NOTICE

To anyone I mention by name or otherwise identify in this blog (past, present or future):

If I write anything about you that is not true, and you call me and tell me, I promise I will retract any untruth. If I insult you in a way that is not fair, and you call me to complain, I promise I will pay attention and amend my written comments to be less unfair. 

My cell phone is 847-370-5410. I’ll talk to anyone. I will never mention or reveal that you have called me if you ask me not to. I only want the truth to be known and justice to be served. I believe that an overwhelming majority of people are well intended and want to help others.

Packard MHC, Lincoln South Unit

Much the same as on all the plantations in the Illinois psychiatric slave system, the issue of "patient" phone use gets huge attention at the Packard (née McFarland) plantation. The Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code, 405 ILCS 5/1-100 et seq., specifies, inter alia:

Except as provided in this Section, a recipient who resides in a mental health or developmental disabilities facility shall be permitted unimpeded, private, and uncensored communication with persons of his choice by mail, telephone and visitation.

(Section 2-103.) This same section of the Code further states:

    (a) The facility director shall ensure that... telephones are reasonably accessible...
    (b) Reasonable times and places for the use of telephones... may be established in writing by the facility director.
    (c) Unimpeded, private and uncensored communication by mail, telephone, and visitation may be reasonably restricted by the facility director only in order to protect the recipient or others from harm, harassment or intimidation, provided that notice of such restriction shall be given to all recipients upon admission. When communications are restricted, the facility shall advise the recipient that he has the right to require the facility to notify the affected parties of the restriction, and to notify such affected party when the restrictions are no longer in effect....

Most slaves feel the right to use the phone is one of their most important rights. Without it, the plantation occupies their entire world, which becomes a world of dehumanizing oppression. The overseers know this, and they use it mercilessly against anyone who appears to question or doubt their superiority and their absolute authority over all aspects, no matter how broad or intimate, of an involuntarily committed person's mental, emotional, social and behavioral life.

My client Mickey was in the middle of a phone call with his family yesterday on Lincoln South Unit, when "STA Rob" (full name under investigation) arbitrarily ended the call from a switchboard in "the bubble" (nurses' station) by disconnecting the phone Mickey was using. This was rude and upsetting to Mickey and his family, and probably contrary to elaborate and voluminous statutory, administrative and local rules or procedures. 

Mickey walked over to the bubble and asked who had shut off the phone in the middle of his call. Upon being told that the culprit was "STA Rob," Mickey asked why, no doubt in a clear tone of protest. Rob became quite hostile in response, yelling (according to multiple witnesses), "Get the fuck away from the bubble!"

Well, Rob probably disconnected Mickey's call by mistake, and knew he had screwed up but didn't want to admit it. He's a fairly new, low-level overseer on the plantation, only 23 years old. Rob once admitted to Mickey that he smokes a lot of weed, even while he's working, during breaks (probably in his car in the parking lot). If he was high when he disconnected Mickey's phone call, the incident and the hostility which ensued could easily have been almost accidental, not intended as personal retribution.

The problem is, Mickey knows he really has to watch his back right now. His Thiem date is in the first week of January, and given any slightest excuse, somebody might try to prevent him from walking out the door at the last minute.

Thankfully, the two most important members of his "treatment" team, Kasturi Kripakaran, MD (the psychiatrist, née "Dr. Cash") and Zachary Naylor (the social worker), seem to be on Mickey's side. They just authored a court report stating that Mickey is mentally stable, not a threat to himself or others, and not in need of mental health services on an in-patient basis. By that testimony there should be absolutely no legal cause to hold Mickey on the plantation any longer than the next three weeks.

However, I hasten to add, this same court report added an arbitrary comment that Mickey is in need of outpatient mental health services. I'm not sure why Dr. Kripakaran and Social Worker Naylor thought it was their business to include such recommendation in a court report. Neither they, nor anyone else in the Illinois Department of Human Services, nor the court itself, will have any jurisdiction to require Mickey to be a psychiatric patient after his Thiem date. He may want to be a patient or find it helpful to be one, but if he wants and chooses to refuse psychiatry altogether, no one can stop him unless he commits a crime or presents a clear and convincing danger to himself or others.

It may be that mental health professionals just habitually promote psychiatry whether anyone is likely or can be required to accept "services" or not. It may also be that Dr. Cash and SW Naylor are ignorant of the law (as they are sort of entitled to be, but not entirely), or that they are just so used to slaves obeying their every whim and believing their every opinion that their arrogance in the current circumstances of the court report completely escaped them.

But I don't need to cause trouble for the Packard treatment team. The stoned-on-the-job STA Rob is a good enough target for the time being.

It's not the peculiar fault of "STA Rob." If the system were at all honest, I'd have no targets.

Norman Lear and Henry Kissinger

Norman Lear made people talk by producing breakthrough TV sitcoms like All in the Family. Henry Kissinger made people talk by running an American foreign policy which employed waterboarding. 

Both Ashkenazi Jews died the same week at ages of 100+, and received long obituaries in the New York Times. Lear was an outstanding spokesman of American peace, and Kissinger was an outstanding spokesman of American war. One could go all Tolstoy over it.

It is impossible for me to imagine that those who have lived great lives of war and peace could ever have believed in psychiatry. I don't mean "believed in it" just as a putative medical specialty which they have little or nothing to do with, or as an incidental fixture of philosophical or social theory, I mean in their hearts and in their guts. 

