Mayor Adams, and lessons of history

2023. Too many crazy people in the streets and the subways, embarrassing the city and the political leadership? Well there’s always the old standby: round them all up, get them out of sight, and pretend they’re “hospitalized” for their own good. 

The police can do it, after all, and when the ugly people are gone the city will look better. Maybe that will be worth some votes. Who cares if homelessness is really solved? We don’t know how to solve the real problem, but this is politics, we know that. 

1850. Too many slaves escaping to the north, making the South’s critical economic institution unstable and encouraging northern abolitionists? Well, let’s  pass this “bloodhound bill” to round them all up, and summarily enforce the old fugitive slave law.

There are plenty of entrepreneurial slave hunters, after all, so the plantation owners can always get their property back. Maybe that will save the Union. We sure can’t see how to solve this with Christianity, but it’s really politics and maybe we’ll avoid a destructive war.

Lessons. The great compromise of 1850 was bullshit.  Mayor Adams’ plan for so-called “involuntary assistance” (who can say that phrase with a straight face?) to those “suffering from mental illness” is bullshit. It’s not easy to bullshit human nature, you have to lie to yourself big-time. African Americans were 5/5 human (not 3:5) all along, and there’s no such thing as “involuntary assistance,” that’s a total oxymoron. These are not subtle facts, they are outstandingly obvious, common sense. 

The great compromise on slavery was a useless waste of time, it only incited everyone to total war. The dream of America as a Christian city on a hill was dashed forever at Shiloh, Antietam and Cold Harbor. The  New York plan to expand forced “treatment” will prove equally useless, and it will destroy any remaining public standing and confidence in scientific medicine. The overarching sociocultural value of health will be dashed forever at Elgin, Chicago-Read and Chester.  

Susan Knauss

 OK, once again, I promise to apologize for and retract anything that turns out to be untrue....

Susan Knauss ("Susie" to her slaves on K Unit) is an Activity Therapist at the legendary Illinois state "hospital", Elgin Mental Health Center (EMHC). According to the State Comptroller's website, she got her pay check for $6300.00 yesterday. Time for some Christmas shopping, Susie?

From a LinkedIn profile picture, Susie looks to be in her 50's or 60's, white lady, grey hair. She hasn't been at EMHC for very long, barely two years. She previously worked at St. Coletta of Wisconsin and Anne M. Kiley Developmental Center in Waukegan, IL. Bachelor's degree (maybe two) from Eastern Illinois University in 1990.

Being new at EMHC possibly accounts for a couple very serious mistakes Susie is making. For one, she has become a bit too close with some of her "patients". This is colloquially called boundary issues. In particular, Susie has been seen sitting in the K Unit day room with a couple of "residents" behind her, looking over her shoulder at her laptop screen, and pointing directions or touching the screen to navigate to whatever they wanted to see online. I'm pretty sure there are strict rules against allowing the slaves any internet access. 

A couple hundred years ago there were laws in the American South against teaching slaves to read, so there's precedent for the internet ban at EMHC. I disagree with it, but for now it's the rules. There's also a very clear precedent for the point about boundary issues, right where Susie works on K & L Unit as recently as 2017. It evolved into a huge flap, and is still costing DHS substantial legal fees. 

Another recent mistake by Susie may be even more serious. She inserted a report in one slave's medical chart, which detailed a whole conversation with him that just never happened. She totally made it up! Susie may think she can get away with this, because it'll be her word as a "mental health professional" against the "mentally ill" slave's word. But when you put something totally false in writing in a legal document, immediately after it supposedly happened (but didn't), there will be sharp, reliable memories that will contradict what you wrote, and you'll probably get accused of, if not charged with, perjury. 

I'm just sayin'. 

In case I don't post again in the next ten days, Merry Christmas to all!

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

I recently had an interesting back-and-forth on Twitter with a San Francisco psychiatrist named Joe Pierre. He had first posted a link to an article in Vogue, by a woman who was very thankful for her psychiatric diagnosis, which had apparently helped her by offering an explanation and the beginning of a solution to her hypomania.

I jumped on that, perhaps a bit roughly, by saying in ten years the same woman might think the exact opposite; I had seen many people change their minds about whether psychiatry had been good or bad for them, once the drugs stopped working and the brutal project of withdrawal began. Dr. Joe told me that I should "get past" my own professional experience, and my religious beliefs. Then I wouldn't be so predictably narrow minded and instead I would be able to envision positive outcomes from psychiatric treatment, and imagine circumstances in which involuntary treatment would be justified.

Well, I could have gone on and on about such suggestions and such arrogance. People don't "get past" their own experiences and their deeply held beliefs just because somebody else is sure of a different opinion. I suppose I can envision possible positive results from psychiatry and imagine justifications for forced drugging and shock; but I honestly think the results of psychiatry have been and will continue to be epically terrible, and forced "treatment" is just grossly wrong.

I still like Dr. Joe. At least I "like" him as an opponent with whom I can exchange restrained if hostile tweets, like some kind of ideological target practice. I think he's reasonably well intended and smart, and I learn from him. So I tried to cut to the quick by explaining that my "anti-psychiatry" views with which he so earnestly disagrees are all derived from a single position. That is: the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion, or condoned in non-religious fields.

