Go ask Malis when he's ten feet tall

I occasionally try to imagine how psychedelic assisted therapy ("PAT") could ever be implemented anywhere in the forensic mental health plantation system. Jo Neill, a professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Manchester, recently said that such treatments are exactly what psychiatrists should be utilizing. In a paradigm shift, they should emulate shamans rather than continuing to use the same old drugs they have been getting "heartbreaking" results with for the past 70 years. 

It's difficult to justify denying any truly better treatment for mental illness to "patients" who are NGRI because of mental illness. The law says these guys are only held involuntarily in psychiatric "hospitals" to be treated, right? And they are entitled under the law to the least restrictive effective treatment, right? So psilocybin or Ketamine for depression and anxiety, molly for anti-social personality disorder, and LSD for... probably everything, right?

Somehow, it just seems like multiple axe murderers don't deserve good drugs. The guy who strangled his girlfriend in the basement with a clothesline, or the mom who cut her five-year-old's head almost off, should get Haldol or something else that causes really bad side effects. These are not individuals who should be expanding their consciousness: they are bad guys.

Somebody said the bad guys are only bad guys because their brains have chemical imbalances, or their genes are unfortunately mutated. So we try to fix the bad guys with medicine, to help them not be so bad. Psychiatry is medicine, right?

Either that, or maybe psychedelics really aren't good drugs after all? Maybe they're not medicine? But how can that be? There's so much enthusiasm for them everywhere right now! Even at EMHC, a state psychiatrist told me he was very interested in Ketamine. (But maybe he was only interested in Special K for himself, not for his patients?)

It seems like a hard scene to disentangle, unless you understand one principle that has been part of my creed for most of my life: The study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields.

I briefly mentioned this in the first article I ever wrote for this blog, over 14 years ago. My point was basically just that... the brain, and the mind, and the person... are not identical or inseparable things. Unless one knows something about this, he/she has no chance whatsoever of making a bad guy good. Pretending to "help" people with drugs rapidly degenerates into idiotic confusion.

If mental illness doesn't make people violent or dangerous, why should it excuse violent crime, as it seems to with an NGRI verdict? "Insight" into mental illness as the problem, and Moral Reconation Therapy in the same institution? We don't know what the hell we're doing! When men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go, and the white knight's talking backwards and the red queen's off with her head....

EMHC is chasing rabbits, and you know they're going to fall.