You may compromise patient safety

A recent comentary in JAMA Open Network highlights recent research indicating that empathy and respect for patients, in communications between clinicians, may enable better information recall and thereby avoid negative impacts on patient safety and quality of care. 

Empathy and respect for patients may seem like an obvious value under the old "bedside manner" rubric, but that's not what this is about. The research now shows that when one clinician tells another clinician something negative or stigmatizing about a particular patient, that communication hurts the patient's safety and the quality of care. When it's a cultural habit (as it often is) among medical staff, medicine itself is less effective.

It seems that almost every "patient" I ever knew in Illinois' forensic psychiatric system, i.e., on the plantations in Elgin, Chester, Chicago, Springfield, Anna, Alton... is stigmatized, disrespected, and described negatively by staff. Patients are all presumed to be defective, mentally disordered. Nobody can tell exactly what is wrong (supposedly, with their brains), so it's just a general constitutional inferiority, a fault or a subhumanity: these patients really can't be respected or empathized with, their vaguely defined  "illnesses" make them a nuisance and unpredictable, always hard to understand, often dangerous. 

In fact, psychiatric "diagnoses" are nothing more than epithets. They never help or enable any improvement. They are negative, stigmatizing tales about people, meant only to justify brute control. That doesn't necessarily imply condemnation of psychiatry, or of any particular psychiatrist's specific practices, as harmful to patients. My biggest objection has always been to the total dishonesty, the fraud. This is not any medical specialty which applies scientific knowledge to help people with their problems in thinking, feeling and behaving. It is an unnecessary, cowardly excuse for justice. It merely wastes human talent, blood and treasure. 

Read a few months' worth of progress notes for any individual. They will be over-obviously about almost nothing but how the person screws up, functions poorly, is mentally sick. But there is no real disease, there's only the fact that the clinicians writing these things don't like psychiatric patients, don't understand them, have no empathy, and don't know what to do with them.

The best example I can cite, perhaps, is Gus, who has been told repeatedly over some years, that nobody likes him. His psychiatrist, Dr. Vikramjit Gill, told Gus in so many words that he is the most disliked patient at EMHC. There's no way Dr. Gill would have said that directly to Gus (and I've heard him do so, myself, in monthly staffings when I was present), if he hadn't said it many times to other staff first.

Gus has been stigmatized, so he gets picked on, attacked and neglected. This is exactly what the JAMA commentary is about. Stigmatizing patients creates a degraded and unsafe standard of care in any medical institution. Gus has repeatedly suffered from medical conditions that probably would have been avoided or quickly remedied anywhere other than EMHC.

But psychiatric institutions are not so medical, at least not in the sense of real hospitals. They are a special case. They only stigmatize patients.

That's their business.

Heartless precarity

New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg claims that dealing with health insurers brings out the "heartless precarity of American life." This is a nice turn of phrase. (I looked up precarity which seemed like an unusual word. It means the state of being precarious or uncertain.)

But what's the real reason people feel uncertain when they think about or deal with health care? It's not that our American system is uniquely capitalist, unfair, or too expensive and unpredictable. We will never fix that. The real reason is that we Americans have uniquely come to believe that scientific medicine is the best route to salvation for an individual. This is a false belief which confuses and complicates everything for us. 

Psychiatry is the ultimate proponent of the false belief. Mental health professionals are dedicated, or labor under deference, to the proposition that each of us is merely a brain. 

Jon Franklin wrote going on four decades ago, that our deepest thoughts, our every emotion, our aspirations to love, to nobility and goodness, or to hateful revenge and evil domination alike, are all nothing more than complex reactions between neurotransmitters and receptors, interplay between the molecules of our minds.

In my opinion, this is the most vital issue raised by antipsychiatrists, variously exemplified by Thomas Szasz, Big Phil Hickey, and Laura Delano, among many others for whom I have huge admiration. Their personal beliefs may differ from my own in ways that I don't know at all, but we almost certainly agree that psychiatry is the most destructive cultural influence in human history, at least since the Inquisition.

Racism might be the closest runner-up to psychiatry, but as I read history they're merely arms of the same evil social body. Who could believe another person was less human because their skin was a different color, without accepting the fundamental falsehood that humans are all merely bodies, nothing but mud to begin with?

While we hold onto the false psychiatric belief our lives will continue to be full of precarity, and we will accuse random and unknown others of being heartless. Medicine is a good tool to alleviate suffering. It can be used more effectively than it is being used here and now. But we will still suffer, and we will still pay through the nose. As one song I heard long ago says, "We could laugh, or cry, or even say goodbye ...and know these bodies crumble through the years."

Maybe we will become a society that approves of a political policy for murdering fathers who work at health insurance companies.

Mangione, Goldberg and Malis are prophets of doom.

Psychiatria delenda est!

Incompetence and bad manners

There's a saying, never blame or allege bad or conspiratorial intent for situations that are just as easily explained by incompetence.

From my experience, this should be a major stable datum for understanding the Illinois forensic mental health system. I probably do not repeat it frequently enough to my clients, who hate the plantations and tend to see evil motives in everybody they deal with. I have two examples from yesterday and today.

At a staffing for Adrian, social worker Dan Malone was bound and determined to make the patient feel like he was wrong for refusing to have his vitals checked or to be physically examined. Adrian had told staff he didn't want that "service" several times, but they continued to bug him, thinking he might change his mind or comply just because they kept after him about it. I spoke up, to point out that of course Adrian had a perfect right to refuse any such medical attention, and Malone admitted it but responded very pointedly: "And that's why we didn't make him do it, because he has a right to refuse..." 

I'm not saying Malone's tone was hostile. He did not add, "...you fucking idiot Kretchmar," but his attitude was arrogant and dismissive. I'd rather be straight-out called a fucking idiot than talked down to, any day.

Everybody can be forgiven for having a bad morning and being a little impatient occasionally. At least, everybody except psychiatric slaves. When Adrian gets impatient it gets charted, and the chart notes can be used in court to help prove he's too mentally ill and dangerous to have any privileges or liberty.

Malone insisted on asserting that the only reason Adrian was being harassed by staff for a physical exam or vitals check was for his own good. People went after him and incessantly asked him to comply because they care about his health. This was Malone's nonsense, of course. People harassed Adrian to get his vitals checked or to have a physical exam because they believed it was proper according to the clinical ritual they follow. After all, medicine über alles, right? Everyone should be happy to have their vitals checked repeatedly all the time, and get a complete physical annually, right? Anybody who doesn't agree with and religiously observe those sacred rituals probably has Prodromal Anosognosia (see DSM-5 diagnostic criterion B).

Dan Malone is some sort of clergy of the psychiatric faith. He knows what's best for Adrian much better than Adrian does. His motives cannot be questioned, even if his manners are plainly bad. After going on about how staff's concern for the health of patients was the only reason Adrian was asked if he wanted a physical exam or his vitals checked, Malone proceeded to question Adrian in a very condescending and insistent way (almost like, "What's wrong with you?") about why he would ever refuse these wonderful, helpful medical services provided by such perfectly professional, medical mental health staff.

Adrian didn't have much of an answer, but Malone kept going on, and I finally told him brainwashing was unnecessary. He didn't like that very much. He doesn't believe they do brainwashing at EMHC, but he's wrong. Anyone who doubts it should read Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). Psychiatric slaves recognize Lifton's descriptions of the Chinese techniques instantly, and staff on the plantations would, too, if they were able to be honest. They can't be honest though, they have to lie to themselves all the time. They probably can't read that book either.

Which brings up the incompetence factor. These people are mostly semi-literate cogs in a machine, pretending to be doctors specializing in the medical treatment of behavior. It's too obvious to almost everyone that they get poor or zero (or harmful) results, for which the taxpayers would never knowingly foot any bill. Dan Malone can't get any handle on Adrian, he can't help this patient, so he just has to blame him, disrespect him, despise him. It's not hard to see that, sitting in the room. It's not like Adrian misses it, either.

Meanwhile, over on N Unit, Gus was recently prescribed a heart monitor because his migraine meds might be having serious cardiac side effects. The cardiac doctor at UIC carefully instructed Gus on exactly how to use the monitor. He also mentioned that he didn't trust the data he was getting from EMHC, so he wanted Gus to take the monitor on and off himself, exactly as instructed. Later at EMHC, Dr. Seema Khan wouldn't let Gus do it, and wouldn't listen to Gus about how to do it. Who knows? Hopefully Gus isn't being denied appropriate medical care for a serious heart condition.

Everybody (staff anyway) at EMHC has to prove they can fight Gus. His social worker Joseph, who is supposed to be on a different unit but comes to N just to fight Gus, told him today that his packet for conditional release has gone to the court. But he refused to say when, or how he knows. A packet that recommends conditional release is a big deal; Gus has been waiting a long time for his packet to work its way through administration, his treatment team, second level review.... It probably should have been in court a couple years ago. In fact, comments by none other than the Almighty Statewide Forensic Medical Director, James Patrick Corcoran himself, suggested that Gus was ready for manumission long ago.

I told Gus to question Joseph closely about the conditional release packet, because a casual statement like, "...it has gone to the court," might be true or it might be just Joseph trying to get Gus to leave him alone. Gus needs to confer with his lawyer about an actual petition for conditional release, so he needs to be sure Joseph's news is accurate. He also needs documents, etc., to support a petition. (Tony Dillard wants to charge him a dollar/page for them though. That's suspiciously steep, to say the least!)

So Gus tried to ask Joseph politely, "When did that packet actually go to the court? What day did it get filed? How do you know?" Joseph simply refused to answer in any way at all, which makes no sense unless he was lying to Gus about the packet, which seems pretty likely to me.

