Saturday, January 27, 2018

Larry Nassar should just work at DSH!

The outrage over the sexual abuse of young American gymnasts by their “doctor” is totally justified. The only trouble is that people might think abuse like that is unusual, and that maybe it’s some kind of mental disorder. When somebody is convicted of criminal sexual abuse, he or she very often gets sent to DSH with an NGRI verdict. Maybe they are put on K or L Unit....

DSH and the rest of the so-called “forensic psychiatry” establishment create a whole culture where sexual abuse is bound to be rampant. If you believe that people whom you’re totally in charge of are irredeemably screwed up, perhaps a bit sub-human, and if you are the expert in what’s wrong with them while they can be said to “lack insight”, you might conclude that you can use them any way you like. What else is forced “treatment”? It certainly doesn’t cure mental illness, no psychiatrist anywhere would try to claim it does. If you can justify forcing drugs into a resisting human being’s body, you’re hardly more than a step away from sexual abuse anyway.

One social worker at Elgin Mental Health Center did nothing less horrendous to the two current federal plaintiffs than what Larry Nassar did to the young women he was supposedly “treating”. Both Lenhardt and Nassar were in positions of sufficient power to overwhelm their victims. Arguably, the social worker wielded an even larger power imbalance than Nassar did. In fact, that may be precisely why Nassar has been prosecuted and the social worker has not, at least not yet. She has an entire government agency and an entire profession (over which no one wants to exercise oversight) backing her up. Nassar controlled young gymnasts’ futures in gymnastics, but the social worker controlled her patients’ freedom and their entire life futures. Without her support they had no freedom, even to choose what went into their own bodies. As long as she had free reign, her patients knew they had to have sex with her when and if she wanted it.

A great deal of damage is done by sexual abuse. The victim impact statements at Larry Nassar’s sentencing could just as well be given by the two young men who are plaintiffs against the social worker.

“This is what it looks like when the adults in authority do not respond properly to disclosures of sexual assault. This is what it looks like when institutions create a culture where a predator can flourish unafraid and unabated.” These were the words of Rachel Denhollander in Judge Aquilina’s courtroom.

The social worker flourished unafraid and unabated for years at DSH. Long before Ben Hurt or Mark Owens were asssaulted, she was turning other patients into her sex slaves. Angelo Rotuno was an admitted child molester, and the social worker helped him escape from DSH, actually drove him to O’Hare airport and put him on a plane out of the country, so he could roam the streets of Europe and find more victims for eleven years.

In fact, the plaintiffs against the social workewr are far less likely to be believed or acknowledged as victims, because they are young men, not women, and because they have criminal records. But guess what: they are every bit as human, and they hurt just as much, as the young female gymnasts who were assaulted by Larry Nassar. There is no justification under the law for any kind of punishment of these young men. They were supposed to be at DSH to be helped.

Now they have an awfully long way back that they will have to walk, to ever again believe that any offer of help is anything but an intention to betray. The social worker offered help, and she was a licensed clinical social worker, part of a treatment team in a hospital, and the state of Illinois and its people were all promising help and claiming they knew how to help. It was just like the “examinations” that Larry Nassar gave young girls, sometimes with their parents right there in the room.... How could it be so wrong? How can anyone ever know what is wrong?

But people do know what’s wrong, in their hearts.

Psychiatria delenda est!

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Corcoran's "safety"

I attended a client's monthly staffing out at Dick Suck Hospital in Elgin this morning. In attendance was James Patrick Corcoran, the so-called "Medical Director". As always, Corcoran immediately asked whether anyone was recording anything. I told him (pointing at my head), "Every word."

One statement of Corcoran's that I "recorded" was that it's his job to protect the safety of all the "patients" at Dick Suck Hospital. (Corcoran doesn't actually call it by that name, which I recently made up myself. My wife objects that I seem to be channelling Donald Trump in using such crass words, but this new name for Elgin Mental Health Center is quite appropriate, it might stick. Maybe I'll just use an acronym, "DSH" from now on.) I pointed out that Corcoran does that particular job of protecting the safety of "patients" very poorly! He coudn't resist a very quick, sarcastic, "Thank you." (Kind of like that sing-song chant of 6-year-olds, "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I?")

What "safety" has he protected for the particular client whose staffing I was attending today? She was sexually assaulted (as most "patients" probably are at DSH), violently force-drugged on two separate occasions, battered by other "patients" at the behest of staff, and encouraged by staff and actively incited to attempt suicide. She's currently being threatened with transfer back to the very clinical unit (White Cottage) where she was least safe, during all her years at DSH. Today, Corcoran and another DSH administrator in the staffing pointedly refused to rule out this threatened, terrifying transfer. Within a couple weeks we'll find out just how blatantly abusive they're willing to be.

