO USE IT FOR: STUDYING MATERIAL RELEVANT TO THE ON-LINE COURSES HE WAS ENROLLED IN.

SO WE ASK THE COURT TO GRANT THE PETITION FOR PASSES. IN FACT, WE ASK THE COURT TO DISCHARGE MR. SAWICKI FROM DHS CUSTODY, BECAUSE THE EVIDENCE SHOWS HE IS NO LONGER MENTALLY ILL, AND SO HE CAN’T BE DANGEROUS TO HIMSELF OR OTHERS DUE TO HIS NO LONGER EXISTING MENTAL ILLNESS, AND SO THE STATE HAS NO FURTHER RIGHT TO DENY HIM HIS LIBERTY AND TRUMP UP ALLEGATIONS AGAINST HIM. ILLINOIS’ STATUTE REQUIRING THAT AN NGRI COMMITTEE MUST PROVE, MANY YEARS AFTER HE WAS FOUND NGRI, BY AN ELEVATED STANDARD, THAT HE IS NO LONGER MENTALLY ILL IS IN VIOLATION OF THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT DUE PROCESS CLAUSE. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE PROCESS TO PROVE THE NON EXISTENCE OR AN ABSENCE OF MENTAL ILLNESS.

IT’S TIME THAT WE BEGIN TO HONESTLY CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACT: THIS SYSTEM OF SO-CALLED FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH THAT WE ARE WORKING FOR IS UNJUST, INCOMPETENT AND A WASTE OF OUR TIME AND MONEY.

Corcoran's laugh

On two separate occasions, I saw James Patrick Corcoran, M.D., laugh exactly the same way, and it bugged me both times. It stuck with me, like something I almost understood, but didn't quite.

There are very few people I've ever met whom I could believe to be irredeemably bad. That's saying a lot, given that my business involves me with violent felons, psychotics and psychiatrists.

Corcoran laughed the first time when I told him in a monthly staffing for one of my clients that convincing a forensic patient to take a small dose of a psychiatric drug merely to give a court an impression of "compliance with treatment" was fraud on the court, if the dose was sub-therapeutic and if the patient knew it was a ploy and didn't believe it had anything to do with real medicine or his own condition. It was a dismissive laugh, only a little ostentatious (and perhaps slightly spontaneous, or nervous), as if he were asserting to the other Elgin staff present (and to himself) that he wasn't at all worried about this crazy Scientologist lawyer having anything on him, and they shouldn't be worried either. As "Medical Director" of the Elgin plantation, he had to put on a certain face.

The second time I saw the exact same laugh was when Corcoran was on the witness stand under oath. He had just told the court that he believed my client could benefit from taking a small dose of a psychiatric drug, in that once he was no longer in a controlled environment (i.e., released) the drug might help prevent a relapse of psychosis caused by additional, unfamiliar stress. So (I now realize)  this was a reaction to the same idea. I asked him if the FDA had approved the drugs he was talking about for that use. He didn't have to answer, due to a sustained objection. (My mistake: I should have asked exactly what medication he recommended first.) Then I asked whether he was aware of any clinical evidence or any published study that validated the benefits of prophylactic medication for preventing psychosis. He repeated part of my question in an ironic or slightly mocking tone, paused, and then laughed. There was no objection, so he finally had to answer: No.

The thing about this laugh is, it's not honest; it's an effort at covert control. I would bet that many people who deal with Corcoran on a daily basis see this same laugh regularly, and will recognize my description.

There are three fundamental ways to control another person: overwhelm them, invalidate them, and enhance them. Of course, the Elgin plantation (like the Southern cotton plantations before them) maintains an elaborate pretense of enhancing its slaves (just calling them "patients" is an obvious part of that). Involuntary psychiatry is said to be good for them, it's said to be help (even as involuntary labor was said to be good for African slaves, or help for their savage, animal souls, in the 19th Century). But this "enhancement" is all too obviously something entirely different. The drugs, and the systematic abuse (e.g., the sexual abuse of young black Ben by his old white social worker and her enablers), are disabling and dehumanizing. Forensic psychiatric patients are never cured of mental illness: they are overwhelmed, temporarily or permanently, in the forlorn hope that they'll remain unable to ever behave so badly again.

Corcoran has legal authority and police powers to overwhelm his "patients" with "treatment", and he has the power of an employer to overwhelm his employees with orders. Unfortunately for him, he can't overwhelm me.

