Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call...

A little over five years ago, I published an article on this blog which mentioned the enthusiasm of a particular state psychiatrist for Ketamine as a promising treatment for depression. I should hasten to point out that I do not know Vikramjit Gill personally. I don't know whether he self-treats for depression, or whether he has any experience with or affinity for psychedelics in general.

But I do think it's a reasonable prediction... that frustrated "mental health professionals," who see their specialty criticized more and more frequently, who find themselves degraded as quacks or plantation overseers or human rights criminals, and who fail to help their patients every day... will be likely to reach for new and radical solutions.

History suggests that people who get into psychedelics go quickly over-the-top-evangelical about it. Ken Kesey was desperately devoted to "pranking Amerika" with LSD, and Tim Leary dedicated much of his life to "internal freedom." They were both latecomers, and they both went to jail. In an earlier decade, the CIA's Richard Helms said LSD was "dynamite!" and celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis recruited young teens for her Beverley Hills psychoanalyst friends to experiment on. Those enthusiasts of the 50's, unlike the Haight-Ashbury hippies ten years later, tripped with impunity, because they kept it private for their own elite circle. Psychedelic drugs have nevertheless always been an embodied imperative scream: "NO CONTROL!"

That's why "treatment" team members and patients, inside or outside of proper clinical contexts and proper informed consent requirements, might just get a little sly. After all, I know an STA who stood lookout while her friend smoked a "blunt" in the car with an EMHC patient on conditional release. Then the STA spent the night with that patient at the Hyatt Rosemont. The tryst wasn't very sly, the STA used her own credit card for two hotel rooms! (Hey friend Kristine Iglesias: were you in Room 414 or 415?)

Somebody in Vik Gill's position, or Michelle Evans' position (not to mention a position as the IDHS King of Psychiatry, AKA "Statewide Forensic Medical Director"), could figure out how to make a deal with a patient or a social worker somewhere, like maybe way out of sight where there's a statue of Popeye....

Nobody wants to deal with violent psychotics or psychiatrists. That's exactly why we have the mental health system that we have. We are all eager to believe that guys like Gill, Corcoran, Evans and Bogle are professional "experts" to whom society has properly delegated the job, so we don't even have to look at Chester or Elgin. We don't have to think about it.

But the "experts" don't do the job they are supposed to do. What the hell, they can't! So to take what could have been the title of an Adelle Davis book in 1959: Let's All Trip On LSD!

Who's gonna get caught?

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