The "treatment" strategy is clearly to threaten this patient, to scare her into slavish obedience with every slightest whim and preference of staff, and to teach her that her thoughts, preferences and feelings count for absolutely nothing. She's been on "frequent obs" for many weeks. This is a degrading restriction that basically involves intrusive staff observation and restriction on movement, to dramatize distrust of and disrespect for the individual, and to demonstrate that the relationship is one of true slavery. It is not continued because there is any danger (this was openly admitted in the staffing), but only out of spite, that this "patient" remains defiant and will not be "redirected" into pretending to love the plantation and pretending that overseers are doctors.

Corcoran's idea of "safety" is for all DSH "patients" to be utterly submissive slaves. If any staff ever socialize with him and get invited into his home, I'd suggest that you should probably expect to see a bullwhip, mounted proudly above his fireplace!

Psychiatria delenda est!

Monday, January 15, 2018

Good conversation

Many people wonder why I spend as much time and attention as I do, for no money, in state psychiatric “hospitals”. Well... maybe I’ll get paid someday, and maybe I’ll contribute to abolition of psychiatric slavery. But meanwhile, there are occasional entertaining moments.

I spent a couple hours at Chicago Read Mental Health Center last week, meeting with our second plaintiff (new lawsuit, to be filed in Federal District Court Wednesday) alleging sexual abuse under a guise of “mental treatment”, against a pervert social worker, her psychiatric enablers, bureaucratic collaborators, and clueless apologists. This case actually involves even more blatant corruption of psychiatric “diagnosis” and “medication” than the previously filed Hurt case does, although it doesn’t quite feature as much sex. (Less sex doesn’t matter legally, though there was only a bit less in this instance, because any sex at all between staff and a patient brings felony charges against the staff, no mitigating circumstances are possible, no issue of “consent” is allowed.)

After I’d been there about an hour, I was approached by my client’s psychiatrist, Dr. Goyal.  He and the treatment team social worker Rex, and the psychologist Dr. Stiava, wanted to have a private conversation with me (meaning without my client, their “patient”) before I left. No problem, but slightly weird...

The four of us ended up conferring for about twenty minutes. It was quickly apparent that they wanted my client to take more psychotropic “medication”, and they hoped either I would help talk him into it, or at least not oppose it. The most specific reason why they had come to the recommendation for a higher drug dose was an incident that occurred about a month ago, details of which they only knew from reading others’ reports, but which of course they had never witnessed, investigated or confirmed, themselves. The only other conceivable reason is that this “patient’s” Muslim prayer habits make them uncomfortable.

I did point out to these guys that I’m a lawyer, not a mental health clinician. I need my client to be a credible plaintiff for our civil suit, not constantly in trouble, etc. The civil suit involves events and individuals out at Dick Suck Hospital in Elgin, not anyone at Chicago Read, at least not for the time being. So in theory, I have a common interest with the people who are currently “treating” him... if (but there’s no way this contingency can be taken for granted!) they intend and are capable of making him better.

I also admitted that under almost all circumstances, I’ll be the guy who defends involuntary “patients” against forced drugging, so if they want to increase my client’s meds, they’ll need to get his agreement rather than coerce him. Dr. Stiava spoke of my client’s “remarkable amount of self-restraint,” but speculated about potential situations of unpredicted or unusual stress that could set him off and make him dangerous to himself or others. The significant thing about that is, it’s an implied admission that he’s not dangerous to himself or others now. Which of course means that under the law, he shouldn’t be subjected to involuntary treatment on an inpatient basis; which of course is why they are currently recommending him for conditional release; which of course is their main problem — they don’t want to have to reverse course on that, and change all the paperwork; which of course would make them look like they don’t know what the hell they’re doing (which of course they don’t!).

I responded to Dr. Stiava with the prospect that coercion of psychiatric drugs might become a stress factor very quickly. But social worker Rex and psychiatrist Dr. Goyal quickly insisted that such an idea would not be “debated” in this meeting. There was another idea that these guys flatly refused to “debate”: their own assertion that, of course, their views of what drugs should go into my client’s body are more valid than his own, because he is mentally ill and they are mental health professionals. The law does not support them on that: they should be more willing to “debate” it, so they can predict that it’s a clear losing argument in court.