But incompetence explains all of this at least as well as bad motive.

Decent manners would help.

The thing about apologies & retractions

Apologies can be sincere or insincere, and still make no difference in how anybody feels about an offense. 

Retractions likewise might have no impact at all, because the truth remains the truth, and lies remain lies.

There was once a "patient" at EMHC who was nicknamed Wookie or Scooter or Nookie or something else cute (I'm not sure what). He's long gone from the plantation by now, maybe very few people remember him. This guy accused one female staff of giving him crabs. (I looked up "crabs" to be sure I knew what it meant. It's gross, but if somebody accuses somebody else of giving them crabs, suffice it to say that does mean the accuser is saying he had sex with the accused.)

So... Wookie/Scooter/Nookie/whatever apparently had sex, or at least claimed or imagined that he had sex, with a female EMHC staff who shall go unnamed here. The allegation was investigated and the female staff was not fired. Perhaps she had some disability (other than crabs, that is) and EMHC/IDHS felt sorry for her.

But as I have said many times, when a staff in an IDHS institution has sex with a patient who is involuntarily committed for "treatment" of mental disorders which supposedly caused a crime, that staff commits a new crime. It's a serious crime, too, one that might earn the staff a prison sentence, and just about always should. I cannot fathom why anyone with any professional status or ability would ever choose an EMHC "patient" for sex. It is almost entirely incomprehensible to me. 

But apparently lots of IDHS staff do want psychiatric slaves for sex. Is there anyone reading this who has not heard credible rumors about some such "relationship" (terrible lying word for it!) at EMHC? Never mind whether you reported that suspicion to OIG within four hours... tragically, almost nobody does that!

And just by the way, another thing I cannot fathom is the concept itself, of "meaningless sex." In my own experience (which may be embarrassingly limited), that's an oxymoron. I was never jubilantly promiscuous, I always worried about it. Even a flirty look or a mostly social kiss and hug might be meaningful, and can often be memorable. Therein lies the problem. Sex is extremely powerful: it's a lot like LSD (the tiniest bit can cause huge effects), as anybody who ever had any knows. It's never meaningless or entirely free.

The female staff who had sex with Wookie/Scooter/Nookie many years ago has probably been a perfectly good girl ever since. But I guarantee she remembers him. I understand that, and I sympathize. She should rat out others, there are many.

Everyone should be interested. Everyone is.

More on Turley, Amanda Calhuon, N Unit

January 6th, 2021, has been called "an insurrection." I thought, even from the day it happened, that the use of that term was a cynical political tactic which dishonored our law and our history, not to mention three quarters of a million Americans who (as Lincoln said at Gettysburg) "gave the last full measure of devotion."

Trump's riot (or whoever's riot it was) at the Capitol was an upsetting and ugly warning; but it has been made much uglier by this dishonor. I come from a family who meant 1861-1865, not 1941-1945, when they spoke about The War... and that was when I was a kid in the 1950's, barely a decade after VJ Day but almost a century after Appomattox. 

One person was killed in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. The human cost of the American Civil War was beyond anyone's expectations at that time, and thoroughly beyond our understanding in the 21st Century. That insurrection claimed at least 2% of the entire population of this country. It was more deaths than those from all other wars in our entire history combined.

It also changed the fundamental character of the country. Constitutional changes eliminated most of the sovereignty of the states. We stopped saying, "the United States are..." and ever after said, "the United States is..." The constitutional changes gave this country a much better character. But who can study that history and believe Congress and the States would ever have bothered, let alone succeeded, in working out such a far reaching remake of the whole idea, due to the death of one person in an insurrection?

I have been told that the BLM riots in the summer of 2021 were also called an "insurrection."  (I don't remember that in the media, but I could have missed the meme.) Apparently about two dozen people were killed then, but I still find the application of the term to be a silly and dishonorable political ploy. 

Perhaps a few moments during the 1965 free speech movement in Berkeley, or the civil rights protests and mass marches later that decade, prompted some comments about "insurrection" during those times, too. It's the same thing though: public relations or propaganda. The ideological causes and arguments in 2021 and 1965 were utterly insignificant compared to the complete national mobilization of all moral and material power to save the Union and end slavery (or to dissolve the Union and protect slavery, depending on which side you were on).

Jonathon Turley expressed some of this view, and other opinions, in an article this week. I mostly agree with him. Meanwhile, some people suggest that what counts is not how many people die, but whether an event upsets ("triggers") somebody. As I noted in a post earlier this month, Yale's Amanda Calhoun advises her psychiatric patients to cut ties with their own families to avoid being upset about politics on Thanksgiving.

This is wrong. It's more wrong than calling January 6 an insurrection. It actually may be one of the most wrong, ridiculous, discreditable things any psychiatrist ever said. But it's only one example of how wrong psychiatry is. Calhoun thinks we should all avoid getting into fights no matter what, no matter how we have to lie to each other, or be insulted, or fail to help others, or even lose our families. The ultimate value here is some weird, almost unrecognizable version of "safety," especially the safety of our feelings (not of our families, that's for sure!).

Ironically, the only place this supposed psychiatric value of "safety" might not apply is in psychiatric institutions. Real physical safety takes a back seat to privileges, convenience, deference for mental health "experts," and certainly everyone's ability to bury their heads in the sand when anything bad happens. It's not so bad if a patient gets injured in a fight, or if a staff who doesn't toe the administration's line gets injured. But if somebody says something sarcastic about the powers that be or those loyal overseers who truly believe in psychiatric slavery... well, that's "verbal aggression" and that's bad. The overseers can dehumanize the slaves with fake "diagnoses" of non-verifiable, non-falsifiable "mental illness." Just don't ever give STA Quinton Ivy the finger--he gets away with battery!

An immediate example (just today!) of this distorted version of "safety," is N Unit at EMHC. Dr. Vik Gill has a "patient" who continues to violently attack anyone in sight for no reason. The eighth such attack by this same individual in the last couple weeks happened this morning. Somebody will be seriously injured soon. Dr. Gill can't do anything about that for two reasons. One, he has no clue how to improve anyone's behavior, he only knows how to drug people. And two, he's at the mercy of a fundamentally corrupt EMHC culture which thrives on violence among the psychiatric slaves as a method of control.

The Illinois Department of Human Services theoretically has a facility for violent "patients" like Gill's: a separate plantation called Chester Mental Health Center. Gill's violent patient should have been sent there  a long time ago, before eight other patients got beat up. 

It's possible that Gill wants a violent patient on his unit for some purpose of his own, but I don't think so. I think he's being set up by somebody above him. Somebody wants Gill to look bad, so they won't approve sending this violent patient to Chester.

The overseers stab each other in the back all the time.

Retraction and apology

An STA on Hartman Unit persistently asked a patient to tell me I falsely accused her in a post on this blog, of having sex with mental patients at EMHC. The post at issue is "Sex with mental patients again and again" published July 8, 2024. I accused a couple dozen people in that article. In the post itself and in other separate posts on the blog (e.g., here, here, and here), I repeatedly promised to retract any challenged accusation against anyone willing to tell me it was untrue or unfair.

No one ever bothered to convince me or tell me directly that my accusations are untrue or unfair. People are afraid to call me, either because they know that if their bosses find out they called me they'll be in trouble, or because they think I'm crazy and thereby dangerous to talk to. Maybe I don't blame them, but I want to point out that I'm going beyond my promise in an effort to show good will. It took me months to even figure out who the Hartman STA was, and what blog post was disputed. No one I ever accused by their full name, no one I actually know, has complained to me. My articles only name people in such ways that they can identify themselves or each other. 

Nevertheless, I hereby retract any accusation that anyone ever had sex with any mental patient. I apologize to all who have not been convicted of this crime, and hereby presume it only happened once in all of history. (The perpetrator in that single instance was convicted and sent to prison.) Although I have been told by long-time staff at EMHC that a whole list of individuals should be named as perpetrators, I now realize any staff who ever told me anything like that are liars. Anyone who says the crime I was accusing a couple dozen partially identified people of is endemic at EMHC and throughout the Illinois psychiatric slave plantation system is hopelessly brain damaged and psychotic. 

I would like to know how I could have been so mistaken about this, so anyone willing to help with my re-education is welcome to connect. I would prefer to sort it out completely, so that I know for sure who all was falsely or unfairly accused, whether by me, by my sources, or both. I really do not want to falsely or unfairly accuse people!

But what I long believed was that the Illinois Department of Human Services runs institutions that effectively perpetrate sex slavery under a guise of "medical help" for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. This would be incredibly damaging to enslaved individuals, and to the social order, not to mention to respect for the law and medicine in this state. If I must stop complaining and accusing, I sure do hope that I was delusional, for the sake of the victims, and the perpetrators.

If anyone  were in fact up against a mafia-like system with many weapons, legal and illegal, the truth would be very difficult to tell, because the truth might end such a system. Slavery, sexual abuse, fraud, and denial of due process are illegal and ugly. The public would not knowingly pay their taxes for it, so the system would have to fight the truth to survive.

That system does not, after all, sell so-called "mental health services" to those who actually consume them. The consumers don't pay: only others who dislike them or find them troublesome pay.

Help me out guys, I need to know whether my complaints and accusations are accurate or completely crazy, and whether my whole point of view is just plain wrong. Maybe after all, IDHS is a fantastic, benevolent group of medical mental health geniuses, and its consumers are uniformly thankful for it and toast its health every Thanksgiving.

Right? Maybe I need to shut up instead of complaining more loudly more often.

