PSYCHOPLASTOGENS

This is a rather new word, which apparently means "substances which cause/enable molding of the mind," i.e., from my perspective, "brainwashing drugs." 

It is mostly synonymous with "psychedelics" but implies a bit of materialistic brain theory (perhaps "dendrite manifesting" instead of the older and more romantic "mind manifesting"). According to Wikipedia, it was coined in 2019 by David E. Olson, a professor of chemistry, biochemistry and molecular medicine at UC-Davis.

When I first encountered the word in an opinion piece in JAMA Psychiatry, I vaguely recognized the bio-implication but immediately wondered why anyone needed a new word to replace Humphrey Osmond's venerable old "psychedelics." There might be various explanations. Maybe the medical profession wants or needs to separate itself from the history of 60's craziness. They'd love people to think that if they use LSD, it will be in connection with careful, scientific research, not at all like those reckless adventures of Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. If they do push such a brand, it will be a lie of the same magnitude as the "chemical imbalance" myth.

Kesey and Leary only pushed acid into mainstream America a decade after it had been thoroughly researched in very well-funded government programs, designed with the successful precedent of the Manhattan Project firmly in mind. The researchers of the 1950's abandoned psychedelics for the simple reason that unlike with the nuclear weapon experience, they discovered they could not control any aspect of these drugs. They couldn't control the effect of LSD on any particular person at any particular time, and they couldn't control the market supply or (most surprisingly to themselves) the demand. The central message of LSD was simply, no control.

Merely calling psychedelic drugs "psychoplastogens" will never change the essential reality of no control. "Bad trips" will happen at about the same frequency as they did in the Haight in 1967; inspired musicians and tech engineers, micro- or mega-dosing, will imagine "enhanced creativity" only to burn out far too quickly; and here or there we will see a new Charlie Manson horror story, or a new Richard Helms atrocity.

People are people, and they will not be substantially remade or redeemed with a pill. Dr. Gill will still have to talk to that hypo-manic patient on N Unit, and Dr. Malis will still have to listen respectfully to his delusional patient on Hartman. No matter what fancy fiddling these guys can ever do with neurons and brains to emulate Nathan Kline or to follow Professor David Olson, there will be no chemical salvation. 

Whenever I hear or read this term "psychoplastogens," I will suspect that the speaker or writer is:

1.   trying (and tragically failing) to sound like a scientist;

2.   actively covering up idolatry of drugs and brains;

3    hoping to brainwash other people for money and personal power;

4.   utterly hopeless about really communicating with an individual; and

5.   unable to create anything from scratch.

These "psychedelic renaissance" people and these supposed "scientists" who actually believe there can be such a thing as psychoplastogens look for the living in a place of the dead. 

Psychiatric slavery

Perhaps the single best dramatization of the "slave plantation" character to which the Illinois forensic psychiatric system so obviously aspires, is an elderly (age 77) African-American patient at EMHC named James Baker. A former forensic program director confided in me several years ago that he really wanted Baker to get a conditional release, because it just doesn't look good when a recipient of services dies in custody.

I've written about James several times. I think he was a drug user at an early age, grew up in bad neighborhoods in Chicago, got into the "mental health" system, killed somebody, was found NGRI, got coerced to take more drugs, finally decided completely on his own that he'd get off all the drugs, and got punished for that at EMHC for many years by several treating psychiatrists including none other than Richard Malis-with-malice, who literally kept James in chains until a judge forced an end to it.

I once had a plan to get a picture of James being loaded into an EMHC van in his chains, to go to an opthamologist appointment for his glaucoma. I figured I could blast that picture all over the internet with some suitable caption about "American slavery then and now." It never happened because of the very sensible judge, who basically told Malis, "Go in the jury room right now with Baker, and fix this." 

But one of the greatest regrets of my legal career is not having succeeded in getting James Baker released. He's only a year and a half from his Thiem date now, after three and a half decades at EMHC! When I first knew him he played basketball every day; now he has a hard time walking, and probably will be in a wheelchair from now on. What a tragic, ugly waste!

