A social worker on N Unit named Sebin at DSH (remember what the acronym stands for — it was originally all about L Unit!) has been going around telling patients not to sign anything attesting to true facts which have been omitted from or altered (to become false) in court reports about patients. One of my own favorite mini-causes, within the larger cause of abolition, has long been this actual perjury, committed habitually and continuously at Elgin Mental Health Center and every other state psychiatric facility in Illinois.
Judges rely on the truth and accuracy of the information that comes to them in court reports. These documents are filed as under oath. Of course, nobody easily believes doctors would lie about the details of their patients’ conditions and progress. What they don’t understand is that perhaps psychiatrists are in a sense not real doctors. And state psychiatrists who coerce people into accepting unwanted “treatment” are worse — they’re plantation overseers or gangsters.
The “facts” in court reports are mostly taken from daily progress notes or other reports (e.g., incident reports, security reports), written by staff who almost never end up under oath in court. I have gone out of my way several times to get low level staff into court under oath, precisely because I can often prove they have made mistakes or lied in the paperwork which is supposed to be exempt from hearsay rules as reliable “medical records”.
What happens is, some evil sleaze ball like Richard Malis-with-malice tells a social worker, “Don’t write so much positive stuff about patient X, because it will make it more difficult for me to get an involuntary medication order!” Or a little Hitler like James Patrick Corcoran tells clinical staff, “Change the court report to say patient Y was verbally aggressive, or you’re going to lose your job!” People know they’re supposed to be truthful, but it’s not hard to push them, little by little, into corruption. When the whole setting is as wrong as psychiatric slavery to begin with, everyone who gets their pay from the master quickly accommodates their “ethics” to the demands of whoever holds a whip just up the bureaucratic ladder.
Sebin’s social worker supervisor on N Unit is an experienced and well-intended staff member named Mario Rabaza. It’s hard for me to imagine that Mario would have been so stupid as to organize what can surely be portrayed later as evidence of a cover-up.
The question that comes to my mind is, who is going around Mario and using Sebin to make patients think they have no recourse and will be in danger of retribution if they tell the truth? Who’s really setting Sebin up to take the fall?
Friday, February 21, 2020
Sunday, February 16, 2020
Malis-with-malice, personality and moral reason
I recently heard that the psychiatrist Richard Malis-with-malice will soon no longer be in the employ of the Illinois Department of Human Services. It has long seemed over-obvious to me that an organization aspiring to provide services to humans should never tolerate a guy like him; but apparently IDHS is just coming around to that.
When the rumor came to me, I quickly checked to find out where Malis-with-malice will go from Elgin Mental Health Center. He’s the sort that I would not like to lose track of: there’s security only in knowing exactly where he is on a daily basis. It turns out Malis is just moving “across the street” to the Department of Corrections.
I told several people about this whom I thought might be interested. The comments came back along the lines of, “Yes, that makes sense — he belongs in the DOC in more ways than one!” and “He’ll be safe with his own kind.”
I’ve mentioned Malis-with-malice in several blog posts. He’s a fanatic who has had a terrible impact on one client of mine in particular. Until fairly recently, James was a healthy 70-year-old who loved keeping up with much younger men on the basketball court. Now at 74, he can’t get out of his wheel chair, and there’s no way it’s not Richard Malis’ fault. There’s no way Malis didn’t do this to James on purpose, to punish him for recovering from Schizophrenia without drugs.
Of course, there’s not supposed to be any issue or purpose of punishment in a “hospital” — James is only supposed to be at EMHC to be helped, “treated” for any remaining mental illness like what supposedly caused his insanity, which was why the court found him not guilty 30-some-odd yeas ago. It’s a huge lie, of course. Nobody has any useful medical explanation for why he committed his crime; and medicine has not invented any improvement over merely punishing him.
A staffing I attended the same day I found out about Malis-with-malice moving over to DOC was instructive regarding this huge lie. My client, whom I’ll call Jack, has been stable and asymptomatic for major mental illness for many years. But nobody wants to go along with a conditional release because they think he may have “personality problems” or slightly “questionable moral reasoning”. He’s in his fifties now, and not really amenable to the idea that the clinicians at EMHC know how to “treat” his personality or his morality. He thinks that sounds like pure bullshit, and he’s right.