Needless to say, he's way far south of ever enhancing another human being. But there's the third possibility for control: invalidation. That's the laugh! We'll see if the court bought it, and we'll see if the Elgin plantation staff buy it. I guess I didn't.

Refinement of American Slavery, Part 2

In our hypothetical narrative about a patient and his social worker, the thing to understand, to get the correct perspective, would be that this is organized slavery, not merely an incident of abuse by one bad apple.

Just imagine, if the social worker had frequently been backing Ben up to the door inside her office, or the door inside the office of another staff (let's just call him Bob H) and getting her jollies for a couple years, and if the doors had windows, so anyone who walked by on a busy clinical unit could look in... and if several other staff (let's just say another social worker named Drew, and the psychiatrist Dr. J) had actually confronted her on occasion, to a minimum degree at least (i.e., not quite saying, "Hey! Were you performing fellatio on that patient?" - but perhaps by asking, "Why were you in that room with him when he's not even your patient anymore?" - or perhaps just by giving the pair an accusing look of recognition).

At some point, people would have to be regarded as complicit. It could be said that they certainly would have known something was going on, unless they just didn't want to know. Unless the dominant culture of the plantation held "patients" (slaves) to be just a bit subhuman, so usually wrong and culpable, and "staff" (masters/overseers) to be naturally superior and benevolent, so always right and needing protection. At some point, it would be reasonably seen as organized slavery on the state-run plantation.

The medical perspective would be especially ugly. Sexual abuse is recognized more and more often in psychological literature as a cause of personality and mental disorders. Our hypothetical victim, young black Ben, is supposed to be committed to the Elgin MHC plantation for treatment that could improve his illness, which would of course be the exact opposite of being made worse because a social worker wanted a personal sex toy. The psychiatrist who is in charge of the treatment program, and the medical director who is her ultimate supervisor, and the department of the executive branch of state government which hires and fires people, all would have failed in their duties to prevent something like this from happening.

And in the final analysis, all of us, the taxpayers who fund and benefit from the plantation, should be ashamed. We would have set this up because we don't want to think about or look at insanity. On some level, of course, we would have known that psychiatry is destructive nonsense, not a regular medical specialty that ever cures anyone of anything. But we wouldn't have wanted to know. The plantation gives us valuable benefits by letting us believe we are a kinder, more rational society.

It's a strange thing that Americans want slaves, but they surely do.

Refinement of American Slavery

I had James Patrick Corcoran, M.D. on the witness stand last week. I had called him hoping to get an admission that he ordered Elgin Mental Health Center apparatchiks to undermine my client's request (and his treatment team's request, and the 10th floor's independent recommendation) for court-ordered pass privileges. Dr. Corcoran doesn't like my client, doesn't trust him, doesn't believe he should get privileges or progress toward release, because my client doesn't take psychiatric drugs. Because he doesn't take the drugs, Dr. Corcoran can't own him.

The drugs are the whip on the Elgin MHC plantation. If you take the drugs you're reduced to a subhuman, compliant slave. If you don't take them, you might be too literate, too willful and too interested in your own life.

It's a strange thing that Americans want slaves, but they surely do. The USA was founded on a system of slavery actually justified by Enlightenment arguments for scientific social organization, efficient production and greater human prosperity. Even as James Corcoran believes that every patient at Elgin should be drugged whether he or she likes it or not, and Jeffrey Lieberman believes that mastery of brain science will make psychiatrists rulers of the world, our most outstanding Virginian founders truly believed that their Negroes were in their best natural condition as slave laborers. They were quite certain that the plantations were the instrument of God's love for humanity as a whole, and that the world would soon come to adopt this ideal Southern social order.

(By the way, if anyone thinks I exaggerate the American history, let me just recommend two books: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, by Michael Karp; and Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War, by C. C. Goen. And if anyone is interested in a much more thorough argument comparing American slavery to modern state psychiatry, please read the ultimate explication: Liberation By Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry, by Thomas Szasz.)

The Southern plantations exploited the physical labor of black Africans, to build a fabulously wealthy cotton kingdom. The Elgin plantation exploits the violent threat of criminal perpetrators, to build a fabulously powerful political protection racket. In the mid-Nineteenth Century the European world desperately wanted cotton clothes and cotton sheets. Beginning in the mid-Twentieth Century, the American world desperately wanted to pretend we could medically "cure", instead of punish, bad behavior.

Hence, consider a completely hypothetical example (anyone who gets obsessed with circumstantial correspondences to real people or events in this narrative is, of course, paranoid and delusional!) of a young black man (let's just call him Ben).

