Wednesday, November 2, 2022

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.

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