Peter B. Neumer and Michelle Bogle

I don't know Peter Neumer, so I hesitate to blame him for anything or say he's not doing his job....

But he heads up the Illinois Department of Human Services' Office of Inspector General (OIG). His organization is supposed to protect people like Mickey, an involuntarily committed "patient" (more accurately called a psychiatric slave) at Elgin Mental Health Center (EMHC). 

If I find out that anything I write here is untrue, I will apologize. But it seems to me that Peter Neumer's office does not protect the people it is supposed to protect. Hence, as a taxpayer I resent him for his salary of well over $100,000, which comes in part out of my pocket. He's a relatively worthless bureaucrat, in a state that cannot afford relatively worthless bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, my friend Mickey is getting his butt kicked every day at EMHC, in retribution for reporting to Peter Neumer's office that a female Security Therapy Aide named Michelle Bogle carried on a sexual relationship with him. Michelle apparently committed the felony of custodial sexual misconduct, which might be thought of as a type of statutory rape. If Michelle is convicted of this, she'll have to register as a sex offender every year for the rest of her life.

Staff at EMHC are not supposed to have sex with patients, because they wield extraordinary power over them. Patients cannot legally consent to sex. Staff can deny patients their liberty. They can forcibly restrain patients and torture them. They can ruin patients' lives, and never be blamed because after all it's supposedly done in the name of "treating mental illness" and these guys are the experts.

American chattel slavery was much the same in the 19th Century. The plantation masters insisted that they were doing what really helped their negroes, who were best fit for hard labor and hard discipline. It was consistent with God's plan for the different races of man and the different beasts of creation. I don't think Peter Neumer would have been an abolitionist. I think he would have prospered as a high-level plantation overseer, dutifully producing the world's cotton, at least until Sherman arrived to burn it all down.

It has been several weeks since Mickey came clean to OIG about the relationship with Michelle. OIG turned the investigation over to the Illinois State Police Department of Internal Investigations. According to a phone conversation today, "It's a police matter now, OIG doesn't touch it while the police investigation is in progress." Well, OK.

But here's the thing.... The state police do not accept cases for investigation when there is no credible evidence. They are investigating this one, and that means there is credible evidence. When there is credible evidence of staff sexually abusing a patient, that staff is supposed to be removed from all contact with patients (not just the victim) until the matter is resolved. That's the law, intended to protect vulnerable people whose liberty has been restricted by the state "for their own good" and to protect the community.

Michelle Bogle may have been removed from patient contact briefly, but she is reportedly back now, on the M & N clinical unit every day, with lots of new opportunities to sexually abuse more patients. Somebody is violating the law, and Peter Neumer's office is failing to protect people. I tried to ask the EMHC administration about this today, but nobody returned my call. 

They're too busy driving the slaves to get the cotton picked.

Resistance and orders

In Orlando for Thanksgiving, thinking of a client who shares a name with a mouse….

A staffing yesterday was much about my guy having gotten into a physical altercation with a peer on the unit. It seemed hard to know for sure who really started it or whom to blame, but after some discussion, there were a couple takeaways for me. 

One. I have always told every client I’ve ever worked with, that they must cultivate a reputation, in their circumstances as a psychiatric slave, of being more able than anyone else in sight, to walk away from fights and frustrations. Don’t punch back, don’t tell anyone to suck your dick. You can take great pride in this, it has huge historical, religious and philosophical pedigree (e.g., “Turn the other cheek…”).

Nietzsche said recalcitrance is the nobility of the slave, but a soldier’s nobility is in obedience. My clients have to understand that their relationship with psychiatrists and with the nuthouse is that they are slaves. But their relationship with me and with their peers should reflect that they are soldiers. 

This is not absolute from the beginning, I am a lawyer and I do follow rules. It’s just highly aspirational. The distinction by the philosopher points to my very best clients.

The guy whose staffing I attended yesterday is really good at recalcitrance, and he’s very funny, so I love him for that, it’s how he got my attention. I just hope he’ll do what I tell him, because I believe he can be one hell of a soldier. 

Two. In the obvious understanding of nuthouse staff or “mental health professionals”, any so-called “patient” is absolutely nobody. A member of my guy’s treatment team, during the staffing yesterday, insisted that nobody saw him get slapped across his face by a peer to precipitate the altercation being discussed.

My guy protested, that was a lie! The incident was witnessed by somebody named Shonterellio (or something like that, I probably have the name wrong). So I asked him who Shonterellio was. He said Shonterellio was a resident. 