I asked Barry Smoot why the system could possibly want to keep Baker at EMHC any longer. He said that's easy: Baker is valuable property. He causes little or no trouble, he's an easy patient to deal with and he's worth federal dollars like other patients, but for less expense, at least for the moment. It's a short-sighted business calculation, but not entirely irrational.

Baker's current social worker and his psychiatrist were the only two clinical staff to attend his monthly treatment plan review yesterday. They have an acceptance for James' placement in the community already, despite his not taking psych drugs, being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and having committed a homicide. That speaks volumes.

But why should EMHC let the value and the income that this slave represents for the institution be transferred over to Bobby E. Wright Transitional Homes? They can keep him at EMHC for another year and a half, under transparently ridiculous but arguably "clinical mental health" logic like, "Well, he might benefit from doing the community reintegration program (which consists of two or three trips to local malls) for the fourth time. We did change it a little bit since he did it the third time... now we not only go to the mall, but also to McDonald's!"

There's no conditional release packet being prepared for James Baker. Nobody is bothering. He's easily maintained property like Barry Smoot pointed out.

They don't even need the chains anymore, he can't run!

               ________________________________________________

Quick note: It's only August but this is my 57th article posted in 2023, which is my highest ever for any calendar year since I started the blog in 2009.

Confidential information

A staffing yesterday featured a major, and majorly flawed strategy, by the masters and the overseers in the Illinois psychiatric slave plantation system. It's called, "protecting the confidentiality of medical and mental health information." This strategy goes a long way to help cover up real crimes which are utterly endemic, like staff sexual abuse of patients, staff failure to report suspicions of sexual abuse of patients, falsification of medical records, and perjury.

Needless to say it also helps in a huge way, to more generally deceive the tax-paying public into believing that EMHC and the other IDHS plantations are really "hospitals" where people who only did bad things because of a treatable disease can be successfully cured. This of course, is the big lie. The best people I have ever known in twenty-plus years at Elgin Mental Health Center are no better at "curing mental illness" (but on the plus side, no more likely to sexually abuse those in their custody) than an average layperson. However what distinguishes them as "professionals" is, they are all much more competent than a layperson with the bureaucratic procedures and justifications for, and the eccentric vernacular of, psychiatric slavery.

One item in that eccentric vernacular is "HIPAA!" as a near-magical incantation which means, "Everybody has to shut up now, everything is secret! Anybody who talks is in a lot of trouble." Following is my response to this incantation during yesterday's staffing for my guy Gus.

He is Gustavo Rodriguez from Aurora, IL, date of birth 10/10/1963, adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity on a charge of aggravated sexual assault. He is an involuntarily committed "patient" (psychiatric slave) housed on K Unit at Elgin Mental Health Center, 750 South State Street, Elgin, IL 60123. I don't remember his bullshit psychiatric "diagnosis" or I'd include it here, he wouldn't care.

Gus' current treating psychiatrist is Robert "Boris Johnson" Sharpe, the gnomish little outside-contracted (non-union) character who still needs a haircut, and who spearheaded complaints in yesterday's staffing about Gus "...posting confidential information about other patients," perhaps in an attempt to convince his boss, James Corcoran, that something should be done so that Gus will stay away from me. Gus tells me a lot about day-to-day happenings on K Unit (and some other units), and I occasionally, although probably not as often as he would like, write about what he tells me on this blog.

Gus' current treating psychologist is Stoika Meyer, a slightly severe, frenetic-looking woman in her fifties or sixties, who attempted to extract information from me about where I live(!), when I saw her in the forensic program building reception area at EMHC this morning. I probably could have chanted "HIPAA" just to see how that would work on her. Stoikie is another outside-contracted, non-union staff like Bobby (Boris) Sharpe. Her role in the staffing yesterday was apparently to convince James Corcoran that lots of patients on K Unit complain about Gus. The thing is, she's the one inciting or soliciting those complaints, in what seems to be an organized campaign to discredit and isolate Gus.

Rachel Nelson is Gus' social worker. She made a fallback argument for the team yesterday, that even if Gus' (and my) "posting of confidential information" isn't illegal, it's immoral because Gus wouldn't like his peers doing the same thing to him. But Gus doesn't care. (See the paragraph above, with his full name, etc.)