To my surprise, this statement was not rejected, but quite productive of more good exchange. Dr. Joe wasn't sure exactly what I meant, but he quoted Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul: "Among all my patients in the second half of life -- that is to say, over thirty-five -- there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."

I told Dr. Joe that I know too little about Jung, perhaps only that he was considered a bit of a mystic, and he treated Clover Dulles (wife of Allen Dulles) in 1945. With that thought (of Dulles), it suddenly dawned on me that the whole conversation was high irony indeed!

Here I was, in a dialogue in 2022, with a San Francisco psychiatrist who was only marginally willing to briefly tolerate me, and the subject of Jung/Dulles/1945 became a point of some agreement.

The thing is.... When wide-eyed, soft hearted American youths had to confront the corpses stacked up like cordwood, with others still barely breathing, at Dachau and Belzec and Chelmo, and when the public contemplated the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the American holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the whole world realized on some level, we have to find a way to not ever do this again. That was 1945. Allen Dulles was still in Switzerland at the beginning of the year, with his wartime mistress Mary Bancroft, a devotee and patient of Carl Jung. By summer, they were joined by Clover Dulles. Allen, Clover and Mary all sought the help of Dr. Jung, each perhaps for a different problem (e.g., Allen for advice on how to influence the defeated German population, Mary and Clover probably for more personal, less political issues).

Eight years later, Allen Dulles signed off on Richard Helms' brainchild project, MKUltra. He also made sure that his own CIA had a complete monopoly on the world supply of LSD. The drug was initially considered by the MKUltra researchers to be a breakthrough offensive weapon in the emerging war for men's minds, by which anyone could be rendered psychotic with a single dose. But by the late 1950's various private psychiatric experimenters were recommending it for spiritual enlightenment of the whole American population. If one reads some of the reports by rich Hollywood celebrities (e.g., Adelle Davis, Auldus Huxley, Cary Grant) circa 1959 (Kesey and Leary were definite latecomers as acid celebs), it's easy to discern the over-the-top, Jungian mystical-religious, evangelical fervor.

I asked Dr. Joe if he was  aware of the connection between Jung/Dulles/1945, and the current exuberant promotion of "psychedelic assisted therapy" as a new breakthrough since SSRI antidepressants failed to cure chemical imbalances in the brain. The desperation of Dresden and Enola Gay hangs again over psychiatry's very bad year, 2022. He responded, "I agree, the connection that you imply is there."

More recently (just today, I think) Dr. Joe tweeted separately, "One of my least favorite phrases to hear is, 'I'm micro-dosing with psilocybin.' Not sure how they're defining 'micro-dosing,' but all the people I've seen using this phrase have been floridly psychotic."

I picture my Twitter counterpart strolling up Haight Street from the Grateful Dead House on Ashbury, in the direction of George Hunter White's Chestnut Street acid brothel/safe house on Telegraph Hill. I hate to underestimate him, but I can't help worrying that Dr. Joe, like almost everyone else in mental health, remains clueless. Materialistic "mind science" failed to provide any magic button for saving the world from Godless Communism in the last century; psychedelics and psychiatry will only encourage more florid psychosis in this one.

Maybe my San Francisco psychiatrist friend has some dawning suspicion that in the last resort our problem remains that of finding a religious outlook on life. Plus ça change.

But the rough beast LSD slouches again, towards America to be born. And guess what, today is Pearl Harbor Day.

Michelle -- on the count, or no?

It is contrary to regulations and law to have a staff who is being investigated for custodial sexual misconduct in contact with any patients.

STA Michelle Bogle is currently the subject of an Illinois State Police Department of Internal Investigations (ISP/DII) case, after a complaint by a patient alleging that she had been his lover. There is plenty of evidence, several other staff were witnesses, etc.

So pursuant to strict legal policy, Michelle should not be at EMHC, or at least not on any clinical unit where she would be in contact with and possibly able to seduce more patients. At the moment she's a suspected sex offender, and various people (e.g., OIG's Peter Neumer, as I pointed out yesterday) are responsible to protect consumers of the State's mental health services from her. The patients at EMHC are not Michelle's property, even though they are effectively at her mercy, and at the mercy of the institution which locks them away and is allowed to force drugs on them or call them degrading names, day-in and day-out, for years.

But I suspect that Michelle is at EMHC. In fact, several witnesses have told me that she's on M & N clinical unit, working as an STA. Yesterday I left a message with an administrator to inquire about this situation, but I never got a call back.

So this morning, I called M & N, at extension 3467, and asked for Michelle. The lady who answered the phone checked briefly, and then said, "Michelle Bogle is not here today. Try the other side, or try K & L."

Maybe they have removed her from patient contact, as they should have. But it sure seemed to me that Michelle had been on M & N recently, when she shouldn't have been. I don't think anyone is really very interested in protecting patients. I think they just want to get the cotton picked.

It will all come out. People knew, and didn't report. Sexual abuse of patients is endemic at Elgin Mental Health Center. The fundamental staff attitude is, they own the slaves, they can do whatever they want with them. But abolition will come. Psychiatria delenda est!