Maybe I should tell my clients to take drugs.

An old lesson

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote about what it means to debate the "Existence of Mental Illness." My friend Rodney Yoder commented from his own bitter experience that being locked up in, e.g., Chester Mental Health Center, is social segregation or correction, punitive as a matter of explicit and implicit policy. It is not medical help, "...and the average person understands this all too well."

The window dressing of psychiatry demeans both medicine and the law precisely because it encourages the public to pretend ignorance of social policy choices. There are standards of behavior which simply will be enforced one way or another, and legitimate scientific medicine never has much to do with that. The function of so-called "mental illness" is at least to deflect responsibility, and at best to encourage faith or hope for future progress. 

The problem is it wastes honest human effort in present time, and it ruins the public fisc. Yoder, as an avowed atheist, would argue that this is ever the result of religious faith. His mentor Thomas Szasz, and his expert witness Nelson Borelli, both wrote long and eloquently (as no compliment) that psychiatry is best seen as a state religion.

Two weeks ago today, the American election demonstrated some serious impatience with continuing poor results from social policy choices. The world is on edge, and people want change. They may not know exactly what change they want. They may bounce around between increasingly radical promised "solutions" for years. Nobody knows what will happen, but the understanding of the average person is much better than the authorities apparently believe.

People are not generally stupid, they're smart enough to survive. Some are infinitesimally "smarter" than others, but only for moments at a time. We have (contrary to elitists on our left) no real competent educated class; and (contrary to delusional reaction on our right) there certainly is no subspecies or race "higher" than the simple diverse majority, however deplorable or morally upright they may be. There certainly will never be "brain treatment" breakthroughs to afford broad salvation.

The Jewish High Holiday Prayerbook contains a page I memorized many years ago, which is the best prescription I can think of:

In well doing rather than in well being seek your salvation.

Leave for awhile the narrow sphere of your concerns, and with Israel's ancient seers ascend the mount of vision. Thence behold the millions of your fellow beings madly struggling for air and light and a place in the sun, and tearing each other's flesh in the panicky scramble.

You will forget your small cares in the woes of the defeated and helpless multitudes. The pang of compassion will grip your heart, a pang that for ought we know is the stirring of God within you. 

And you will cry, Oh that men were united to do Thy Will with a perfect heart!

Then descend into the valley where men die struggling. Thither take the vision, the pang, and the prayer, and transmute their urge into deeds of love. 

No apologies to my friend Rodney Yoder for being religious. And no apologies to the IDHS plantation overseers for being antipsychiatry.

We simply have to work.

Baker and Malis-with-malice

Dr. Richard Malis has a patient who has violently attacked other patients at least half a dozen times lately. In theory, one primary purpose of mental health treatment in an institution like EMHC is to keep crazy people from hurting themselves or others. But this patient of Malis-with-malice keeps on hurting others, and nobody does anything about it.

Today I found out that the latest casualty is my friend James Baker. James is an elderly African-American man who has been at EMHC for several dozen years (most of his life). Malis' dangerous, uncontrolled patient just walked up and cold-cocked him this weekend, sending him to the hospital! James only has one good eye, and the vicious, totally unprovoked blow to his head caused bleeding in that good eye. More medical evaluation will be necessary, as well as a very thorough investigation into why this patient of Malis-with-malice is allowed to wonder around the clinical unit freely to attack others at will.

Malis-with-malice tried to keep James Baker in chains for a long time, making it very difficult for him to get regular ophthalmology care for his glaucoma, until a Cook County Circuit Court judge finally put a stop to that. Now this violent patient, whom Malis just glibly allows to assault and batter people may have damaged Baker's one good eye. A casual observer might be forgiven for suspecting that this is on purpose.

Long ago, Rodney Yoder told me that psychiatric plantation overseers "dog fight" patients just for fun, and as a tactic of control. More recently, Barry Smoot has explained this as the characteristic "failure to protect," as reflected in the title to his book.

Anyone injured by Dr. Richard Malis-with-malice's violent patient should call me. You may have a civil claim.

Turley and the Yale Psychiatrist

I frequently read Jonathon Turley's columns because I agree with him about the indispensability of the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. Today, Turley takes Yale psychiatrist Amanda Calhoun to task for telling the public that it'll be just fine over the holidays, to cut off communication with your family members who voted for the wrong presidential candidate so you won't be "triggered" by hearing political views contrary to your own.

For Turley, this is a freedom of speech issue. He thinks we need more speech, more communication, more discussion, rather than speech controls and disconnection from family. He also thinks this is especially important in the context of elite universities like Yale. I certainly don't disagree with him.

However, I think the fact that Amanda Calhoun is Yale faculty is much less significant than the fact that she's a psychiatrist. She's encouraging family estrangement in the name of "mental health." I sure hope she gets sued for alienation of affection. (In fact, if anyone who reads this is negatively impacted by Amanda Calhoun's horrible advice for the holidays, or by similar advice of any other psychiatrist, call me, maybe I'll take your case on a contingency fee basis!)

It's not uncommon for psychiatrists to believe that their "expertise" is far more valuable than such a pedestrian thing as family. If only everyone were a good enough "patient" to take the drugs and electric shocks that psychiatrists prescribe, and to totally buy into the "diagnoses" of (fake) brain diseases, we wouldn't even need families, right? If only the psychiatric religion reigned supreme in the USA, we wouldn't need elections either.

Turley thinks Calhoun's view is political. It's not, it's psychiatric. The thing is, psychiatrists like Calhoun actually believe the only rational politics is to put them totally in charge.

They're wrong: that's prescribed harm, prescribed slavery.

More on "up for grabs"

My guy Gus has gone without any treatment plan review (TPR, or "staffing") in two of the last six months. This is a significant departure from established IDHS policy and practice, if not a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code.

In April 2024, Gus had no TPR because his assigned social worker, Xiaomara Ramirez, just refused to work with him after he suggested she was papering over the window of her office door so nobody would see what she was doing in there. (Actually, I was the one who suggested that, and I hearkened back to the social worker sex-with-patients flap circa 2017, which seemed darkly instructive.)

Then this month, October 2024, Gus' new replacement social worker, Joseph Basso, just didn't have time to arrange any staffing. After all, Joseph doesn't even work on the same clinical unit where Gus is housed, so the lines of communication are very slow or administratively awkward and responsibility is cloudy. Joseph probably doesn't want the thankless job anyway, and people higher up the food chain like Michelle Evans, or James Corcoran, have had to lie so much, every day for so long, that they no longer have the capacity to care.

Obviously there isn't much of a mental health treatment team for Gus at EMHC. In fact, it's becoming more obvious every week that there's very little legitimate mental health "treatment" for anyone at EMHC. 

There certainly is no recognizable teamwork toward the noble purpose promoted on that bronze plaque in the Forensic Program Building lobby: RELIEF AND RESTORATION, A PLACE OF HOPE FOR THE HEALING OF MIND, BODY AND SPIRIT. I don't recall seeing staff laugh out loud when they walk past that plaque on their way to their offices, but it seems like they must laugh to themselves.

For three days in a row last week, EMHC was reported to be short some number of critical clinical staff: seven staff down on Friday; five down on Saturday, four down on Sunday, just on one unit! Morale is down the tubes even more than normal. People just aren't showing up, and sooner or later that will mean more than skipped monthly staffings. It will result in security failures and tortious malpractice. Patients and staff will be seriously hurt, and if somebody dies the media may notice!

The plantations in southern Illinois are even worse than EMHC. I just spent a day at Choate. Seasoned public servants there are throwing up their hands and even joining me to just poke sticks at the mad dogs who run the system. There's no hope for rational improvement, the only course left and the only real entertainment is to sit back and watch it all burn down. 

Writing this on Election Day, I can't help comparing the situation at EMHC to the scene in the United States. The microcosm and the macrocosm are alike horrible. In fact, the idea that all human problems of thinking, emotion, and behavior are malfunctions in the brain which medical doctors know how to fix with drugs or other brute force, is key to understanding both disasters. 

Psychiatry is a false and suppressive concept that has infected our whole culture. It's hardly surprising that nobody wants to hold a monthly staffing for Gus.

Who reads this blog?

I occasionally review the statistics of page views for this blog, which can be fascinating data. Just for example:

• The single article which has gotten more views than any other, out of 433 or so, is from October 8, 2010, entitled "DSM 5 Proposal". It has gotten 5,250 views, about 2000 more than the closest runner-up. One obvious reason is that it's been published for a long time; another reason is that I have repeatedly promoted this one on social media. I'd like to think people also find it thought-provoking. It speaks to the first of two very simple points I harp on about psychiatry: "Diagnosis" is bullshit; and "treatment" sucks.

• Every now and then I notice patterns in the views. They can be telltale, because the universe of my readers is pretty well limited to mental health professionals who work in the Illinois plantation system as overseers of psychiatric slaves. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in attention to an apparently random assortment of old articles that have not been viewed for many years. One such, just this week, is from April 4, 2016, entitled "Chart Note Rebuttal." In 8-1/2 years this particular piece of writing got a grand total of about 1,400 views, but almost 1000 of those were prior to 2018. The article popped up this week though, suddenly getting seven new views.