My first main point here is, HIPAA doesn't apply to me or Gus, because we are not medical or mental health professionals. If they want us to shut up, they should try to get a relevant court order that won't infringe against constitutional speech or press freedoms. The mere incantation definitely won't fly here. And actually the whole accusation about "posting confidential information" seemed to fall pretty flat with Dr. Corcoran. (He didn't have any great interest in the hoopla over Gabby and Latwon being inseparable on Faiza Kareemi's "love unit" K, either.) He finally piped up and said that all these complaints are normal, minor personality conflicts that occur on any clinical unit. His priority would be to work hard on how to get Gus out of EMHC!

Corcoran's priority is certainly correct, from any point of view. Almost twenty years ago, clinicians and administrators at CMHC and EMHC, plus legal counsel for IDHS and prosecutors in the Circuit Courts of a couple Illinois counties were all telling me they wanted to get Rodney Yoder the hell away from their establishments and out of the media. He caused too much trouble and embarrassment for the state.

I would hesitate to bet that Gustavo Rodriguez will rise to a level of such extraordinary public relations and media acumen as Rodney Yoder showed. But I am confident that as long as Gus is a slave on the Elgin plantation, there will be copious details and embarrassing stories about day-to-day lives on the units posted on this blog. Gus isn't my only source for this material, but he's a pretty good one.

Those details and stories will also end up in public records of lawsuits.

TOCS California

OK, I'll jump back to a wider sociopolitical scene today. (You're welcome, K Unit.)

There is a movement for a ballot initiative in California called TREAT California. It's the brainchild of Dr. Jeannie Fontana. Dr. Fontana seems like a dicey character to me, because she apparently believes that if enough Californians take psychedelic drugs, the problems of mental health will be solved and the world itself will be redeemed. 

I would suggest that the initiative should be renamed "TOCS California" with TOCS standing for Trip Out Californians to Save the world" (and TOCS by the way might sound like "tax" with a West Coast accent, which would be appropriate here).

Jules Evans recently called Jeannie Fontana "...the Barbenheimer hoping to bring tax-payer-funded psychedelic therapies to all Californians," in an article with a picture of his subject looking very much like a classic Barbie doll right under the headline, TREAT California: the Manhattan Project of psychedelics?

Evans points out several issues with this intiative, including historical precedent that strongly suggests it could quickly become a corrupt boondoggle (did that happen with the atom bomb, too?!), and the prospect that over-promising benefits like the total salvation of humanity will blow back against promoters.

The corrupt boondoggle issue is raised partly because of Barbenheimer Fontana's own record with the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), an earlier initiative that California taxpayers funded to promote stem cell research. CIRM was fraught with conflicts of interest for 20 years and never developed a stem cell treatment that became available to the public. It ultimately gave about 90% of its funds to the private projects of board members.

Dr. Fontana told Jules Evans that she has learned a lot since she was with CIRM. During the pandemic, she divorced her husband and found universal love in Mexico by eating chocolates made by a shaman with psilocybin and ayahuasca. Then she proceeded on a real magical mystery tour, with ibogaine, MDMA, Ketamine, mescaline, DMT, and lots more psilocybin. Now Dr. Fontana wants to define a new industry through which everyone can take these drugs and be part of "the unifying force of the universe," which she knows in her DNA (?) will enable us all to "have the relationship of knowing."

I sure as hell am reminded(!) ...of Adelle Davis' 1961 book (as Jane Dunlap) about LSD! Davis wrote:

Many hundreds of people given LSD have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory. People who have had such experiences usually agree that deep within lie goodness unimaginable, wisdom, music, talents of every variety, joy, peace, humility, love, and spirituality, to name a few.   

Adelle Davis died of bone cancer in 1974. Her son told me sadly that his mother's final drug of choice was not LSD, but morphine, in rapidly increasing doses. We'll have to see whether Barbenheimer Fontana can do any better than that. 

As the French say, plus ça change.... 

Dan Malone

Dan is a social worker on K (Faiza Kareemi's "love unit"). Like almost everyone else who works on the EMHC plantation, he started out wanting to help people. His intentions were mostly frustrated within a few years, and he began thinking about getting away with pretenses until his state pension accrued.