Kissinger didn't investigate whether Zyprexa or Adderall might help Menachem Begin or Mao Zedong be more amenable to peace. Lear didn't microdose psilocybin mushrooms to create Archie Bunker, the irascible right wing bigot we all still somehow liked.

It's arguable whether either of these extraordinary people changed his world very much, though they both clearly wanted to. Neither man seems to have ever said he was especially disappointed. The lesson from Tolstoy is that happiness lies in finding and appreciating, or creating, beauty and meaning in everyday, mundane things. Rabbi Harold Stern said we don't blow shofar when Yom Kippur falls on shabbat, because the common discipline of observing a weekly ritual is more holy before God than the uplifting drama of observing an annual one.

Psychiatry simply denies, or tries to remove, all meaning and beauty, all creation, from life. The only discipline that's accounted for at the EMHC plantation is imposed on slaves by their masters. It's a system of punishment, not self control. "Insight" is only professed (truthfully or not) agreement by slaves with the orthodox plantation line: you are a brain, your illness causes your behavior, mistaken thinking and inappropriate emotion; your meds are necessary to treat your behavior, thinking and emotion, which we understand and you don't. We own all of you, so take your meds or you'll never get out of here!

In such an environment, how can "doctor" or "patient" ever find and appreciate, or create, beauty and meaning? Perhaps only by recalcitrance, non-compliance. Slaves don't comply with "treatment" and overseers don't comply with rules against having sex with slaves.

It makes them happy, but only for a while. They don't live to 100.

Psychiatry and Henry Kissinger

Ben Rhodes' ungenerous eulogy in the November 30 NYTimes is such a beautiful piece of writing, about such a phenomenally significant character during my lifetime, that when I read it aloud to my wife this morning, it was hard for me not to cry. (Maybe it's my age, history makes me cry.) The first paragraph in this guest essay ended with the datum, "Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not."

I'm not too sure about style. But when it comes to power, I am quite sure there is no substitute for an idea. You cannot bomb an idea out of existence. You cannot shoot an idea in the head. And contrary to the apparent modus operendi of medicalized mental health, you cannot drug an idea or manipulate people's brains to control ideas. Behind and beneath any form or any use of mechanical power, there is always an idea. And in the event, that idea might be very slippery. 

For the sake of argument, let's presume that the idea which motivated all the horrible powers of war in recent centuries, and probably throughout human history, has been, "We must reach farther to greater heights, we must get bigger, as individuals, as a group, as a race, as a species. This is the only game." 

Well... what greater heights? Bigger how? If you get bigger, does that mean I am smaller? How is this game organized? Who is the opponent? Do we have referees? 

Power serves ideas, and if ideas go in and out of style, then power changes hands. Saying ideas go in and out of style but power does not, puts the cart before the horse. Purpose and function monitor or control structure, not the other way around. 

I'm currently reading Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, by General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts. The authors point out that the first and most vital job of any commander is to get the big picture, or the strategy, right, and then to make sure everyone else agrees on that big picture or that strategy. Hence, e.g., in the 1948 War of Independence, a small volunteer Israeli military managed to defeat five professional Arab armies on the other side. The Jews all understood the existential purpose of defending their nascent state, while the Arab soldiers were wondering why they had to be there.

People who believe that power is the thing, power is reality, are usually people who have lost their own motivating ideas, and are therefore likely to lose their power. They only hope ideas will go in and out of style fast enough that their opponents won't stay or become strong.

My clients often come to me in the belief that as a lawyer, I have my hands on the power of the law, which controls the locks on the nuthouse doors confining them as involuntary "patients". The thing they don't understand, and the thing I have to explain to them before I can be of any help, is that the law is not a mechanical power, it is in fact agreements between people, like judges, public defenders, psychiatrists, social workers, neighbors. 

People's ideas control the law. This is true in a big context of who becomes the next President or what nations are allowed to exist; it's also true in the small context of who is mentally ill and dangerous. You have to be able change one person's mind: that's the only way you change any existing power arrangement, whether it be international borders, or court ordered privileges and conditional release.

Malis, Hussain, Corcoran and their ilk seem to believe that people's minds are their brains, and their brains can obviously be manipulated (with the power of drugs, shock, etc.) to affect their minds, to make them think, feel, and behave "better" (meaning more in line with the ideas of other people around them). This is exactly what psychiatry is about, using power to change ideas. 

This is also a source of huge trouble for the ongoing "psychedelic renaissance," which is a mistaken psychiatric strategy. Everybody can see that the drugs are powerful; but they fail to notice, e.g., that psilocybin-as-medicine is fundamentally irreconcilable with psilocybin-as-religion, and the power can never be predictably aimed to change any idea. The ideas, as set-and-setting, direct the power.

The misconception is laughable but for so much blood and treasure wasted on it. Using ideas to change power is much easier. It's what you have to do anyway, because that's now the world works. And just incidentally, when you think you have changed someone's mind by application of mechanical power, you ignore the possibility that you are being deceived, and you render yourself defenseless against someone's real ideas which you can't know or predict. Is Baker King of Egypt?

In Henry Kissinger's time we came to love the mechanical power of nuclear science and medicine, pretending that nuclear science and medicine are not actually our own ideas to begin with. That is hypocrisy.