RefusingPsychiartry has been a subject of regulatory investigation recently, after allegations were made (primarily or exclusively by Robert Sharpe, M.D., a particularly vicious overseer at Elgin MHC) that it sometimes reveals private information of my clients, thus violating my duty of confidentiality as an attorney. To the best of my knowledge, none of my clients have ever complained of anything I ever wrote about them. Bobby Sharpe would of course say they're all mentally ill after all, so as a psychiatrist he knows better than they do what's good for them. He probably believes he should even advise them or decide for them who their lawyer should be, and he probably also believes there's no need for any mental health law after all, as long as an M.D. psychiatrist is available to take charge. Tragically, many judges and attorneys often act as though they agree,

There may be an organized effort to censor me, which I should take as a high compliment but for the nuisance. With some degree of paranoia, I now tend to review the blog statistics with thoughts about who at ARDC is reading which articles. The one attorney who has admitted to running an investigation into Bobby Sharpe's allegations against me certainly is reading it and I welcome that, although I haven't heard from that attorney in quite a while, and I rather expected more "meet and confer" after I promised to cooperate fully. 

In any event, I have always invited criticism and protest from anyone whom I criticize on RefusingPsychiatry. I have publicly corrected or removed articles which I came to believe, after they were published, were unfair or untrue. But the story I have always told, and will always continue to tell, remains that the Illinois forensic mental health system is hopelessly corrupt to a point that it causes far more harm than good. The plantations must be closed down, and the masters and overseers must be prosecuted or removed from all positions of power to control people under a false guise of "medical help."

When I call people "masters and overseers," I am only pointing at a few of the guys I know at EMHC or in IDHS. Most of those I've met in 22 years of work are good public servants who got into the "mental health" profession because they wanted to help. Vik Gill is a decent doctor; Vicky Ingram is a very well-intentioned administrator. Many others, even some I have sued, are basically good people. The problem is, they discovered after taking their particular jobs that it's not possible to help the way they had hoped to, from inside this corrupt system. Then they started justifying and equivocating and fibbing and hiding. Now they find themselves demoralized or confused, and others find them stupid.

Ninety-five-plus percent of the people at EMHC are good guys. It's only a small handful that I call "masters and overseers." Consciously and publicly comparing that small handful to the earlier bad guys from the beginning of the Ruffin-Tibbets Century is not mere rhetorical flourish: it is practical, because it generally enables prediction. Slavery based in bio-material delusions propagated as "science" will repeat certain social patterns, over and over again through history.

However I must admit, I didn't really see the regulatory action against me coming out of Bobby Sharpe's hostility. I didn't mean to corner him so badly, and I didn't predict that he would have to turn quite so rabid.

Surprises are the spice of life.

Is IDHS just up for grabs or what?

Here's a wild hypothetical. What if they were to move 24 of the "worst of the worst" from the Chester plantation to the Choate plantation in only a few days? Chester is where they put the multiple ax-murderers, and Choate is supposedly just for innocent, developmentally disabled consumers, not forensics.

I think the guys from Chester's Baker Unit will eat the brains of the over-stressed Choate staff, and party at will with the vulnerable patients there. Without Chester's max-secure restraints, they might even go AWOL and cruise the beautiful Anna community for some entertainment.

Who would think this plan will be anything but a disaster? An idiot or a desperate madman? I think a lot of people are on their way out, in good ways or bad.

Good Yuntif, Gmar Tov

I remember a sermon from 45 or 50 years ago, which has stuck with me ever since. Rabbi Harold Stern of Congregation B'nai Emunah in Skokie noted that since Yom Kippur fell on Shabbat that year, we would not blow the shofar. He was initially apologetic, because he knew the children loved the dramatic sound of the ram's horn, and perhaps the thrill of that ancient clarion call was the biggest compensation they received for sitting obediently in temple all day, in dress-up clothes, through the mostly Hebrew service.

B'nai Emunah was a Conservative Congregation, not Reformed, but it had a large number of "three-day-a-year Jews." Most people fasted on Yom Kippur, or at least pretended to. The kids got out of school for the High Holy Days. Many of their mothers kept kosher homes, but they went out to restaurants for dinner and didn't always mind cheeseburgers. The men were of the "greatest generation" who fought through France or drove Higgins boats to Pacific beaches and then, having survived, returned home to obediently make money and babies for America. Some of them worked on Saturday.

Harold Stern was a very capable religious scholar, but he was an absolutely brilliant politician. His congregation was wealthy and large, and he was paid very well for many years, despite growing cultural cynicism and the youth rebellion that was in full flower by the time my wife and I were in high school. Stern later convinced the mother of a close friend not to attend her daughter's wedding because it wasn't Jewish; and in 1975 he told my wife and me that if I didn't go through elaborate rituals and grueling study to properly convert to Judaism (which he made a point of saying he wouldn't recommend anyway), then he would never officiate at our wedding. He was sort of a Jewish version of Richard J. ("shoot to maim") Daley or George Wallace to us. It seemed incomprehensible that he could get away with being so arrogant and mean, and yet be so respected for so long by our parents.    

The ultimate crowning-blow offense was when Rabbi Stern was appointed to officiate at my wife's grandmother's funeral. He refused to even consider any statements or recollections by family members as part of the memorial. These were people who had loved the deceased Bubbie all their lives, but Stern insisted that he knew what to say and he didn't need or want any advice or suggestions from anybody.

In retrospect, Harold Stern ruled his flock of almost 1000 families with guilt. They knew they were not Jewish enough and their children would be even less Jewish. Their parents and grandparents were frowning on them from their graves. They had somehow left it to the Orthodox to replace the Six Million. B'nai Emunah's people would remain negligent in many duties, despite their rabbi's best efforts. They were ignobly assimilated, and the congregation finally merged with another shortly after the end of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps ironically, its architecturally beautiful building was sold to an Assyrian foundation, and it now hosts classes teaching an ancient Middle Eastern language that is not Hebrew.

Nevertheless, that one sermon about why we don't blow the shofar when Yom Kippur comes on Shabbat established Rabbi Stern as an important religious figure for me. Blowing the ram's horn is itself work; but what of carrying it  to and from the synagogue? We are commanded to "Do no work!" on the sabbath; and we are also told to blow the shofar at the conclusion of the Day of Atonement. How do we choose which is the more important duty?

In God's eyes, the heroic, dramatic actions performed rarely or just once a year are not as holy as the routine weekly disipline. It's the ordinary, not the extraordinary stuff that counts most. We can dream all we want to about winning the lottery or an epic battle. But in the final analysis our happiness comes from mundane production of value added each week in life. If we can create our world in six days, then on the seventh we should rest: create time, plan for that weekly sabbath, not Christmas and New Years.

The current thrall of psychedelic drugs, and psychiatry's broader apotheosis of the brain, show our continuing human demand for a short-cut or a catalyst to give us mental health and spiritual salvation without a necessity for religious work and study, and tedious planning and collaboration. This is precisely the wrong instinct. 

The "miracle of modern medicine" is a graven image. Psychiatry is the golden calf most offensive to God.

Have an easy fast and keep the sabbath holy.

The Ruffin-Tibbets Century

I'm not sure how to relate this idea to mental health or Elgin Mental Health Center or Gustavo Rodriguez, but if you can bear with me, I'll try.

On April 12, 1861 at Charleston Harbor, Edmund Ruffin, having paid good money for the privilege, fired the first cannon shot against Fort Sumter, thereby opening the American Civil War. Ruffin was a wealthy planter who served in the Virginia State Senate, and a fanatically ideological proponent of African slavery, who truly believed (along with perhaps half the population of the United States at the time) that the Antebellum South's "peculiar institution" was ordained by God. 

In only a few years, Ruffin's view had been decisively proven wrong, and Abraham Lincoln expressed a different version of God's will: that every drop of blood ever drawn by slavery's lash should be repaid with another drawn by the sword. At Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, Antietam, the Wilderness, and on so many other bloody fields, Lincoln's version of God's will was grotesquely done. The United States was not the same country after that inferno.

A bit more than four score and four years after Ruffin's demonstration of his faith at Charleston, on August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets flew an American B-29 bomber named after his mother to Japan and killed more than 150,000 people with a single bomb. Tibbets never regretted doing this duty and later wrote, "Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don't care whether you are dropping atom bombs, 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it."

Only a few days after Tibbets had facilitated the final end of World War II, the United States effectively ruled the world. American ideals and political philosophy had only a single competitor, which American leaders quickly understood as a new existential threat they called "Godless Communism." But the planet was not the same, and morality was a very different subject, after humanity had arrived at a godlike ability to destroy everything and literally end the history of our species.

This century (84 years), bracketed by Ruffin's and Tibbets' separate dramas, was a pivotal moment in the far longer saga of Abrahamic faith irregularly collaborating with scientific reason. Humanity always wanted an Authority higher, or a necessary factual frame more real, than ourselves. We no longer have that. Our story, from the binding of Isaac to the Manhattan Project, is over. (Now we have such a weird thing as so-called "artificial intelligence," and we somehow convince ourselves to be terrified of our own created machines.)

The whole world is new, and it's a frickin' mess. This startles us and dismays us. It reduces our ability to live, partly because we do not recognize what has occurred. The old story is over. The Christian "golden rule" and mathematics alike have become almost irrelevant. We must create new things from scratch.

The way this probably applies to EMHC is, you guys can forget about anyone (and I must say, especially Gus!) believing you're even trying to help. They have learned that "help" means control and betrayal as much as anything else. You can also forget about anyone thinking your professional skills and your education give you any knowledge that they should be interested in. It's just too obvious to all these days, that "you don't know shit" and neither does anyone else. I don't suggest people are right in those attitudes, only that those are their attitudes.

What's necessary is a thing called two-way communication. In his book, Dianetics 1955, L. Ron Hubbard explained it as a very specific formula, a technical action that can be learned and drilled: "cause, distance, effect, with intention and attention, and duplication at effect of what emanates from cause," going first in one direction and then reversing to go in the opposite direction, between two people.