Oh, OK! The witness was a patient, which means he is a total nobody in the eyes of staff. He’s not believed, his information doesn’t count, he’s just another subhuman slave. To check this, I asked the staff who said nobody ever saw my guy get slapped, whether she would believe Shonterellio if he told her that’s exactly what he saw, that’s how the altercation began, my guy only fought back after he was hit first. She would not answer my question.

Which proved my point, I think. “Patients” in a psychiatric institution are subhuman slaves. They are nobody. I spoke to Shonterellio myself later. He seemed pretty competent to me, and he told me categorically, my guy got hit first, he saw it. 

The staff are idiots because they believe they are more able to perceive and understand than the patients. They make the same error that was made by the British in Kenya, and even by my hero, General “Billy the Torch” Sherman: discounting the value of intelligence from black slaves.  

They will pay for that mistake, if my guys can just follow orders. Unlike the psychiatrists at EMHC, I do not confuse control and help. 

Psychiatria delenda est!

Short peace (meditation on the news)

“Down range, when this happens, you just get out on the next patrol. You need to get it out of your mind. That is how you cure it. You cure it by doing more. Eventually you get home safe. But here I worry there is no next patrol. It is harder to cure. You are already home.”

Those were the words of the combat veteran who took down the shooter in the Colorado Springs Q Club massacre. His daughter’s boyfriend was murdered, amid too many other casualties. 

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra told warriors, “You should love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long.”

From my own life experiences which might relate to such things, I would just say: BE yourself; don’t look at yourself or try to fix yourself, as though you could believe you are not already yourself. Assume a viewpoint, reach and withdraw from others and things, play, fight, get confused, have fun; just don’t ever forget that you can only be or not be, yourself.

Love peace as a means to new wars. Go out on the next patrol. Seek your enemy whom you can cherish and of whom you can be proud, and love your enemy. 

And someday when there are no more patrols, when you stand on the suddenly quiet field of your greatest victory with all the world kneeling at your feet, and all the world’s treasure at your hands: then turn and walk away with nothing but the shirt on your back. 

You will live forever. 

Psychiatria delenda est!

Syed Hussain is no longer on White Cottage Unit

At one time, I'm pretty sure White Cottage was a clinical unit at EMHC that was a step down from medium security. I think there were civil patients there.

I don't know exactly when Syed Hussain, M.D., became the primary psychiatrist on the unit, but I know he was there for much of the time during which two patients named Paul Olsson and Shanovia Fowlkes were lovers and conceived a child. In fact, Hussain directly questioned Paul about sexual contacts, with female patients generally and with Shanovia specifically.

It's possible that Hussain was screening an allegation that he was supposed to report to OIG within four hours of any knowledge or suspicion. He is certainly arrogant enough that he might have done that, even though he has received training and knows perfectly well that screening allegations is contrary to the rules. Psychiatrists do not investigate abuse on the plantation units where they are overseers, because they are too likely to be the perpetrators of the abuse, and of course they are never going to do honest investigations of themselves.

Paul and Shanovia's baby girl is indisputable evidence that White Cottage was not run in such a way as to successfully and reliably treat mental illness as a medical problem, and enable people who have gotten better to be released. Rather, the "cottage" was run as a hut for slaves on a plantation. 

Maybe White Cottage was a breeding hut in this case: after all, that baby is a new involuntary participant in the custody industry in Illinois, which employs a large number of mental health and welfare workers, medical experts, administrators and guards, who wouldn't have jobs but for the slaves. If the criminal courts were to stop sending new slaves, they could be bred as an alternative! That worked in the American South in the Nineteenth Century. Syed Hussain might be right at the leading edge in applying this precedent for the Twenty-first Century therapeutic state. 

Shanovia was even told the moment the "treatment" team found out she was pregnant, that her child would surely go to DCFS (i.e., be born into slavery). Hussain's cohort, another White Cottage psychiatric overseer, was actually fired for telling her that, probably because it just made the whole operation too obvious.

And maybe that's why Hussain isn't on White Cottage anymore, too. The go-to coverup strategy in IDHS has long been to just move perpetrators and accomplices around. They may have learned that from abuser priests (or maybe the priests learned it from forensic psychiatrists -- but it's definitely the same tactic by a rotten but shielded, powerful institution).

It's not impossible that Syed Hussain, immediately after he suspiciously questioned Paul Olsson, called the OIG hotline and reported that his "patients" might be used as breeders by whomever was enabling them or encouraging them to become pregnant. It's not like nobody knew or nobody was complicit. Staff were involved. But I don't think he reported anything to anybody. At best, Hussain just figured he didn't want to know, it wasn't worth finding out.

And that's why Paul and Shinovia's little girl will go to Harvard. On the State of Illinois, which indemnifies it's employed plantation overseers.