I attended a staffing at Elgin Mental Health Center (“DSH”) today, for James, a client who is so unfortunate as to have Dr. Richard Malis as his treating psychiatrist. Dr. Malis has been after James to talk about a certain subject which he believes will evidence delusion. James refuses, wisely in my opinion. He doesn’t think there is any upside whatsoever, Malis just wants to create evidence of latent psychosis to enable an argument that James should take unwanted, debilitating antipsychotic drugs.
Well... James is in his 70’s. He been at DSH for many years and he hasn’t had any behavioral problems other than minor rules violations for more than a decade. He hasn’t taken any psychiatric “medications” for a couple decades, and there’s no chance that he ever will again. He’s very smart, nothing is wrong with him, he gets along better than almost any “patient” (the word is inside sarcastic quotes because they are all forced “patients”, they’re really psychiatric slaves) that I know of.
So Dr. Malis came up with a recent innovation in James’ case: covertly deny him needed medical treatment under a guise — hold his off-grounds pass for “elopement risk” thereby requiring him to be transported to the real hospital (DSH is not a real hospital, it’s a plantation) and humiliated with leg irons, chains and handcuffs. James refuses to endure that, and therefore he gets no opthamological exams for his glaucoma. I wrote an earlier post about this a couple months ago.
Recently James suffered a groin injury playing basketball, for which he was told to get an MRI by the medical doctor at DSH. The trouble is, of course, the plantation doesn’t do MRI’s, only real hospitals do. To go to a real hospital, James, in a wheelchair due to his basketball injury at age 72(!), has to be chained against Malis’ trumped-up “risk” that he’ll escape. So he’s not going to get any MRI. Richard Malis thinks this kind of punishment, this brutal and malicious coercion, will eventually convince James to talk to him and reveal his thoughts, etc.
I think it will teach James that the only way to maintain any human dignity at all on the plantation, the only conceivable path to any nobility, is noncompliance, resistance by any and every means. I think James dreams about payback, every day. I sure know I would.
Psychiatria delenda est!