The easiest thing a person does is change his/her mind. In the interests of a better game, any of us will change our mind at the drop of a hat, and we can just as easily change it back if the new offered game doesn't turn out to be as good as we had hoped. Every problem, every conflict or unpleasantness, is dependent upon an absence or failure of two-way communication; when that absence or failure is remedied things get better, life gets better in any circumstance.

The current political culture of intolerant rage has everyone on a hair trigger to dismiss, fight and hate another person the moment they are revealed to be, e.g., a Democrat or an antipsychiatrist, at which time all communication must be refused. It's a hopeless, losing strategy.

The successful influencer does not promote their own opinion with magical power: they understand and suitably acknowledge the opinions they encounter in the world, and they create from those viewpoints of other people, at least until those other people know they are understood, until they become less anxious about changing their own minds and therefore more willing to turn the communication around.

Here's the real connection to mental health. Force is the ultimate losing strategy. The Ruffin-Tibbets Century finally taught humanity that exact lesson. Manipulating brains with drugs or electricity is force and it makes things worse. Only two-way communication by individuals unafraid of force changes minds and improves conditions.

You guys have law and guns, but if you can't change minds by communication alone, you will certainly lose.

And that's the lesson of history!

"Good psychiatry" is oxymoronic, "bad psychiatry" is redundant

The etymology or roots of the word psychiatry (psyche + iatry) suggest that this subclass of physicians can, or intends, to doctor the soul. However, they also deny that such a thing as the soul exists; they say the only thing that is real is the brain. 

I am quite sure more psychiatrists would claim to be brain doctors than would claim to be soul doctors. Years ago I attended a speech by the President of the American Psychiatric Association who predicted psychiatrists would be at the forefront of emerging brain science, and derive power and wealth from that close proximity. But I've never heard a psychiatrist in any similar position predict that the profession would benefit from its proximity to the emerging science of the soul.

Ironically, now the psychedelic drug cult tries to admonish all of us that we have some moral duty to turn on, tune in and drop out. It's the latest version of the "mental health awareness" imperative, and perhaps akin to the vaccine imperative. The next thing we know, we'll be getting cancelled for not agreeing that LSD should be widely available to everyone for the salvation of the world!

I recently read The Beginner's Guide to Ketamine Therapy for mental health, by Leah Benson, LMHC, Ed.M. (Leah Benson, LMHC, Ed.M.: Tampa, FL, 2023). This book has the character of holy scripture for psychedelic religion. It has a post-dedication page with a quote from Aldous Huxley's Collected Essays. But a Forward by Kazi "Zayn" Hassan, M.D. states that Ketamine is "...the biggest breakthrough in psychiatry in the last 50 years," and positions the psychedelic renaissance, IV ketamine clinics, non-profits like Rick Doblin's MAPS, and institutions like Johns Hopkins together along with Yale Department of Psychiatry.

Hassan cites a need "...to soften and reorganize the mind through psychedelic transformation." Some of us might recall the MKUltra work of such luminaries as Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, Ewen Cameron, Harry Baily, and Joly West from the 1950's and 60's. Those guys were all about softening and reorganizing minds, too--but their agenda was dark!

Leah Benson's book is distributed free by a recently established LLC called Brain Health Restoration of Illinois (BHR), located near Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. I got a tour of their clinic recently, and spoke for about an hour with two staff, Michael McCully and Alexis Magat, who were very gracious hosts. Michael mainly runs the delivery of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatment at BHR. He didn't seem to be 100% enthusiastic about Ketamine assisted therapy, but he had impressive anecdotes for the value of TMS. 

I told these guys I had seen an article entitled "The Truth About Ketamine" in Sheridan Road magazine, written by one of the founders of their clinic. I had emailed Dustin O'Regan, the Managing Editor of the magazine, to complain that the article tried to say I-V Ketamine is approved by the FDA for treatment resistant depression, which is not true. Michael McCully quickly agreed with me when I read the offending paragraph aloud to him. He lamented that the statement had somehow gotten past his proofreading, and said he would recommend that the company should publish a correction, because BHR absolutely does not want to disseminate false information about their treatments.

A day  or two later, I had a very pleasant phone conversation with Terry Yormak and Karen Todd, who are both known as founders of BHR. Terry is also the author of the article which appeared in Sheridan Road. They agreed that there should be some sort of published retraction. I will have to leave that to them and J.W. Conatser, the magazine publisher. 

It's interesting that the entrepreneurs and enthusiasts in the so-called "psychedelic reanaissance" are generally in agreement that psychiatry, or at least the established, orthodox, APA-types in the profession, are mostly bad psychiatry. They prescribe drugs that are bad for their patints, and they almost universally fail to help people because they are only trying to control behaviors that people are afraid of or don't like. They largely depend on coercion for their customers. They're not really even trying to free people or heal them. The people pushing psychedelics on the other hand, are into expanding consciousness, evolutionary spiritual leaps, saving the world, etc. They are supposedly the latest and greatest chance for a good psychiatry.

In all likelihood, psychedelics will ruin psychiatry as any kind of scientific medical specialty. Even such a fossilized extremist as Jeffrey Lieberman knows that. The "renaissance" will bring back such horrors as Manson family murders and Jonestown, but many times more, because the cultural setting today is far darker than it was in the 1960's. People like Jeffrey Lieberman and (I'm sorry to say) Dustin O'Regan, Michael McCully, Terry Yormak and Karen Todd will end up all in the same, blamed boat. Right now they think they are so different from, or even the antithesis of, MKUltra and the Nazi doctors and Manhattan Project scientists, from whom Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and Augustus Owsley Stanley III actually inherited their evil.

But we cannot doctor the soul. We can only communicate as souls, with souls. This means that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields. 

And just incidentally, we cannot eliminate the soul. It is the only thing we cannot eliminate. (Brains on the other hand, are no problem.)

There is no good psychiatry, and we need not say psychiatry is bad.

Existential Confusion: America on psychedelics

"Existential confusion" is frequently said to be a possible negative side effect of psychedelic drugs. I think the phrase mostly means you are suddenly uncertain about who you are, where you are, what's real, what you're doing in the world and why.

Psychiatrists intentionally confuse their patients about who they are, where they are, what's real, what they're doing in the world and why. It's seen as a fundamental method to control people (e.g., gaslighting), and psychiatric patients are believed to be in great need of control, because they threaten and offend others. Hence, psychedelic drugs would seem to be a natural "treatment" in psychiatry.

The irony is that psychedelic drugs will ruin psychiatry utterly. Confusion is the antithesis of control, because it doesn't merely cause a person whose actions others don't like to become less active and therefore less trouble. The anatomy of control is start, change, and stop. (If you can start, change and stop something at will, you control that thing.) Psychedelics render a person unable to start, change, or stop anything, especially his/her own mind. I have written that the essence of these drugs is best expressed in two words: NO CONTROL!

One of the three biggest problems the FDA recently had with the research behind Lycos' MDMA application was "placebo unblinding," which meant there was NO CONTROL (group).

The facilitators in some instances crossed boundaries and abused patients during trials. There was evidently NO CONTROL of sexuality. (Perfect for the psychiatric slave plantations in Illinois, by the way!)

I have heard a former President of the American Psychiatric Association predict that the moment a psychedelic drug is approved to treat mental disorder, there will be NO CONTROL of the quality or supply of the drug; rapidly exploding demand will (as with the ongoing example of Ketamine) assure that regulators will have NO CONTROL over street (non-clinical) use.

Now that Rick Doblin's bucket-list life ambition, of FDA approval for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat PTSD is thoroughly shot down, the next plan will be psilocybin for depression. Two bio-tech companies, Compass Pathways and Usona Institute are already in Phase 3 trials. Right behind them, Mindmed is in a Phase 2b trial of LSD for anxiety(!) and atai Life Sciences is working on DMT for depression. Approval of any psychedelic drug to treat mental disorder will replay the Ketamine disaster. Hundreds of "clinics" will spring up overnight, the drug will be everywhere. But collateral damage from psilocybin alone will be many times what Ketamine is causing, and LSD will dwarf all previous negative impacts put together. 

Anyone who wants a taste of what "America on psychedelics" may look like should watch a YouTube video of an interview of two supposed proponents of medical psychedelic drugs. They both seem so existentially and ardently confused that neither even knows the other may be an ally, and apparently presumes anyone encountered must be an enemy. They don't know what their own positions even are, or why they should argue with anyone. It's worse than the current national political scene, and it's the last thing this society needs right now!

We all need to walk around, get our bearings, look at real walls and touch them, not hallucinate that the walls are breathing, not conjure the interdimensional demons. Psychotomimetics are not vitamins.

Willie Nelson sings, "The world's gone crazy and it seems to get worse every day, so come on back Jesus, and pick up John Wayne on the way."

Plasticine porters with looking glass ties, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes, invite insanity.

Ribbon cutting ceremony today!

 

 

"Psychiatry,: An Industry of Death" museum exhibit on State Street

 ALL ARE INVITED!!!

This exhibit will be at 114 South State Street in downtown Chicago from August 13 until August 22.. It got rave reviews in NY City during the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May. Don't miss it.

Anyone from EMHC who intends to go, let me know when and I'll show up and buy you some Starbucks or something. I'd love to know your impressions of this exhibit.

RK

Spensuril Halftail's First Amendment rights

 A recent article by Jonathon Turley seems compelling to me, on the subject of freedom of speech. This is Turley's whole raison d' être, and his entire reference point for any and all political analysis.