Now he mostly pretends, every day. He pretends to be a "mental health professional" with special access to scientific brain technologies that enable the amazing team he's on to medically cure human difficulties in cognition, emotion and behavior. This was the pretense favored, possibly even believed, back in 2014 when Jeff "freak of nature" Lieberman gave his speech to the APA convention and tried to get people to take my picture.

That was almost a decade ago, and no one believes the pretense now. Psychiatric "diagnosis" has been widely revealed to be bullshit, and "treatment" clearly sucks as bad as ever. That doesn't mean a guy like Dan never helps anyone. But when he does help someone, it's despite any allegiance he may have to psychiatry, despite the incompetent fakers who surround him at EMHC, despite his unfortunate training in false methodologies and explanations, despite the real work that takes up the majority of his time and energy, which is pointless paperwork and lying.

With all those strikes against him, it's really quite impressive that Dan does occasionally help somebody, and he should be honestly admired for that. The problem is, he has to pretend and lie, constantly, to everyone. That just turns anybody plain, damned stupid.

On the 27th of July, Dan went to the trouble of interrogating one patient on the unit over what Gus had been seen discussing with him that day. In fact, Gus had simply been explaining a form to request preferences for phone time (or some such mundane daily affairs), in the event that the guy would be absent for a religious service when staff went around to take a poll. But Dan was very ready! or even hyper-alert, to suspect some dark conspiracy. It was stupid.

Then yesterday just after 8:00 AM, Dan made a tangential remark that Gus had better not be threatening Dan's patients! Gus asked where that came from, and it turned out that another patient had simply worried aloud about Gus reporting rules violations on K Unit (e.g., Gabby handing her cell phone around for Latwon and other favored patients to use; or the pervasive black market trade in personal possessions). So Dan arbitrarily converted that into a threat, apparently establishing his role as the protector of anyone Gus might report, even if rules (or for that matter laws, like those that establish custodial sexual abuse as a felony!) are being broken and Gus' reports are fully accurate. 

Gus has become dangerous. Not because he would ever hurt himself or anyone else due to any faux "mental illness," but because he does not like the mafia culture on K unit, and he has realized that merely to maintain his own integrity, he must write reports which disturb the status quo. Gus is apparently dangerously powerful in the eyes of some staff, because he's not afraid and won't stop. I have tried to help him with this, mostly by admonishing him to be very strict about the truth, but otherwise urging him to continue.

It just now occurs to me that my Twitter friend, the San Francisco psychiatrist Joe Pierre, spoke quite directly about this phenomenon during a recent presentation he gave. Joe tries to explain conspiracy beliefs as a little bit (but not very) pathological, and theorizes that they may be caused by a combination of epistemic mistrust and marketplace misinformation. These factors are obvious on K Unit!

I sort of regret that my advocacy for Gus may put me at odds with some staff who are essentially well-intended, like Dan Malone (maybe Stoika Meyer, too, by the way), but who have really just become plain damned S-T-U-P-I-D from lying too much.

And I think that's a better explanation than Frisco Joe's complex epistemology and Marxism.

Oh, well.

Gabby & Latwon, Gus, Peter Neumer (light entertainment now)

OK, enough with philosophizing and grand plans to solve everything. I want to get back to the nitty-gritty of misbehavior and corruption at Elgin Mental Health Center and all around IDHS!

Gabby and Latwon remain visibly inseparable on Faiza Kareemi's K Unit. Everybody can plainly see that this female staff and male patient have some special relationship. The only one who apparently worries about it is my guy Gus. And what he gets for noticing, is arbitrary losses of privileges (LOP's) which are really thinly disguised retribution.

(Just for the record, I don't worry much about special relationships between staff and patients. It's bound to happen, people are perverts. But it totally amazes me that EMHC/IDHS is so willing to casually foster more civil lawsuits and demonstrate the psychiatric slave plantation character of the system! In fact, if I ever worry about this, it's because it might be too good to be true, somebody might be setting me up.)

My guy Gus needs to get other "patients" on his side, but on K Unit they are nearly all effectively bought off. It's more of a mafia-like culture than most other parts of the plantation. The guys who are willing to shut up and accept cheap favors for not verifying Gus' "unimportant" allegations of policy violations, or for shunning or harassing Gus, are encouraged to believe they will get positive reports to their criminal court judge about their treatment progress. 