Ben is found Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity on a charge of aggravated battery on a police officer, and committed to the Elgin plantation for a period not to exceed three years. The judge tells Ben's mother that if he just does what the doctors tell him, he'll probably be out much sooner than three years. But in this case, liberty will not come so easily or so soon.

Ben's psychiatrist (let's just call her Dr. J), and the Medical Director who supervises her, both hold a strong belief that Ben must have some brain disease which should be "treated" with psychiatric drugs. They can't say exactly what this brain disease is, beyond the label itself, or exactly why the drugs will help, beyond some urban legend about correcting chemical imbalances. The uncertainty and lack of validity in their beliefs is why Dr. J and the Medical Director are absolutely determined to convert Ben to them. If he is released, he'll have to be a living example of the power and beneficence of the Elgin plantation, he will have to evangelize the true psychiatric faith, to get Dr. J and the Medical Director more "patients" and more authority, and to prevent the public from realizing that their state salaries are worse than a waste of tax money. It's difficult for these people to tell for sure whether Ben truly believes in his brain disease and the drugs, because he's a shy and immature black man, who doesn't communicate well and who has never even had a girlfriend.

Speaking of which, Ben's social worker (let's just call her the social worker) finds young black men attractive. She has taken previous opportunities with Elgin plantation "patients". To the social worker, Ben looks like a perfect prospect. And after all, he is owned by the Elgin plantation. She is basically entitled to him, because she works for this institution which has the lofty purpose to help Ben....

(To be continued.)

Help: It really is a Land of Enchantment

I am in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the wedding of a cousin's grandson. Unfortunately, two days before flying here I managed to get a horrendous cold, bordering on pneumonia. I arrived in the Land of Enchantment in much discomfort, but somehow made my expected appearance at a Friday night rehearsal dinner.

Meanwhile, my wife, on business in California and supposed to meet me in Albuquerque (it's her cousin, dammit!), had her flight cancelled and couldn't get in until midnight.

It's my long habit of personally delivering my wife to and retrieving her from airports when she travels. That saves cab fares and enables opportunity for much conversation. I like it.

But after the rehearsal dinner last night, Cousin Nancy was pretty sure she should "help" me, since I was sick, by picking up my wife and letting me sleep. I tried to explain that is just isn't "help" if I don't want it, and I was certain I would sleep better most of the night if I picked up my wife at midnight myself. So I set my alarm and figured I would rest from 10:00 to 12:00.

At quarter to twelve, I heard the door close. Nancy had gotten up and left fifteen minutes ahead of me, having decided unilaterally that she knew what I wanted better than I did. I was actually pretty pissed. But it seemed important not to spoil the family weekend with acrimony, so I got up and walked around the house for an hour, thinking about why people do things like this.

She should have simply said, "Listen, you're staying at my house, and I'm afraid you're too sick, so I'm not going to allow you to get up at midnight and drive to the airport, and since I am in charge, you'll just have to do as I say!" ... I would not have been offended, and I would have happily relented. Orders are orders.

But the pretense, "Oh, I just want to help," when in actual fact control is being exerted over the top of a disagreement, and tricking or invalidating or overwhelming the person you're pretending to "help", is extremely offensive. It's probably the biggest reason people refuse help. They've learned that those who say they want to help in fact want to overwhelm and control.The proclaimed "helpers" want a shortcut, they want to cheat because they are not smart enough to change a person's mind. They are unwilling to communicate with another live human being.

Help has to be honest, and it has to be acceptable to the person being helped, or it's just not help. Psychiatry is 99% covert, coercive control under a false guise of medicine. People hate that, and it's not necessary. Just tell the truth, like my cousin Nancy could have.

For abolition

To the degree that you are able to communicate with another person, you will be less afraid of them. No matter what that person ever did (and no matter what you ever did) in the past, to the degree that you are in communication now, any apparent need for force or trickery will be reduced.

Psychiatric drugs are force, not communication. The project is to change a person’s mind. Persuasion is or seems to have become impossible when a person is psychotic, so the drug controls the brain, which is part of the body. Handcuffs control the hands which are a part of the body. A blow from a police baton controls the head, which is a part of the body. A bullet controls the heart, which is part of the body. Clearly, handcuffs, billy clubs and bullets are not social or helpful communication from the view of the person on the receiving end. Obviously, neither are coerced psychiatric drugs.

