Why it doesn’t work.

In the final analysis, all the laws, rules, policy, etc., designed to prevent sexual abuse of patients by staff at state-operated mental health facilities doesn’t work because people don’t care. Ordinary employees in the Illinois Department of Human Services are not willing to do anything themselves to stop sexual abuse. 

They are trained repeatedly and regularly that they must report any suspicion of abuse to OIG. But they are very happy to presume that somebody else must have already reported the same suspicion they might have (it’s an old rumor, everybody’s heard it), so they don’t really have to report it themselves. And after all, OIG has too many cases already, there’s no way they can keep up, so why add to that mess?

Plus, nuthouse staff have little appreciation for the fact that the power differential which they wield over every involuntary psychiatric patient makes any sexual or romantic relationship manipulative or abusive. Thomas Jefferson probably never felt like he was abusing Sally Hemings either, right? But look where that got our country….

Beneath the failure to understand—e.g., that Erica’s seduction of a patient at Chicago Read, or Gabby’s dalliance with Latwon on K & L Units at EMHC, or Faisa’s refusal to even ask what was happening to her patient when she knew in 2017 that Administration was hiding information—is in fact abuse, and the failure to understand that the staff is always the abuser, that no matter the appearances and circumstances, the patient is always a victim, never consenting, never receiving a “benefit”… beneath that circumstantial failure to understand… lies a much more fundamental misunderstanding. 

Like almost everyone else these days, nuthouse staff don’t know that an individual person is not just a biological mechanism. They don’t consider life itself to be a fundamentally spiritual phenomenon, and it never occurs to them that the “patient” who is locked up as not guilty of a violent crime by reason of insanity is just like them, an immortal spirit. That “patient” just seems dangerous, or disgusting, or extremely difficult to understand. The people who had been shipped from West Africa looked that way, too, as they were paraded onto an auction block at Charleston Harbor under the gaze of wealthy bidders who so proudly, obviously by their own genius and most noble efforts, produced the incalculably valuable commodity of cotton for the whole world. 

But people under the influence of psychiatry are in a worse position to understand what a human being really is, even worse than the kings of American cotton in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mental health professionals are carefully taught to believe that a person is merely a brain. A brain is merely a biological machine which can ultimately be entirely understood and controlled by the most noble doctors, without reference to any concept of soul. What a “patient” might claim as his or her own honest personal ideas, reactions and emotions are really, in the nuthouse or on the plantation, unworthy of respect. They are animal instincts, or mere chemical connections between neurotransmitters and receptors. Surely it all can, and probably should be, controlled across the whole world, by incalculably valuable psychiatric drugs or a whip. 

In this context human love, which is so inextricable from sexuality, becomes either invisible or the Holy-of-Holies. It is certainly never part of normal, mundane business or subject to written, institutional rules. 

Everyone knows, instinctively, that it’s a fool’s errand to punish people for who they love or to regulate sexuality. They also know instinctively that forensic psychiatrists are slavemasters, and forensic social workers are plantation overseers. 

But they all pretend otherwise at least once every two years, when they do the required OIG Rule 50 training over again. They all pretend: “Oh sure, we will certainly report any suspicion of abuse to the hotline within four hours, to protect our sla… er, sorry.. patients!” In the nuthouse the pretense is so easy, so automatic, because there’s an even more endemic pretense, which is the tragic basis of the whole horrible system. 

Everyone collecting that paycheck on a union salary and looking forward to that union-negotiated pension pretends that we can find and deliver medical cures for unwanted thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and that medical science is the route to human salvation. They all pretend that the psychiatric slave system operated by the Illinois Department of Human Services is about helping the mentally ill with wonderful medicine.

It’s just not true. And that’s why it doesn’t work.