It's also pretty easy for low-ranking overseers to call one person's protests and complaints "symptoms" when it's only one person (and when the "symptoms" are those of bullshit "diagnoses" to begin with) so any lone protester or complainer can be psychiatrically buried.

But if Gabby and Latwon are in love or infatuated (like Christy & Ben, Christy & Mansoor, Christy & Angelo, Erica & Michael, Michelle & Mickey, Shinzetta & Kevin, Mark & Jennifer... and how many other illicit plantation "couples" we may never know about -?- going all the way back in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings), it will come to a bad end for them, and for anyone who has ignored or swept the clues under the rug in exchange for phone, snack or contraband favors.

Going up the food chain a bit, Peter Neumer has resigned as IDHS Inspector General, supposedly to accept a job as Inspector General for the Chicago Park District. I'm not sure whether that's a more prestigious position, or maybe the Park District has more money to pay him than the state has... or whether it's another example of the strategy that seems to have been adapted from the Catholic Church, just moving people to some other place if they were complicit in abuse, and hoping the victims will lose track. 

It seems to me that Chicago parks are a smaller sphere of responsibility than the whole state of Illinois. On the other hand, soccer games and picnickers are more pleasant than mental health by a long shot!

Keeping it light here.

A three-point plan

I believe that our problems with mental health and substance abuse will become far more tractable if we make these legal reforms:

1) Totally eliminate the insanity defense;

2) Fundamentally reform rules about mental fitness to stand trial; and

3) Change medical control over drug access to requirements for prescribed expert information and advice.

In criminal cases requiring an element of mens rea, the so-called "insanity defense" is superfluous anyway, because a jury can determine that the defendant did not have criminal intent. For example, if a mother was so delusional (e.g., from the side effects of psychiatric drugs) as to truly believe that cutting her five-year-old's head almost off would save the beautiful child from hell, that her daughter would go immediately to heaven and be happy rather than be abused by sex traffickers and sold into slavery, maybe it's clear that the mental knowledge of wrongdoing requisite to the crime of murder was lacking.

Some U.S. states have reduced the use of NGRI pleas to nearly zero, by revising presumptions, burdens of proof and procedures. Illinois, unfortunately, is not one. Here, anyone who ever had any contact with the mental health system is encouraged by the criminal courts to consider an NGRI plea when they're charged with almost any felony, all the way down to assault and car theft. It has virtually become a system where a prosecution has to be approved by the psychiatrists before a defendant is even allowed to plead guilty or not guilty.

Judges and juries simply cannot defer to medical experts about whether crimes were committed and whether punishment should be meted out. This is a difficult social task, requiring semi-divine wisdom over the long haul. We have a system of English law which acknowledges the imperfect nature of human judgment and strives to mitigate the errors caused by imperfection. Our system can be compared, very favorably in my opinion, to the Napoleonic or inquisitorial system, which relies on finding the wisest possible humans who are expected to judge more perfectly than others. 

Psychiatrists have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are not any such wisest possible humans!

Likewise, these "mental health experts" should not be trusted to say whether an alleged perpetrator is fit to stand trial. On any given day, Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for the costs to "hospitalize" at least a handful of defendants who understand perfectly well what their legal situation is, and what the process will be in court. They constantly argue that they shouldn't be at EMHC but want to go to trial ASAP; and as far as I can tell they only need to be "treated" because they disagree with their public defenders about trial tactics and strategy. 

This is absolutely not some manifestation of chemical imbalances in these defendants' brains for arrogant idiots like the crew on the tenth floor at 26th and California to "diagnose" and send back to Dr. Malis-with-malice to cure at EMHC by drugging them to make their trials more fair! It's a scam by petty bureaucrats who are too lazy or too incompetent to do their jobs in a rotten criminal justice system. If a defendant wants his/her day in court, there should be a much stronger presumption of fitness. "Unfit to stand trial" should be as obvious as the Defendant is physically incapable of communicating at all, or even getting out of bed to come to court. 

These reforms to NGRI and UST laws and definitions are pretty easy. I could probably write the bills for our General Assembly in an afternoon. The last reform, to drug policy, is more interesting.