State psychiatrists like Richard Malis and James Corcoran at Elgin Mental Health Center automatically speak of believing that “medication” would be “helpful” for “patients” diagnosed with so-called “serious mental illnesses”. Corcoran actually made a claim under oath just a couple days ago, that an individual who has shown no signs of active psychosis for many years should start taking antipsychotics to help cope with stress when he is no longer in a controlled environment. The idea was, I believe, that the drug will prevent a recurrence of symptoms.

But it’s a lie. The truth is, there’s absolutely no reliable medical or scientific evidence for any such theory of prophylactic drugging. Corcoran was in actual fact attempting to enlist the Cook County Circuit Court to punish or subdue an individual whom he believes to be a dissident. This particular patient doesn’t take drugs, and yet he appears to be fully recovered. His treatment team, along with independent evaluators, believe there is nothing to “treat” with medication. They have observed him on a daily basis, interviewed him, dealt with him consistently on the clinical unit. They all think he should progress through the gradient of increased privileges toward a conditional release, without drugs.

Corcoran and Malis cannot allow that to happen. They must enforce their own severe orthodoxy: Everybody at Elgin Mental Health Center takes psychiatric drugs whether they like it or not! These two are cracking down, and any patients who think they can avoid taking drugs will be crushed, slowly but surely. Any staff who may countenance people avoiding drugs will not be promoted, or even allowed to act or make decisions freely in their normal clinical capacity. It’s relentless and fascistic. Eventually there will be hell to pay, because it’s also against the law.

Fascists are terrified of people. They have to control others by deception or violence because they can’t change anyone’s mind with reason. They can’t communicate in present time.

It amazes me that Corcoran and Malis can so delude themselves as to believe they are in any way engaged in helping anyone. They remind me of antebellum Southern slaveholders who were so deluded as to truly believe they were doing what was best for their Africans by keeping them in chains. Those plantation owners and Southern politicians owned and controlled the government of the United States, and they had their own unconstrained way with it until 1860.

Perhaps there is a war that must continue until all the bureaucracy and political power piled by a century of false promises for coerced “hospitalization” and “treatment” shall be sunk, until every drop of blood drawn with the psychiatric lash shall be paid by another drawn with an antipsychiatric sword.

God help me, I must be Sherman. Uncle Billy, the torch.

Illinois Criminal Code

(720 ILCS 5/11-9.5)     Sec. 11-9.5. Sexual misconduct with a person with a disability.     (a) Definitions. As used in this Section:         (1) "Person with a disability" means:             (i) a person diagnosed with a developmental

disability as defined in Section 1-106 of the Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code; or

(ii) a person diagnosed with a mental illness as

defined in Section 1-129 of the Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code.

(2) "State-operated facility" means:             (i) a developmental disability facility as

defined in the Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code; or

(ii) a mental health facility as defined in the

Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code.

(3) "Community agency" or "agency" means any

community entity or program providing residential mental health or developmental disabilities services that is licensed, certified, or funded by the Department of Human Services and not licensed or certified by any other human service agency of the State such as the Departments of Public Health, Healthcare and Family Services, and Children and Family Services.

(4) "Care and custody" means admission to a

State-operated facility.

(5) "Employee" means:             (i) any person employed by the Illinois

Department of Human Services;

(ii) any person employed by a community agency

providing services at the direction of the owner or operator of the agency on or off site; or

(iii) any person who is a contractual employee or

contractual agent of the Department of Human Services or the community agency. This includes but is not limited to payroll personnel, contractors, subcontractors, and volunteers.

(6) "Sexual conduct" or "sexual penetration" means

any act of sexual conduct or sexual penetration as defined in Section 11-0.1 of this Code.

(b) A person commits sexual misconduct with a person with a disability when:         (1) he or she is an employee and knowingly engages in

sexual conduct or sexual penetration with a person with a disability who is under the care and custody of the Department of Human Services at a State-operated facility; or

(2) he or she is an employee of a community agency

funded by the Department of Human Services and knowingly engages in sexual conduct or sexual penetration with a person with a disability who is in a residential program operated or supervised by a community agency.

(c) For purposes of this Section, the consent of a person with a disability in custody of the Department of Human Services residing at a State-operated facility or receiving services from a community agency shall not be a defense to a prosecution under this Section. A person is deemed incapable of consent, for purposes of this Section, when he or she is a person with a disability and is receiving services at a State-operated facility or is a person with a disability who is in a residential program operated or supervised by a community agency.     (d) This Section does not apply to:         (1) any State employee or any community agency

employee who is lawfully married to a person with a disability in custody of the Department of Human Services or receiving services from a community agency if the marriage occurred before the date of custody or the initiation of services at a community agency; or

(2) any State employee or community agency employee

who has no knowledge, and would have no reason to believe, that the person with whom he or she engaged in sexual misconduct was a person with a disability in custody of the Department of Human Services or was receiving services from a community agency.