In my family, and in my community, there is a clear majority of serious Democrats, who have basically bought the campaign line (or legitimate fear) holding that Donald Trump poses a mortal threat to our democracy. I am more afraid of the scenario Turley writes about, but I certainly am not a Trumper. In exercising my right to vote (which I consider a very important responsibility), I have frequently gone for one or another third-party candidate. 

But while out to dinner with friends the other evening, I was so injudicious as to pose a pure hypothetical, which got me into a truly shocking amount of social difficulty. I said that I was so against the Harris-Walz ticket that I would be tempted, if I lived in Michigan or Pennsylvania, to do such a horrible deed as vote for Trump. My point, which I incorrectly believed would be obvious to these people, was not that I am favorable to Trump, but only that I am very unfavorable to the Democratic ticket. In Illinois it hardly matters who you vote for because the Democrat will certainly win. I told my friends I was really glad I live in Illinois, so I can't be tempted to do such a horrible deed as vote for Trump. In Michigan or Pennsylvania, critical electoral votes are realistically up for grabs, so one would have to be more responsible, and even consider the lesser-of-two-evils evaluation.

Somehow, the only thing these people heard me say was that I might vote for Trump. Horror of horrors! I was suddenly a Trumper, a fascist/racist/misogynist/transphobic/homophobic neanderthal, completely unfit for mixed company! People who are family, or as close as family to me, argued they didn't even know who I was, and this single comment had more or less completely changed our relationship. There was a  clearly implied demand that I retract what I had said, or what they said I had said, which was not what I had intended to say at all.

I reacted pretty badly in my turn. Maybe that's kind of predictable for any political conversation these days. This dinner table slapdown became a kind of denial of my free speech, or at least I felt that way at the time. When I read that Turley article this morning, it inspired me to go back to the text of the First Amendment, because I recalled that it guarantees four separate freedoms, of which freedom of speech and the press is only one (not even the first-mentioned, which would be freedom of religion).

The truth is, the United States of America was a breakthrough idea, with the Bill of Rights becoming the seed for all our subsequent prosperity, all our spiritual motivation, all our personality as a nation.

Now many people say times have changed: the existential questions are about climate, equity, artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, science... not freedom of speech. Those who say that are wrong. It was the American ideals of freedom and human dignity that enabled the highly improbable abolition of slavery in the 19th Century despite the overwhelming practical fact, that King Cotton financed a system of corruption and greed to continuously deliver riches and unassailable political power to slaveholders. 

Abraham Lincoln didn't free the slaves by abolishing Habeas Corpus, instituting a military draft, prosecuting dissenters, and letting Billy-the-Torch Sherman march from Atlanta to the sea (although he is properly remembered by history for all of those questionable acts): Lincoln freed the slaves by hearkening back to Americans' revolutionary sense of fundamental rights which made everyone free in a new way. He called for a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg, but he was still prepared, nearly a year and a half after that elegant sermon, with cannon balls still flying and brothers still killing brothers, to sink all the wealth piled by two hundred and fifty years of toil and repay every drop of blood drawn with the lash by another drawn with the sword.

Times have not changed for freedom of speech. The American people ultimately gave up their peculiar institution of chattel slavery as an arbitrary act of their own will (however fraught), despite its empirical utility and the obvious material value built on the backs of unrequited bondsmen. We made that change because we were firm in the right as God gave us to see the right. Can we remain so firm now? Can we still believe that all men have the inalienable right to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others?

One force says no with huge authority: psychiatry says we can't allow freedom of thought and freedom of speech anymore in the modern world, we cannot and must not resist the machines, the money, the gaslighting, however they undermine, dishonor and degrade our culture. Psychiatry tells us we are brains, nothing more than brains, just mud. Psychiatry's "experts" insist they know more about us than we know about ourselves. They say we must take their drugs and respect their sacred artifacts (which they call diagnoses).

I have a beautiful, big Airedale terrier named Spensuril Halftail. He barks incessantly every morning at early walkers on the beach, and wakes up the neighbors. Sometimes he gets anxious, and he growls menacingly at guests, even kids, who reach for him in ways he doesn't like. Twice, he bit somebody.

I adore Spensur, he's my friend. But he doesn't have First Amendment rights. I stop him from barking sometimes, and suppress his enthusiasms or protests if I consider them too fierce. I don't think twice about that, he's a step down from a human being, he has no human rights as a dog. I love him, but if he upsets people or makes them afraid or hurts them, I will take his freedom away and I might kill him.

Malis, Corcoran, Hussain, Sharpe and their ilk have (at best) the same relationship with their "patients" as I have with my dog. Even Vik Gill, a decent guy, knows that Gus has to be discouraged from complaining too much. There is no freedom of thought or speech for psychiatric slaves: they are subhuman by at least a couple fifths.

The reason for varying views of how to divide life is not so much politics or avarice, let alone biology. It's willingness and ability to communicate. If you can change another's behavior with a loving glance, or a knowing wink or a smile, or kind encouragement, you will naturally prefer that mode to an angry snarl or an assault, or prison bars. Those with whom you can find agreement, and come to like and understand, without violence, will naturally seem entitled to rights like freedom of thought/speech, that you will grant and respect.

The FDA's disapproval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy last week is a fascinating study. By most accounts, the problem with the proposal from Lycos Therapeutics was the psychotherapy element of the treatment, not the drug. The FDA has never regulated psychotherapy. They don't understand communication by itself, they only specialize in what they imagine are molecules of the mind, and they know those tiny particles of dead matter can't communicate at all.

The FDA made the right decision for the wrong reason. They expect drugs to work and be safe, but they have no interest or jurisdiction with regard to live communication as a method of healing.

Psychiatrists and the FDA should confine themselves to veterinary professions and leave people alone.

But I should communicate better with friends and Spensuril Halftail.

Gill, Xiaomara, Joseph & Gus

 OK, so Xiaomara didn't want Gus on her caseload any more, and Dr. Gill covered for her by telling Gus it was just his own idea for no reason, so Joseph could take over the case. Right? That's my theory.

But there are at least a couple funny things about that....

"For no reason" is nonsense as any explanation for a new social worker. Gill just lied about that because he didn't want to tell Gus the reason. Gus is continuing to ask why he was assigned a different social worker immediately after he made kind of a big deal about Xiaomara papering over the window to her office so no one could see what she was doing in there (which is against policy). I'm pretty sure, and I hope, that Gus will keep on asking anyone and everyone about this, and nagging EMHC staff and administrators, at least as long as the only answers he ever gets are nonsense. Today Tony, the legal advocate, gave Gus the answer that maybe "they" thought he would do better with a male social worker. This was laughable, and it only incited Gus to keep asking.

Well then, who is the "they" who thought that? Was it just Gill? He did say the whole new social worker idea was his own. If so, why does he think Gus will do better with a male social worker? The thing about Joseph Basso is, he's male... but not actually assigned to the clinical unit Gus is on (N Unit). He's assigned to M Unit, which is a sister unit to N, but separate. I recall that some years ago (December 2016 to be exact) a patient was moved to K Unit from L Unit (these are also sister units), probably to enable his assignment to a different social worker, because the one he had on L Unit was having sex with him.

But in this case with Gus, the patient is apparently remaining on the same unit while the social worker (Joseph) comes over to him from the sister unit. It might all just be completely arbitrary, with no relevant policy or protocol other than Dr. Gill's whim. But I find that unlikely. I was just in a Hartman Unit staffing today, where "protocol" (or "policy" or some such inscrutable excuse) was cited for a clearly unreasonable, obnoxiously punitive assignment of one-to-one observation to James Baker, requiring that the door to his room stand wide open all night for a female staff member to directly observe him constantly while he was in bed sleeping because of a surgery he recently had on his right hand at UIC Hospital. That made no sense in terms of any purpose for medical care or security protection that I can imagine. It was just "protocol," that was all anyone in the staffing could think of. Nonsense.

There must be some similar (even if equally ridiculous) "protocol" excuse for Gus getting a new social worker absent any agreement, consultation or explanation. Joseph isn't even assigned to work on N Unit. All the social workers assigned to N are female, although all the patients there are male, so that might relate to Tony's theory. But what do you know, all the M Unit social workers are male and all the patients there are female! Somebody at EMHC or in IDHS has apparently neglected to consider, up until now, the possibility that some patients on M and N Units might do better with same-sex social workers. So what exactly could this "protocol" be?

Maybe only Dr. Gill is smart enough as a psychiatrist to think of the same-sex/opposite-sex point, and maybe Gus is the only patient this contingency has ever applied to. Maybe Gus will suddenly be no problem because he now has a male social worker; maybe there's nothing at all wrong with Xiaomara and she'll never have any boundary problems like that other social worker did, years ago

If that's what proves out going forward, then top EMHC administrators like Michelle Evans and Ryma Jacobson will be off the hook (for not predicting the same-sex/opposite-sex contingency in treatment); maybe they'll be credited with stellar executive insight into the unique dynamics of personnel in state nuthouses (for keeping the great psychiatrist Dr. Gill around)!

But if I had to bet, I'd say Gus won't change much. He'll keep complaining and causing trouble, because he's right and he has a strong sense of duty to truth. Meanwhile, Xiaomara will be trouble in one way or another, and she'll leave this bad job, as will Joe Basso. Dr. Gill will resign (I'm told he's actually said he intends to). EMHC will continue getting worse and worse: more like a psychiatric slave plantation, less like a real hospital. 

The title to this article could be sung to the tune of a 1973 song about the Watergate flap, Haldeman Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean.

These guys have no idea what they're doing. They make it all up.