I wrote about this some years ago, and here and there my ideas got some favorable response. I have never received any suggestion or comment that made me think my specific plan to turn drug regulation on its head would not work. I haven't reviewed it myself more recently, in the context of the current, ballyhoo'd "psychedelic renaissance." My instinct is to worry a little more about easier access to dangerous drugs in the short run; but in the end, the only way to simultaneously solve substance abuse and mental health coercion will remain more individual responsibility, less reliance on the supposedly benevolent authority of false "brain experts."

So that's the 3-point program to save the world in mental health: unceremoniously dump the insanity defense; let accused criminals have their day in court; and solve drugs with education and responsibility. 

You're welcome!

Why we're not solving mental health and substance abuse problems

There are simple reasons why we have not solved, and might never solve, problems in mental health and substance abuse. But it might be possible to solve these problems, if we can honestly and creatively confront the reasons we have failed to do so. I count three reasons:

First, we erroneously believe insanity is brain disease.

Second, we mistakenly think we can manage people like animals.

Third, we confuse help and control.

Insanity is not brain disease. If you want to use medical metaphors just to prevent the careless exclusion of doctors who are so insecure about their social value anymore, you could probably say it's moral disease or moral atrophy or moral disorder, or something like that.

More fundamentally, insanity is just a compulsion or constant intention to stop or destroy (anything and everything). Anyone who kills or enslaves another human being is insane. Actually, anyone who knowingly commits or omits actions to cause more harm than good is insane, at least for the time it takes to do that. The fact behind this is the basic goodness of the individual. People naturally try very hard not to commit crimes or hurt others, because they are good. When they become obsessed with stopping and destroying, they are not being themselves, but have (covertly, unconsciously) "chosen" at some point to solve an overwhelming confusion by being a synthetic, evil entity.

But the bottom line is, even if brain disease can cause a convincing appearance of insanity, insanity itself remains a decision to be evil or stop and destroy things in response to an unsolvable confusion. When psychiatrists fiddle with brain chemistry they are more likely to create insanity than to cure it.

People cannot be managed like animals. This is mostly because people are almost always smarter than animals, and they usually like each other more than they like most animals. People have (human) animal bodies, of course. But they sometimes consider that their integrity to themselves is more important than their bodies, and that their self-determinism and honor are more important than their immediate lives. It is doubtful that non-human animals indulge in the luxury of such considerations very often, if ever.

The whole psychological model of "the human animal" was a philosophy of political control, which bucked up against ancient and much better understanding, beginning really as late as the Nineteenth Century. With the advent of the modern state, life became complex and leaders like Bismarck needed to become more extreme. Apparently in response to the confusion of modernity, when there were suddenly over a billion human beings for the first time, and complex machines became powerful enough to transform life, the idea that man is merely an animal made a good excuse for killing as many people as necessary to maintain "order."

Such "order" ultimately manifested in 1945: 30 million war dead, social and economic ruin, true existential threat to our whole species and all life on Earth.

The curious little error which, in my view, ties the psychiatric idea that insanity is brain disease together with the fundamental psychological concept of man-as-mere-animal... is the failure to distinguish help and control. Both are legitimate activities of society. Every good person wants to help others and is pleased to be helped by others. But it seems that accepting control from others and exerting control over others come less easily for most of us.

Thus, when we are faced with a necessary task of control, we wish it were really a helping project, and we pretend. If we should control a crazy person so they don't hurt themselves or others or destroy things, we call it "treatment" (help), and we say if the person doesn't want our help, it's because their animal brain is defective. The truth is, we are afraid to tell the crazy person, "You are making us nervous so we are going to control you now." So instead, we lie and say, "You need to take this medicine to help balance the chemicals in your brain."

(NEXT: A three-point plan to solve it all!)

WE MUST STOP!

 Forcing people to be "treated" is an abomination.

Where medicine is helpful, people ask for it and want it. They even want it when it just might be helpful and they don't quite understand why, as far as they can tell it's just magic.