The big push at the moment is to get Jack to enroll in a program called MRT. It stands for Moral Reconation Therapy, which is the trademarked innovation of Correctional Counseling, Inc., a Germantown, TN based company. As the corporate name may imply, MRT was conceived as a process for rehabilitating criminals. A website explanation of why it works reads:
MRT essentially tells criminals that their problems are caused by lying, cheating, stealing, victimizing and blaming other people, and the fact that they’re locked up is entirely their own fault.
Psychiatry essentially tells NGRI acquittees that their brain disorder is not their fault, it’s genetics or chemistry after all, and they just need the drug (or shock) cure in the hospital to fix it.
So... do we make people change their behavior, or do we cure them? Are they bad, or mad? Should we invest in governmental departments of corrections, or human services? These are very different perspectives and social strategies.
The fact that most of us who pay taxes to support both of them simultaneously don’t really ever think about the difference... may shed some light on how Richard Malis-with-malice can just be quietly moved across the street.
What about investigating and charging him for crimes against humanity?
When the rumor came to me, I quickly checked to find out where Malis-with-malice will go from Elgin Mental Health Center. He’s the sort that I would not like to lose track of: there’s security only in knowing exactly where he is on a daily basis. It turns out Malis is just moving “across the street” to the Department of Corrections.
I told several people about this whom I thought might be interested. The comments came back along the lines of, “Yes, that makes sense — he belongs in the DOC in more ways than one!” and “He’ll be safe with his own kind.”
I’ve mentioned Malis-with-malice in several blog posts. He’s a fanatic who has had a terrible impact on one client of mine in particular. Until fairly recently, James was a healthy 70-year-old who loved keeping up with much younger men on the basketball court. Now at 74, he can’t get out of his wheel chair, and there’s no way it’s not Richard Malis’ fault. There’s no way Malis didn’t do this to James on purpose, to punish him for recovering from Schizophrenia without drugs.
Of course, there’s not supposed to be any issue or purpose of punishment in a “hospital” — James is only supposed to be at EMHC to be helped, “treated” for any remaining mental illness like what supposedly caused his insanity, which was why the court found him not guilty 30-some-odd yeas ago. It’s a huge lie, of course. Nobody has any useful medical explanation for why he committed his crime; and medicine has not invented any improvement over merely punishing him.
A staffing I attended the same day I found out about Malis-with-malice moving over to DOC was instructive regarding this huge lie. My client, whom I’ll call Jack, has been stable and asymptomatic for major mental illness for many years. But nobody wants to go along with a conditional release because they think he may have “personality problems” or slightly “questionable moral reasoning”. He’s in his fifties now, and not really amenable to the idea that the clinicians at EMHC know how to “treat” his personality or his morality. He thinks that sounds like pure bullshit, and he’s right.
The big push at the moment is to get Jack to enroll in a program called MRT. It stands for Moral Reconation Therapy, which is the trademarked innovation of Correctional Counseling, Inc., a Germantown, TN based company. As the corporate name may imply, MRT was conceived as a process for rehabilitating criminals. A website explanation of why it works reads:
“Moral reasoning is how people make decisions about what they should or should not do in a given situation. If judgments about right and wrong are made from low levels of moral reasoning, then counseling, job skills training, and punishment will have little long-lasting impact on behavior.
“Offenders must be confronted with the consequences of their behavior and the effects it has on their family, friends, and community. MRT addresses beliefs and reasoning. It is designed to alter how clients think and make judgments about what is right and wrong.”In a previous blog post, I once noted that there is a conceptual conflict between the idea that someone is not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity caused by a medically diagnosable and treatable mental illness (theoretically a brain disease, such as anyone at Elgin Mental Health Center is supposed to have), and the idea that someone’s thinking and judgment can change or improve.
MRT essentially tells criminals that their problems are caused by lying, cheating, stealing, victimizing and blaming other people, and the fact that they’re locked up is entirely their own fault.
Psychiatry essentially tells NGRI acquittees that their brain disorder is not their fault, it’s genetics or chemistry after all, and they just need the drug (or shock) cure in the hospital to fix it.
So... do we make people change their behavior, or do we cure them? Are they bad, or mad? Should we invest in governmental departments of corrections, or human services? These are very different perspectives and social strategies.
The fact that most of us who pay taxes to support both of them simultaneously don’t really ever think about the difference... may shed some light on how Richard Malis-with-malice can just be quietly moved across the street.
What about investigating and charging him for crimes against humanity?
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