New, lower-level Social Worker to replace Xiaomara

Gus' psychiatrist, Vik Gill, introduced Gus to his new social worker today. His name is Joseph Basso. SW-II Basso has only worked at EMHC since September, 2022. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as an "Agent of Change who seeks to positively impact the disenfranchised." I can't tell how old he is, but I'd say not very, he looks about 25.

Basso's causes are "civil rights and social action, education, environment, human rights, politics, poverty alleviation, social services." Sounds about right. People always go into mental health with the idea that maybe they can help others. Then they discover, slowly or quickly, that's not what the field is about. The state nuthouses teach a lesson very soon: forensic mental health is a mafia culture of control; the nuthouses are plantations where "patients" are merely used and abused for whatever advantage can be extracted. It's a bad career, Mr. Basso. You'll either become corrupt or too stupid to notice corruption.

Gus asked why he has a new social worker, and Dr. Gill responded that this had been his decision alone, but there was "no reason" for it. I don't think that's true, even though I kind of admire Gill's insouciance in saying it. I think Xiaomara Ramirez refused to work with Gus, and she probably went over Gill's head.

In theory, since Xiaomara is a SW-III, she is more experienced and should be better at dealing with the more complex cases than SW-II Basso is. She's certainly getting paid more. Maybe she made some kind of a deal wherein she agreed to turn over 10% of her $174,000 annual salary to whomever is willing and able to take Gus off her caseload. That would only be fair, right? I think both these social workers are outside agency contracted staff, so they may have more leeway to make deals like that, than the regular union employees would have.

But I'm only speculating.

(As always... if I get any information wrong, about any individual I ever name on this blog, I hope somebody will correct me. Especially if I say something negative which isn't true, I promise to retract it as soon as I am credibly informed. You don't even have to call me yourself; just tell Gus, he'll let me know.)

More on the problem of Xiaomara Ramirez

I was almost thinking I had been too negative about this new Social Worker III at EMHC, or even that maybe I had unfairly accused her of things I shouldn't have accused her of. Then what do you know! She did something that kind of proved the opposite. I gave Xiaomara too much benefit of doubt, I was too easy on her, even as I am probably too easy on her fellow plantation overseers as a general habit.

To be clear, I did not accuse Xiaomara of sexual boundary violations with patients, and I do not accuse her of anything like that now. Comments I made were entirely about the potential appearance of such impropriety, caused by her violation of policy about obscuring the window in the door to her office. I had been told some time earlier by one of her patients (Gus, of course) that she was doing that. Gus had to remind me a couple of times before I wrote the first blog article about Xiaomara.

Then I added her name to a list of staff who could be accused of having sex with patients, in the next article I published. I made it clear that this was mere suspicion about Xiaomara, nothing documented. I even offered to publicly retract any accusation that was unfair or careless, e.g., if Xiaomaara would simply call or otherwise contact me to protest.

She never protested. In fact, she reacted as though she was guilty. In my experience, people get hostile or critical toward anyone whom they think might know that they've done something wrong.

Xiaomara flashed back big-time against Gus this morning. She's Gus' social worker, responsible to coordinate details and logistics of his treatment among the various team members. This morning, Gus saw her in a hallway on the clinical unit, and called out to her about a routine question regarding complaint forms. She responded with an unexpected, very hostile snarl, "Gus I don't want to talk to you right now!" Then she darted into her office and slammed the door hard enough to be heard and noticed all across the unit. Gus asked one staff (Tim, a nurse I think) to please note the event he had just seen and heard. Another witness was Cara Wueste (who coincidentally has her own history of connection to staff who violated boundaries with patients). Tim very quickly spoke with the psychiatrist Dr. Gill, in his office, and Gill quickly then went into Xiaomara's office to speak to her.

As it happened, Gus had a staffing immediately after this incident. I had looked forward to meeting Xiaomara at the staffing, and puzzled to myself over how I might apologize in the event that she would protest my blog articles mentioning her. But she didn't come to the staffing, only all the other social workers on the unit did. (This was slightly odd because those other social workers are not part of Gus' treatment team.) Gus now reports that Xiaomara hasn't emerged from her office today since slamming the door in his face.

I would have been inclined to believe that Xiaomara, as a relatively new EMHC employee, only papered over the window to her office door because she didn't know it was against policy, and she was unaware of certain sordid history of a social worker who sexually abused her patient in her office at EMHC for years. I think Gus made some comment to Tim or Cara or both of them at the time of this morning's incident like,"Gee, if she's going to get that upset over a little criticism, maybe she shouldn't work here!" He's absolutely right. Snarling and slamming a door on a patient is counter-therapeutic and unprofessional. 

Gus was probably thinking that Xiaomara had been told about my two blog articles, and she was blaming those on him. The articles have been read more than 300 times by Xiaomara's peers in only 5 days, so she's probably embarrassed. The theory that my blog articles were what made Xiaomara so crazy was also supported by a comment from Dr. Gill shortly after today's staffing. He was advising Gus about how to better demonstrate his readiness for conditional release, when he mentioned something like, "...just don't accuse people of sex all the time." But that's not something Gus does.

Gus did not accuse Xiaomara of sex (in fact neither did I). Gus merely reported to me (accurately) that Xiaomara covered the window in her office door so people couldn't see in. I was the one who then made the point that it's against policy and she might even be suspected of having sex with patients. Sexual abuse of a patient by the patient's social worker did actually happen before, which is the only reason I even know that covering the window of an office door is against facility policy. At the time I casually mentioned that unfortunate experience in a conversation with Gus, I didn't even know Xiaomara was a new employee just this year. I don't think Gus knew either.

Well in any event, Xiaomara has as of today, removed all of the paper with which she had previously covered the window in her office door to prevent people from seeing in. Maybe Gill told her to do that, maybe after she whined to him that Gus accused her of sex. But she's complying with policy now and it doesn't appear as though she's trying to hide things she's doing in her office, so she can't be so easily suspected of having sex with patients.

She has Gus and me to thank for that improved environment of trust!

Sex with mental patients again and again

Below is a compiled list of staff at EMHC who supposedly have had (or are having) sexual relationships with patients. As I indicated recently, this is a felony. All of these people could be prosecuted, sentenced to prison if found guilty, and required to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

Anyone who believes or would argue that their name is wrongfully on this list should contact me. If I am convinced that I have falsely accused you, or even that I accused you carelessly, I promise that I will retract my accusation on this page, and defend you against it whenever it comes up going forward. If I name somebody here and I don't get any protest, I'll probably take that as an admission. In the fifteen years I've been writing this blog, only one person ever asked me to retract anything. That was part of settling a legal case. (N.B., I was not the defendant or the defendant's counsel.)

The list:

(First, a handful of people who have been implicated by individuals, generally patients, with whom I've spoken personally, and by evidence with which I am familiar to some degree.) 

Michelle Bogle, Simech Bun, Gabby Garcia; Mark Roberson, Dave Hagerman, Cletus Stewart, an Activity Therapist on K Unit named Susie; Xioamara Ramirez (social worker on N Unit only suspected because she papers over the window so patients can't see into her office, contrary to policy);

(And some partial or redacted names merely reported to me by other EMHC/IDHS staff, specifically for purposes of this article--a couple of these may duplicate names from patients in the list above.) 

STA's Lula C., Ramona S., Shannon D., Sam M., Mark R., Hillary B., Tiffany J., Tonetta H., Willie Q., Aurora D., Michelle B., LaSonya, David (the librarian); social workers Cassandra, Christy, Judy; activity therapists Becky, Barry, Shannon W.; nurses Kathy (from M/N), that Bun girl.

I am told that a couple more names will be forthcoming shortly. I'll try to keep the list current.

My point is, sexual abuse of patients by staff is endemic, and nobody really cares because this (EMHC) is a plantation. The staff consider on some level that the patients are their property to be used and controlled for whatever benefits are possible. Patients are not thought of as fellow human beings who need and are worthy of help. It's the plantation attitude, slavery. This is less an accusation against individuals whom I should report to the state police, and more a general indictment of the whole sorry mess that is so-called "forensic mental health."

Xiaomara Ramirez, SW III

A recently hired social worker (SW-III, a very highly-paid position a with a $175,000+ annual salary) on N Unit at EMHC is papering over the window of her office door so no one can see into her office to know what she's doing. As far as I have understood for some years, this is against policy.

It is well known that on occasion, social workers and/or other staff at EMHC have seduced patients into romantic and sexual relationships. It starts with "boundary problems" like special favors, home cooked food, computer and phone use. It proceeds to oral sex in the office, or in a mop closet on the unit. By the time the patient earns a conditional release he may be convinced that the staff member is the love of his life and will become his life partner. Then he is invariably abandoned.

This causes criminal convictions, suicide attempts, civil liability and other unpleasantness that is quite contrary to any purpose of improved mental health. It also discredits the institution and makes taxpayers and their elected representatives in the Illinois General Assembly think maybe the state nuthouses should just be closed.

I am not alleging that Xiaomara Ramirez papers over the window in the door to her office on N Unit so that she can have sex with her patients. But I have taken deposition testimony stating that no one is allowed to block the window into their office that way, and I know of various instances of staff seducing patients. In fact, there was a case where a patient was getting several blowjobs a week from his social worker for several years, in her office, only a few steps from the unit nurses' station and directly across a narrow hall from a janitorial closet that is a point of high foot traffic.

Supposedly nobody ever knew what was going on in that case. But the patient told me everybody knew. As a matter of fact, several patients at EMHC have told me that everybody knows about some staff-patient sexual relationship. These things are always known about by patients. 

