Recently Lucy Johnstone, a well-known British psychologist, tweeted about an article in The Guardian. The article leads with a tale of a mother devastated by her son being locked in a cell for stabbing a woman. This situation is apparently unjust because the son had just been to a hospital asking for help with schizophrenia. Shockingly, he had not been helped!
Hmmm. It seems to me that we do lock people who stab people in cells. “Schizophrenia” is only an issue for those who imagine they should be excused for committing violent crimes or other offenses against their neighbors, because they claim to be afflicted by a mythical brain disease that was never proven to exist and is now a discredited, pseudo-medical concept, like “hysteria” or “drapetomania”.
Instead of punishing people who stab people with honest prison sentences, we sometimes prefer to enslave them on plantations that we pretend are “hospitals” specializing in such mythical diseases as “schizophrenia”. That article in The Guardian merely laments in a characteristically British way that we don’t do this more often, because we don’t have enough plantations masquerading as “hospitals”. They figure it’s all politics and money, which is true in that money from the public fisc is controlled, quite properly, through political processes.
If the man who stabbed someone and ended up (so unjustly in his mother’s view) locked in a cell for that violent act had done his ugly (schizophrenic) deed in Chicago, he would have very shortly been consigned to Elgin Mental Health Center (EMHC), the premier plantation pretending to be a “hospital” in Illinois. EMHC is currently overseen by its slavemaster, Michelle Evans. Dr. Evans is a social worker, who has a slightly regal bearing (I would hate to say condescending). She is white, of course (i.e., not African-American, Hispanic or Asian like the majority of clinicians on the plantation), as any real slavemaster traditionally should be.
I will shortly be touring Dr. Evans’ plantation, with herself as my guide! I am very excited for this opportunity. The occasion is a well-financed, formal legal investigation into certain extremely discreditable events that occurred some years ago, which the Illinois plantation bureaucracy has been trying to hide from public view ever since.
It turns out that there is a great deal of sexual exploitation of psychiatric slaves, and lascivious misbehavior by staff. It’s very hard to cover up stuff like this, so of course it will all probably end up in a big trial covered by the newspapers and TV, somehow. Tom Green will have some busy time, like back in the good old Rodney Yoder days!
Michelle Evans almost certainly is not looking forward to this errand of being my tour guide. It’s a losing, even dangerous, situation for her to be in. I’m not sure she’s actually a doctor, by the way. Lawyers I know call her “Dr. Evans”, but I’ve never seen M.D. or Ph.D. after her name. (People have called me “Doctor” plenty of times, too, so I guess that’s an easy mistake to make when you hang out in the mental health field.) Anyway, I’ll do my best to be empathetic and put her at ease.
Ms./Dr. Evans and I worked together on a case or two, back in pre-pandemic days. She always seemed like a true believer in psychiatry and in the holy mission of the plantation. She also made a few errors in professional judgment, and she seemed willing to lie under oath (a truly terrible idea), but that’s all just typical. Michelle will probably use the link I’ve provided in this blog to read the British article that Lucy Johnstone tweeted about, and she’ll be sympathetic with the mother whose son ended up locked in a cell for stabbing somebody.
Just think, if that kid had only been American, he’d be a proper psychiatric slave by now, earning federal money for the plantation and contributing his labor and even his body for the advantage of its psychiatric masters!
That’s much better for everyone, right Michelle?
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