(e) Sentence. Sexual misconduct with a person with a disability is a Class 3 felony.     (f) Any person convicted of violating this Section shall immediately forfeit his or her employment with the State or the community agency.  (Source: P.A. 96-1551, eff. 7-1-11.)

OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE!

In deposition under oath today, the Chief of Security at Elgin Mental Health Center, William Epperson, testified that an incident of staff engaging in sexual contact with a patient is being investigated by his department.

Hey Chief Bill: THAT'S A CRIME! Have you reported it to law enforcement? If not, you are obstructing justice (in all likelihood, along with various others).

Should be loads of fun going forward....

Fraud on the court, obstruction of justice

An "officer of the court" is any person who has an obligation to promote  justice and the efficient operation of the judicial system. Medical experts, hired by a party or appointed by a court, are officers of the court because their testimony and expertise is supposed to guide the court's decision-making with technical knowledge, skills or experience unavailable to lay fact finders.

"Fraud upon the court" has been defined by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals as that species of fraud which defiles or attempts to defile the court itself, or which is perpetrated by officers of the court so that the judicial machinery can not perform its task of impartially adjudicating cases.

Fraud upon the court voids the orders and judgments of that court. It is clear and well settled Illinois law that any attempt to commit fraud upon the court vitiates the entire proceeding. Any decision produced by fraud upon the court is in essence not a decision at all. The orders and judgment of that court are void, of no legal force or effect.

So consider proceedings on petitions for court-ordered privileges or conditional release, when a state psychiatrist has convinced a "patient" to take a sub-therapeutic dose of medication entirely to create the impression the patient is "complying with treatment".

I heard one high-level state psychiatrist, Dr. James P. Corcoran, M.D., (annual state salary almost  a quarter-million $) suggest precisely this fraud just the other day, and I have heard of it many times in the past from various patients and doctors at Elgin Mental Health Center and other state institutions throughout Illinois. "Just a very small amount" of a drug is frequently pushed on a patient with the explicit encouragement, "It'll look good to the judge!" In fact, I am pretty sure I have several species of similar fraudulent statements to a patient by EMHC staff recorded (e.g., see the transcript in an earlier post).

When a doctor who knows better (or should) pretends that an ineffective dose of a drug is active medical "treatment" of a real illness, or when he claims that it is a preventative or prophylactic measure when no such use has ever been validated by the FDA or any scientific research, and when that doctor inserts such nonsense into records that he knows will be in evidence in court proceedings, he certainly commits fraud upon the court. And anyone else who goes along with it, who signs court reports and fails to point out that an ineffective dose of a drug, "...just to look good to the judge" is not valid treatment, becomes an accessory to this fraud.

_________________________

Obstruction of justice is a serious criminal offense under Illinois state law. The conduct that constitutes obstruction may sometimes seem trivial, but the consequences can be prison time.

720 ILCS 5/31-4 states, in relevant part:

"(a) A person obstructs justice when, with intent to prevent the apprehension or obstruct the prosecution or defense of any person, he or she knowingly commits any of the following acts:

     "(1) Destroys, alters, conceals or disguises physical evidence, plants false evidence, furnishes false  information; or
     "(2) Induces a witness having knowledge material to the subject at issue to leave the state or conceal himself or herself; or
     "(3) Possessing knowledge material to the subject at issue, he or she leaves the state or conceals himself; or...."

An experienced social worker at Elgin Mental Health Center instantly admitted under oath yesterday, that she was aware criminal charges could be brought against a female staff member who has sexual contact with a male patient.

I have no direct knowledge or evidence, myself, regarding any story of staff-patient sexual relationships. I have been assured however, that there is such evidence (a video, in fact!). Anyone who knows anything about that sure better be talking to law enforcement.

And anyone who is tired of being part of the Illinois "forensic mental health" mafia sure better start thinking like a whistleblower.

The Terror?

Here's something I know from personal experience.

When a group is subjected to certain simultaneous pressures, or when its leaders choose to take it down a certain road, that group and even some individuals in it will become actively psychotic. The most deadly combination is:

1.  the loyalties of the group and within the group suddenly become uncertain or indistinct;
2.  the group or some members are suddenly subject to unusual emotion and confused morality; and
3.  the group suddenly places a very high value on secrecy.