Another SW-III at EMHC, now retired, testified that he got all his "intel" from patients. And I attended a seminar in New York City at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, just a couple months ago, which was all about sexual violence on psychiatric inpatient units. It was unanimously agreed by all four presenting experts in that seminar that patients know everything that's happening on a clinical unit much better than staff do.

There aren't very many SW-III's at EMHC. People who qualify for that position usually want a more honest job and qualify for one better than "Overseer" on the psychiatric slave plantation.

Xiaomara should not block the window to her office. It's suspicious.

The harmful regimens of the regimented regime

My charming San Francisco psychiatrist friend on X, Joe Pierre, M.D., registered what appears to me to be a telltale complaint according to my feed this morning.

Doc Joe wants people to know that "regime" is not the appropriate word to describe a list of medications that a patient is taking pursuant to a doctor's prescription. "Regimen" is the term he demands, with very arrogantly presumed authority (regency?).

I did a quick study, because I've used "regime" myself, I'm not the only one, and I think I'm as educated as, or perhaps quite a bit more so than Doc Joe, when it comes to English language and rhetoric. Words are primary tools for me as a lawyer, even as drugs are primary tools for Joe as a (very political) psychiatrist.

Joe maintains that regimen, regiment and regime "...are different words with different meanings."  Well sure, but many words are different from each other or related in different ways, for different purposes, and to different extents. The Doc might know this, but his native language (psychiatrese) could cause the principle to be very difficult for him to apply in English.

Just a few examples are instructive. 

Cat (the feline mammal and common house pet) and cat (the large earth mover manufactured by Caterpillar Tractor Company) are "different" words which sound and are spelled exactly alike; the same can be said of benefits (plural noun) and benefits (present tense of the verb), although these two "different" words are close forms with related meanings, unlike cat and cat; spring (the astronomical, meteorological or calendar season) and spring (a device which expands and contracts with increasing resistance or a sudden motion considered to be characteristic of such a device), or rose (the flower) and rose (past tense of the verb to rise) are further examples of pairs of words that are clearly different yet spelled and pronounced identically.

Yawl and y'all, shoe and shoo!, red and read, sew and so, and a long list of homophones, are words which sound exactly alike, but may be spelled differently and completely disrelated for meaning.

Individual small, common words may have similarities or differences that are purely a function of grammar (rules and habits of use), but they are not close at all in pronunciation or spelling. E.g., pronouns like me and I, she and her 

Machine, machinery, machination, mechanical, mechanism, and machismo are words that have similarities in meaning, spelling and pronunciation, as well as common derivation, but they remain different words, very much like regimen, regiment and regime. 

I took one semester of linguistics at Northwestern University, as well as German (I was briefly almost fluent) and Russian (a beautifully complex language). The subject of words is amazing and probably as complicated as the human mind itself. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God," as (I think) the Bible says.

Which brings me back to Joe Pierre's "different words" regimen, regiment and  regime, three words which are closely related and commonly derived from the Latin regere (to rule). Regimen and regime have incidentally been almost interchangeable in historical usage. So what exactly is Doc Joe's point?

The San Francisco psychiatrist doth protest too much, methinks. It's emotionally difficult for him to hear or read psychiatric practices or treatments being called regimes. That word may recall or just come too close to, e.g., despotic governments like Saddam Hussain's Iraq, Putin's (or Stalin's) Russia, Hitler's Nazi Germany, and Jefferson Davis' Confederate States of America. Thus for Joe, regimen is much preferred, as long as you don't err by adding a "t" to the end of that word, giving it a military connotation.

In fact, psychiatry is a despotic regime. It is perhaps the most despotic regime in human history. The so-called "treatments" which guys like Joe Pierre militaristically order are horrendously damaging, and they are forced on thousands of people against their will everyday, people who have never been convicted of any crime, people kept, exploited and abused as psychiatric slaves!

I've spent twenty years fighting this despotic regime, at Elgin Mental Health Center, in cruelly regimented "clinical" units, behind locked security doors guarded by uniformed thugs and despotic "administrators" who hear, see and speak no evil until they are sued for millions of dollars in damages.

Too bad Joe, if you don't like my words for your f***ing psych regimen. Go look the words up in a dictionary, man. They all work!

Psychedelic Renaissance or a new drug dark age? (Ruminations)

Hundreds of Ketamine "clinics" have sprung up across the country; Business Wire PR statements celebrate FDA designation of various psychedelic drugs as "breakthrough therapies" to allow pharmaceutical company trials with acid, shrooms, and ecstasy, as promising new cures for various mental illnesses; LSD flows again in the streets and through the veins of American youth, to start the walls breathing and wake the sleeping demons.

As many people know, at the end of the 20th Century psychiatry's hot new drugs and great, vaunted "Decade of the Brain" all failed miserably. The theories and "diagnoses" were revealed as nonsense, and the "medicine" (only laughably called "antidepressants" and "antipsychotics") is now popularly recognized as abuse and snake-oil poison rather than science. People who do not want their life expectancy to be reduced by twenty years refuse psychiatric drugs, and the men in white coats may finally lose their legal facility to coerce anyone to be an unwilling patient. These developments amount to a dire threat to a scam profession, which once believed it had locked up the invaluable status of "medical specialty."

The threat might only be handled or lessened, if new and better "cures" for human problems in thinking, feeling and behaving can be miraculously developed. Two possibilities are: 1) new drugs, and 2) a resurgence (or actually an advent) of effective talking therapies.

Enter the so-called "Psychedelic Renaissance," which may bear directly on either or both of these two potential saves for psychiatry.

Psychedelic drugs do create huge effects on thinking, emotion and personality. Those effects can seem good or bad, they can make you think you're a holy superman or quickly kill you. But for psychiatry (especially American psychiatry), the drugs all by themselves are an obvious "Hail Mary" play. They do something.

But nobody knows what they do. Do they bring new brotherhood with the universe or horror and suicide? The answer is far too unpredictable, thus inspiring a regime called "Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy" or "PAT". PAT consists of two or more sessions with a trained therapist before and after a person trips on the drug. The preparatory session attempts to evaluate and optimize aspects of "set and setting" so the person will be more likely to have a "good" trip. The sessions after tripping help with "integration," or a hoped-for useful assimilation of the unusual and occasionally ("bad" trip) traumatic experiences caused by the drug. 

There is a great deal of speculation about this talking therapy element of PAT, whether it's necessary, how it can be standardized or researched, and whether it presents risks of abuse. "Set and setting" (respectively, the mindset of the person who trips, and the environmental influence when he trips) was researched in the 1950's and 60's. Arguably, the concept of set and setting has not changed in almost three quarters of a century; the knowledge that these factors are the largest determinants of a person's experience with psychedelic drugs, which clearly cause a state of hyper-suggestibility, has not changed.

Of course, the orthodox, APA-type psychiatric establishment gave up on helpful psychotherapy long ago. They became a medical specialty instead, brain doctors, under the arbitrary, vain presumption that all the secrets of life can eventually be found in the brain. Psychiatrists thus fell under the economic whip of health insurance actuaries and capitalist third-party payers. So they cannot officially push PAT, and they can't really push psychedelic drugs alone, until those drugs are proven safe and effective (which may never happen).

The current rage for LSD, ecstasy, shrooms and special K, comes from a weird collection of people who call themselves the Psychedelic Renaissance. They've raised a lot of money and bought some success, e.g., with state legislatures in Colorado and Oregon, and with European and Australian drug regulators. However, they recently had an epic failure with the FDA in Washington, D.C.

The most high profile organization in this weird collection is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), headed by 71-year-old Rick Doblin, a charismatic Harvard Ph.D. MAPS and Doblin have historical ties going back to the original psychedelic movement in the mid-20th Century, but they don't talk much about that. They are covert religious fanatics, but their public focus and the image they carefully cultivate is of 21st-Century scientific research into sorely-needed treatments for mental disorders, and potential improvements in people's mental and emotional lives.

The falsity of MAPS' PR image is obvious in a single, stark contradiction: psychedelic drugs are promoted as both scientific medicine and religious sacrament. Tripping is (simultaneously) treatment for brain disorders and a religious ritual for spiritual revelation.

The Psychedelic Renaissance is a weird group of people mostly because they strategically believe one or the other of these contradictory things, at different times and in different circumstances, and pretend not to notice any problem. As a movement they promote both views because if tripping isn't medical treatment that private insurance or Medicaid pays for, it will never be scalable or show profit. Talking psychotherapy is expensive, and even if it ever did work, it didn't appeal to regular people, just the wealthy. Broad, booming, popular interest goes to big things, prospects for true breakthroughs: life-changing expanded consciousness, brotherhood with the universe, victory over death. 

Tim Leary was a trained scientist who found deep faith in LSD. Ken Kesey was a bratty college kid who cared about nothing but "pranking Amerika." They were both apparently part of the same movement. But a lesson of history warns us to notice differences better than we did then. The good trip of 1967 music and love all too quickly became the bad trip of Watergate, Manson murders, and Jonestown. By 1970, hippies were (quoting Jules Evans' and Steve Rolles' charming characterization of present-day psychedelic drug enthusiasts) "boring dickheads."

Generations ago, Western culture was alive and powerful enough to survive psychedelics, but it might not be so resilient now. We must pay closer attention, and above all we cannot any longer alienate an honest study of the mind from religion; we cannot condone the degenerate parody of such honest study in non-religious fields. 

We cannot be so suggestible, as to be hypnotized into the weird idea that we are nothing more than a brain. 

"Set and setting," brother. Peace!