So why does psychiatry have to threaten its patients to get them treated, while dermatologists and ophthalmologists have two-month waits for appointments for regular patients? Veterinarians are also backed up for weeks, at least in my neighborhood. But within a short commute, there are two state institutions where hundreds of mental patients are held involuntarily because otherwise they would not accept the drugs that the doctors say "help" them. And Illinois has four more plantations like that scattered around the state, plus quite a few locked psych wards in private hospitals.

It's completely unnecessary to be anti-psychiatry or a Scientologist, to notice this glaring contradiction. Psychiatry claims to be medical help, but the people buying that claim are not the patients: the patients don't want or ask for this "help," and the real customers are people who are afraid of the patients or fed up with the patients.

Most state psychiatrists I know have private practices, too. They'll argue that plenty of their patients are voluntary. The trouble with that is, every one of those "voluntary" patients knows that if they tell their "doctor" certain things (e.g., "I am done with these rotten SSRI's, I feel like just checking out of this rotten life!") or if they fail to tell their "doctor" other things (e.g., "I believe in ADHD, and my son has a chemical imbalance in his brain that needs amphetamines just like diabetics need insulin!"), they can be threatened by some unfriendly state power.

Each step you take on that slippery gradient of mental health makes it more difficult to turn back, and at the bottom you find yourself held down by six goons or chained, while Richard Malis-with-malice forces the needle into your body with drugs to turn you into a subhuman slave for your own good.

The reason I have spent twenty-two years representing and advocating for "mentally ill" people found not guilty by reason of insanity or unfit to stand trial for violent crimes, is that the state institutional system is the ultimate redoubt of an evil regime which must be obliterated if there is ever to be a social order on this planet based on human rights and respect.

Many of my clients are good people, or potentially good people. They are hard to help. But their slave-masters are bad people, and they are easy to frustrate. I just love to frustrate bad people; it makes me happy, like sailing and walking on the beach. If I can help a couple good people along the way, that's fine.

The main thing is we must STOP forcing people to be treated. It degrades both medical science and the law. If you're afraid to control others you will be controlled by chaos. And if you're afraid to hurt others you surely will.

ABOLITION!!

When Lincoln called the banners in 1861 there was no national consensus about abolition of slavery. Britain had abolished the Atlantic slave trade and was actively suppressing it. But the views of crazy people like John Brown were very far from generally accepted. Africans were believed to be naturally inferior, unassimilable into Anglo-American civilization; and the most advanced (by our modern moral perspective) solution to the problem of slavery in the southern states was a mass deportation scheme. 

It took several hyper-condensed years of brutal, destructive  military conflict and unparalleled political struggle to convince America's greatest President he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a purely military strategy disconnected from moral issues of slavery, and later succeed in passing the Thirteenth Amendment. He had to tear the USA to pieces and put the country back together again in a new form.

Abraham Lincoln had always found slavery repugnant, but by the time he took his oath of office he was uniquely destined to be a military leader with no opportunity to engage in moral disputes over race or human equality. He won the war before he was assassinated: the rest, for which the whole world remembers and honors him, was incidental to his real job. (The best history of this is McPherson's Tried By War.)

I have little or no idea what it might ultimately take to abolish involuntary psychiatry. When I tell my neighbors, or even my own family, that we simply must do so, their confused reaction is reminiscent of the American Colonization Society in the early 19th Century, i.e., "Well, all those people who really are mentally ill and dangerous obviously can't live with us, so where are we going to put them?"

I try to explain that the whole idea of putting those people somewhere is moral and scientific nonsense. They have to live with us. Medicine will never cure problems of human cognition, emotion and behavior. These are not, never were, and never will be issues of the body or brain. They are in the end, necessarily religious issues.

"Treating depression" or "mental illnesses" is a sick joke now, the biggest and most obvious failure of our science and our civilization. That failure threatens to discredit the very value of reason in human affairs. Psychiatry's current drastic resort to brutal psychedelic mental and neurological landscape-leveling, with a forlorn hope of "integrating non-ordinary states of consciousness," is equivalent to the artillery barrage on Sumter when we failed to solve slavery with Christianity.

Now we have failed to solve insanity with medicine. Will we have some new destructive war? What will the collateral damage be? Whatever happens, forced psychiatry will not survive.

We need a Lincoln, and I’m not it; but I can keep suing the bastards.