CLOSING IN ON CORCORAN, MALIS, HUSSAIN

I don’t know that James P. Corcoran, Richard Malis and Syed Hussain are the only, or even the worst, bad actors at Elgin Mental Health Center. But I sure do know that they are worth identifying as very bad actors.

The accurate identification of real bad guys is the most valuable social activity because most people are not bad, and if you can separate out those who truly are, you have an effective short cut to dramatically improving any organization, group or society,  or even perhaps a short cut to saving the world.

James P. Corcoran is the one I am most sure of. My first contact with him was in a staffing for Marci Webber at Chicago Read Mental Health Center, years ago. I don’t remember specifics, although I have a general recollection that he was arrogant, dismissive of the patient’s view of her situation, and that he fully expected he could automatically intimidate me into respect for his authority (which in retrospect is laughable). I’ve written more on this blog about Corcoran, and sued him more, than any other psychiatrist. He exhibits many characteristics of an antisocial personality. I could identify specific examples (especially instances of speaking only in very broad generalities, dealing in invented bad news/hostility/invalidation, altering communications to worsen them while stopping any good news, going berserk over any real help and preferring destruction in the name of help) but that will be saved for another article.

Moving to Richard Malis, I note that a DuPage County Judge just ordered Marci Webber released from Elgin Mental Health Center because of Malis’ glib admission that he couldn’t help her and she still couldn’t have any other psychiatrist. There was also testimony by an EMHC nurse that Malis didn’t want him to make true chart entries about Marci, because anything good might hurt his ability to coerce her to take harmful psychiatric drugs. Malis has often attempted to force or coerce other “patients” who are not dangerous onto drugs, he’s very well known for that. He has some sort of fanatical, pseudo-religious faith in the manipulation of brain chemistry whether those whose brains are affected like it or not. He searches avidly for all excuses to make people take drugs they hate.

This problem of state psychiatrists falsifying reports to courts is one of my favorites. In the recent litigation for Sean Gunderson’s release, it became completely clear that James Corcoran was changing (for the worse, of course) the “clinical” reports sent to Judge Hoffenberg, and forcing the unit staff to sign their names, pretending that his own opinions were theirs and effectively suborning perjury. This is part of an institutional policy throughout the Department of Human Services to punish forensic mental patients for refusing psychiatric drugs or complaining about institutional policy. There is much evidence to suggest that staff are similarly punished for not toeing institutional lines and paying slavish obeisance to certain senior administrators.

We are about to file a federal lawsuit against Syed Hussain on behalf of a sexual abuse victim. Hussain helped an EMHC staff member abuse our client, by repeatedly assuring her (brainwashing her in fact) that her interpretations of things and her factual complaints would never be believed, because she was the mental patient and her abuser was the clinical professional. I’ve known Hussain longer than either Corcoran or Malis, going back as far as a brief stay at EMHC by the infamous Rodney Yoder, my first client and now dear friend. Rodney laughed in Hussain’s face when he first heard Hussain’s “diagnosis” of him. I think that was the experience that inspired my blog article about the exact difference between medicine and psychiatry in 2010. Incidentally, Hussain also lied under oath about Marci Webber to escape liability for brutalizing her twice by forced drugging.

The bottom line is that evidence is piling up, and being broadcast to the general public more and more, showing forensic psychiatry in Illinois to be a plantation system that exploits the people it holds, wastes the public fisc, and horribly degrades our culture and our civilization. It’s like organized crime: very difficult and dangerous to fight, but an obvious target for all well-intended advocates.

The reason Elgin Mental Health Center should be razed is not that everyone who works there is bad. It’s because too many of the people who work there have allowed Corcoran, Malis and Hussain to corrupt the decent intentions for which real hospitals are created.