Ultimately, this conversation reconfirmed my understanding that so-called “mental health professionals” who work for the state and get their “patients” by police force can never be benevolent doctors in proper hospitals, but only overseers on plantations. They are the scum of the earth, and the public will shortly see the rampant sex slavery in this Illinois system as the ugliest crime since Auschwitz.

Psychiatria delenda est!

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Medicine v. psychiatry

I had brain surgery last month. Specifically, a craniotomy and excision of a golfball-sized right frontal lobe meningioma. It was the first major surgery of my life, and the only general anesthesia since a tonsillectomy at age five or six. Here I mean to brag, and maybe relate a couple of things learned.

The brain is not special. It's a boring hunk of meat, utterly malleable. Healing of neurological tissue apparently occurs more efficiently than muscle or bone. On the other hand, the shutting down of an individual's intimate, direct organization and communication lines within his body, and the taking over or appropriation of these life activities by little machines, is a brutally disturbing and traumatic thing. It's the anesthetic that hurts most, not the saw or the knife.

The tumor had begun to debilitate me. It apparently had been very fast-growing. I knew I had started to shuffle, and my attention was unsteady. Left to my own devices, I suspect I would have waited too long and ended up in far worse trouble. Thanks to the stern insistence of people close to me, I got an MRI in the nick of time.

The key factor is honest acknowledgement and conceptual understanding of the vital difference between help and control in human relations. I have been enormously helped by brilliant medical professionals and my loving family.

However there sure were moments when I obeyed orders, period. I regret that my wonderful wife had to nag and gradually wear me down just to get agreement for the initial doctor's appointment. I need to pay her back for such trouble, which she should have been spared.

The physically forced appropriation of breathing, urination and other functions was control. It was necessary for my surgery and it was done spectacularly well, but it was not itself loving. Any pretense that such brutal assaults were helpful to me as a person would have multiplied the trauma. People who need to pretend that force is help are liars and cowards.

My first post-op awareness actually did include some experience of help, however. I was in extreme panic, and I said, "You guys have to get some of this shit off me, right now!" Someone standing there actually understood, and mercifully removed something (no idea what) from my nose. I felt like I’d had some positive, even if de minimis effect, from exercising my own will. There was a future, the panic subsided. The point is it took understanding between me and another person. Not much, just a tiny bit. I'm sure there were protocols and best practices and competencies and clinical data, all about whatever the thing was that was removed from my nose, what the thing was doing in my nose, why it should be there, etc. In that moment, all such explanation would have been experienced as hated machinery. My salvation lay in the quick, live communication alone.

There were a surprizing number of medical professionals in the hospital whom I liked and admired.  A couple days after I came home, I ended up back in the emergency room during a really bad day. It turned out nothing was actually wrong, and I probably shouldn’t have been talked into going. Once you’re in there though, you end up having to follow orders again. I was not willing to have an I-V inserted. Once I knew my blood pressure and EKG were normal, and I had no fever, I told people I was leaving. They were not happy because they wanted to do some blood work, and I just said I didn’t care, I was leaving. The nurse had been unable to get any blood out of my arm after a couple tries, anyway, so just forget it!

Well, this started to look like an impasse, and I figured I’d just sign an AMA form and walk out the door. Then one of the doctors who had actually done my surgery showed up, a very bright lady in her thirties, I think. She listened to my explanation of why I wasn’t sticking around for blood work, and responded that they really, really wanted to check my sodium levels, and carefully explained why. Then she looked at me rather beseechingly and said, “Please..?

Of course, it was my decision. I liked this doctor and I believed her. She talked me into it. They got an ultrasound machine so they could find a good vein, and they got three vials of blood in no time, and sent me home. Everybody was happy.

I can’t help comparing my very positive experience with these real brain doctors... with what would likely have resulted had I gone another month or two without finding out I had a tumor, and started showing emotional symptoms, and landed in the clutches of the fake “brain doctors”, the psychiatrists that I deal with out at Dick Suck Hospital in Elgin. I’d be dead by now, for sure!

My doctors helped me. They actually cured what was wrong. People like Corcoran, Kareemi, Javed, et al., never cure anyone of anything. They never have, and they never will. They don’t talk their patients into any beneficial or prudent treatment. They bully and coerce and force their slaves into compliance. Even Vik Gill, a Dick Suck Hospital psychiatrist whom I actually like, seems to believe that his patients can’t ever know anything about themselves that could be anywhere near as important as what he knows about them, merely because he’s a psychiatrist.  Psychiatry is not help, it’s brutal, cynical, arrogant, lying control.

People use medicine to repair their bodies, and often get good results. Society uses psychiatry to feel better about getting rid of people. It should stop.

Psychiatria delenda est!