At the moment there appears to be a bit of group psychosis at Elgin Mental Health Center. Patients are being subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures with no explanations. Restrictions of rights are arbitrary and undocumented, contrary to all rules and policy. Capable and well-intended clinicians are overruled by the administration even on the minutiae of treatment plans. Those who actually deal with the court system are given false information and thereby embarrassed.

In short, the place is freaking out. There's an atmosphere of insecurity. People tell each other, "Well gee, things look bad. Some huge change is happening, what exactly it is can't be revealed, but it's not good for you." (This is almost an exact quote, by the way, from statements by a psychiatrist to a patient today!) The Program Director and Medical Director both resigned recently. These were guys who had been in charge at Elgin for many years. One very capable person who was offered the Program Director job flatly refused to take it. The temporary Medical Director is a slightly shadowy administrator-without-portfolio, whose title and real state job no one is sure of.

No one knows who's responsible. No one knows who's dangerous. No one knows when anything can get done or when some really big shoe might drop.

Somebody is desperately trying to hide something, but in deathly fear that it will be discovered at any moment. That's the source of the terror.

Maybe I'm over-dramatizing this, or believing crazy people who are lying to me. Or maybe it's no acute, new situation, but just a chronic condition in forensic mental health.

Jeffrey Lieberman's Totalitarian Mind

Years ago, I was present when Jeffrey Lieberman gave a talk to psychiatrists which included a suggestion that they could rule the world as elite captains of treatment with an iron fist of brain science.

At the time I recognized a vaguely totalitarian intent, but I discounted it, perhaps in part because I was distracted when the outgoing APA President gratuitously singled me out of the crowd of a couple hundred. He attempted to put a stigma on me, maybe unknowingly as a harmless joke, maybe not.

Since then, Lieberman has been a steadfast proponent and defender of the American, hyper-medicalized, coercive psychiatric orthodoxy. He testified before at least one Congressional committee. He lambasted the New York Times for their anti-psychiatry tendencies despite their positive review of his book. He's the single most obvious spokesman for the bad guys.

I follow Dr. Lieberman on Twitter. Today I noticed an interesting conversation. At 3:34 PM on 7/15/17, Jeffrey tweeted disapprovingly about a NY Times opinion piece by op-ed writer Pagan Kennedy: Ancient Cure for Alzheimer’s? via @nytimes Hmmm? Not much of #Medical relevance here. More like anthropol fiction. 

Maybe this was an unremarkable comment by itself, but Jeffrey and the Times are kind of an item, so it got my attention. 

At noon on 7/16/17, there was a reply from a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Garth Kroeker: While no "cure" is established, I find this article thought-provoking.  Always good to show respect for a unique perspective. Dr. Kroeker was not automatically buying into Jeffrey's disapproval of the Times' incipient divergence from the pure faith of medicine.

Jeffrey's correction of his professional colleague at 6:54 PM the same day is what I find revealing: Agree but precious editorial space could be better used for more substantive info on #Alzheimers or other brain disorders. 

This is the tweet of a little corporal with apocalyptic ambitions. It's elitist arrogance even beyond what got us a President Donald Trump! "Precious editorial space" apparently is some commodity that must be regulated by psychiatric experts for the good of that majority of us who are stupid and impressionable, freedom of the press be damned.

And never mind that "brain disorders" (as opposed to brain diseases) is a term to obfuscate the fact that psychiatrists have no objective medical specialty. Never mind that "more substantive info" is inherently subjective. (E.g., Lieberman and Whitaker surely have radically opposed views regarding what is "more substantive info" about research on the use of antipsychotic drugs!)

Jeffrey's point (whether he's willing to state it overtly or not) is that psychiatrists should rule. We can replace the Constitution, religion, all our laws and customs, with psychiatric wisdom.

Jeffrey Lieberman is actually advocating and attempting to instigate the darkest version of thought reform. This is an unusually pure form of totalitarianism, or totalism. 

Most mental health professionals are good. They got into the business they are in to help people. Perhaps that didn't work out well, and they got caught up in a bureaucratic machine, became cogs in the wheels, got stupid, etc. But the true intention of 39 out of 40 was to help.

There are a very few however, who are truly bad people. It is extremely valuable to identify those outstanding few, because their power and influence actually must be obliterated.

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman is one of those outstanding few.