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.