Musings from the Madhouse Friday, April 25, 2003: Medical Miracle or Diagnostic Duplicity?

(This is the only guest blog article I’ve ever published here. I have not edited a single comma. C. Rodney Yoder wrote this over 16 years ago. He was released from custody only a year or two after he wrote the article, and he has been a fine and law-abiding citizen ever since. He pays his taxes, manages his several real estate properties, fixes things for people, and cares for his animals. Despite all the public resources spent over many years to call him “mentally ill” and to (unsuccessfully) force psychiatric “treatment” on him, he remains alive and well, usually in good humor, triumphant in the end, over the “psychoquacks” and slavers of the Illinois plantations.)

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      For nearly 12 years I languished at the Chester Mental Health Center. My captors asserted in sworn petitions for my involuntary commitment that I was “sick” with diseases dubbed “bipolar disorder, manic type, by history” and “paranoid personality disorder.” My captors further swore that the symptoms of these purportedly real diseases were my complaining about their deprivation of my liberty and attendant violations of my supposed rights as a so-called “mental patient.” No other “symptoms” were ever offered.

    After about three years of having this alleged diagnosis inflicted on me, my captors then gave me a new diagnosis of “delusional disorder, persecutory type.” Their  rationale was something like “His complaints against us should never be considered anything other than the gibberings of a lunatic and nobody should ever investigate what he is relating or intervene on such a fool’s errand. His complaints are symptoms of a disease and not a reflection of reality or any actual misconduct by the CMHC and its employees.” At the same time the ascription of “bipolar disorder” mysteriously vanished from my captors collection of fairy tales called a clinical chart.

    At my trial in December handsomely paid so-called experts swore that I am afflicted with “delusional disorder” and that there was absolutely no question of this in their minds. When my lawyer cross-examined them he inquired about the diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” that was attributed to me by not just one or two potentially “mistaken” CMHC “clinicians” but by no less than over a dozen psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. They all feigned ignorance and we had to dig through copies of their so-called “treatment” plans from 1991 through 1995 and show the signed diagnoses of all these supposed clinicians. No satisfactory explanation was ever given for this switch in diagnosis or abandonment of the first one.

    Psychiatry claims that mental illness is a real and unmistakable disease akin to cancer or diabetes. Bipolar disorder and the psychoses, like delusional disorder, are further asserted to be actual diseases of a person’s brain. The so-called experts testifying at my trial were paid over $100,000 of Illinois’ tax dollars. Bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, schizophrenia and so on are alleged to be definable and different from each other.

    Upon admission to the Elgin madhouse in April, a new psychiatrist, Syed Hussain, announced to me that I have bipolar disorder. I thanked him warmly for this confirmation of the utter quackery of psychiatry.

    In the time it took for my Chester madhouse captors to drive me to another madhouse, I was miraculously cured of one real brain disease and came down with a different one. It’s a miracle. Or else it’s complete fraud.

    Psychiatric diagnoses have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s brain or body, neurotransmitters, chemical imbalances, vitamin deficiencies, or any other somatic component. If they did, psychoquacks would at least pretend to examine their victims’ bodies, brains, fluids, and so forth. Never, in 12 years of psychiatric incarceration during which my captors said they repeatedly “evaluated” me for mental illness, did anyone actually examine my brain or nervous system or even suggest doing so. The only person to ever do so was Nelson Borelli, MD of Northwestern University and his examination is recorded here on RodneyYoder.net. Dr. Borelli performed a standard neurological test and is 99% certain I have no diseases of my brain. He also performed a standard mental status examination and found no problems in my memory or functioning. This is something my government captors have never done. The examination is posted for the entire world to see, including my lying captors.

    Although I continue to be deprived of my liberty, my new prison is at least infinitely more humane than my last. At Elgin madhouse I have not been subjected to any violence, guard engineered attacks, threats, or degradations. At Chester madhouse, I was daily demonized, ridiculed, threatened with violence, and dehumanized. I was regularly attacked by felons acting at the guards’ direction or with their permission. The guards told everyone that I was an outcast and they would never let me leave that facility. The Chester Mental Health Center is a renegade facility and the legislature of this state should immediately close its doors and disband the network of thugs running it before more lives are destroyed.

    The diagnoses of psychiatry are never a description of a person but, rather, they are a disposition of the person. These labels declare that a person should be dealt with as garbage or as a child and be controlled, locked up, removed from the community, drugged, excluded, segregated and disenfranchised.  Psychiatry lies when it claims to be involved in “helping” others. Psychiatry is a tool of social and political control and human garbage disposal.

    For 12 years my rednecked torturers in Randolph County used psychoquackery to strip me of my precious freedom. When Governor Blagojovich intervened and ordered my removal from Chester madhouse, my captors tried to save face and deny this intervention by claiming they initiated it themselves in response to my supposed recovery from mental illness. Days later, the Randolph County State’s Attorney cooked up some bogus criminal charges against me. All the guards at the Chester madhouse boasted for years that if I were successful in procuring removal from their psychoprison, they’d persecute me with criminal prosecutions. They had to invent a crime to do so as self-defense is not a crime in Illinois and I will prove clearly that the alleged crime charged against me was an act of self-defense against actual criminals. Psychiatry was used to rip off 12 years of my liberty and when the fraud of it has now been fully exposed, my persecutors have resorted to the old standby of malicious criminal prosecution. It is time to bring these criminal psychoquacks to account in a court of law.