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., Erica D., 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!

More on sex with mental patients

I have to hope I didn't give a wrong impression, in my June 1 article. Just to be sure, I'll briefly clarify a couple things here.

I absolutely do not believe that institutional staff have any slightest excuse or justification--EVER!!--for seduction and sexual abuse of mental patients. This is severely harmful abuse, which ruins lives! It's also a crime, which people have rightfully gone to prison for. More people will probably go to prison for this crime, and they should! It's similar to child sex offenses, equally despicable.

My point in the recent article was just to ask readers to think a little more carefully about why.

People clearly need to think more carefully about why, because all the rules and laws and threats of prison do not prevent some portion of mental health professionals from crossing boundaries. It's a chronic problem that has never been solved. The complexity itself is proof that nobody knows how to solve it, and a constant warning that these terrible violations will continue to happen.

My point, which I tried to explain in the earlier article, is that it's far too easy to bury your head in the sand. People convince themselves that they don't know things they don't want to know. But they do know those things, and I will continue to sue them until they admit they know them, and until they think more carefully about why. 

It may or may not require the total abolition of psychiatric slavery, or the fundamental redesign of legal and social institutions which are supposed to deal with dangerous and obnoxious people. I don't know.

But I sure as hell do know that none of us can simply show up for work and try to stay out of trouble every day until we can collect a pension. We have to think more carefully.

That's the only way the harm will ever stop.

FDA panel says NO to medical ecstasy!

Yesterday the Psychopharmacologic Committee of the U.S.Food & Drug Administration voted 9-2 to decisively reject purported effectiveness of MDMA "treatment" for PTSD, and 10-1 to overwhelmingly find that any benefits of such "treatment" are outweighed by the risks.

I put quotation marks around "treatment" because the committee's findings highlight the embarrassing fact that the people pushing this whole thing never did figure out what MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, or any other psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, actually is to begin with.

Some like to believe it's the pill that actually cures PTSD. The drugs are catalysts to scramble a brain/mind in such a way as may effectively force a new and better point of view in a patient, who realizes that his/her past trauma is unimportant in light of the vast existential connectedness experienced while tripping, which would surely save the world if only enough people could turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Oddly perhaps, the only apparent theory behind electroshock treatment is similar: a patient gets hit with force violent and painful enough to make him/her look differently at less impressive things. 

But recall (if you're old enough) the dramatic appearance of three huge letters on a hillside in Berkeley, California where high school classes had traditionally painted the name of their school or class year. As 1967 opened, the only message on that hill was: "L... S... D". Psychedelics were mystical messianism from the beginning, never scientific medicine. Flowers and amazing music came with the drugs, so the whole thing had an aesthetic appeal which ECT severely lacked.

And these days, bureaucrats at government agencies are prone to think the drugs do little or nothing by themselves without some talk therapy (although they can't say what kind) or psychological work. The preparation before tripping, and the integration sessions afterward, are essential. Without the psychotherapy element it's not safe or effective.

The FDA monitors and regulates food and drugs, not psychotherapy. They also had to notice certain implications of data (and omissions of data) from the trials cited in the presentation to their committee yesterday. These might make them very happy that they don't regulate psychotherapy. Boundary violations are a larger problem when patients are so suggestible on drugs like MDMA. 

But the truth is it has been more than a generation since psychiatrists even tried to be any good at talking therapy. If they're going to get back into it now because the "decade of the brain" was bullshit and all the antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs failed to solve the problems of humanity, they'll have to start almost from scratch. Handling the patient who's freaking out on LSD or confronting demonic entities on psilocybin is more or less the opposite of starting from scratch!

These guys don't even know not to evaluate patients' conclusions and thoughts for them (they think that's what they're supposed to do as the experts!), and they don't even realize that acknowledgement is a critical part of two-way communication. They're just as likely to kill productive therapeutic realizations with veiled criticism or skepticism, as to enable them by appropriately professional manners.

So at best they end up controlling people, not helping them. Psychedelic drugs certainly assist with (vicious, covert) control, basically by wiping out people's self control.

The MAPS/Lykos/Doblin crowd will hate yesterday's FDA hearing result, and they'll moan sadly about the urgent need to advance new and better therapies for the terrible problem of PTSD. I on the other hand will hope that yesterday was the first sign of the complete demise of the celebrated "psychedelic renaissance"!

These guys want money and control; they have no clue how to help, and psychedelic drugs will never be better therapy.

Sex with mental patients

Sex is a fundamental expression of humanity. In fact, it's a fundamental expression of being alive in a broader context than just humanity. Animals, and even plants, have sex. It's not unreasonable to assume that their sexual expression is as important to their life as human sex is to people like mental patients, social workers and security therapy aides.

Humans have the power to control the sexual expression of less evolved life forms, and we frequently do so just for our peculiar advantage, or if their sexual expression happens to become offensive or inconvenient to us. My dogs are neutered, and my new Ginkgo tree has been genetically engineered to not produce the fruit that would rot and smell bad in October. But why would a fundamental expression of life become offensive or inconvenient? The fact that it clearly does implies some some very basic misunderstanding or disagreement with life itself.

We all want to be as fully alive as we can be. This is the whole impetus of evolution. Human beings developed language, advanced social organization and culture; and we have learned (or at least continuously attempt) to master matter, energy, space, and time itself, in the pursuit of being more alive. That is our game.

But something... maybe about the strategy we are on to win this game, or maybe about the rules, or maybe about an opponent... is mistaken. The facts of sex and our confusions about sex prove this, and urge us to think more carefully.

Why exactly is sex with institutionalized mental patients wrong?

We have so many rules and explanations, and justifications and arguments and theories, which in the end just do not solve the problem: there must be sex but there can't be sex. The problem is nowhere so obvious as at Elgin Mental Health Center and the other nuthouses operated by the Illinois Department of Human Services.

Supposedly EMHC is, "A hospital dedicated by the State of Illinois to the welfare of its people for their relief and restoration, a place of hope for the healing of mind, body and spirit, where many find health and happiness again." That's what it says on the handsome bronze plaque on the wall, right?

Well, certainly sex is part of anyone's version of health and happiness. Why must it be so severely regulated? Why is it banned between patients and staff? Why is it dangerous?

There are people who need to heal mind, body and spirit, and who need to find health and happiness again. In the hospital those people are not supposed to be allowed real sex, and the rules about that are supposed to be helpful to them. There's a whole lot of disagreement though! Most of it is hidden. So what's this complicated story all about?

We create institutions, organizations, social and cultural structures... as evolutionary strategies. Psychiatry, or the medicalized "healing" of human problems in thinking, emotion and behavior, is one such structure or strategy. No strategy is ever perfect by the way, that would make the game be too easy and boring, or it would just be over too quickly. The main point with a strategy is to continuously improve it until the current game is won and a new game becomes available.

All the rules about sex between staff and patients are part of the strategy of medical psychiatry. Other parts of that strategy include the conceptual location of human problems with thinking, emotion and behavior exclusively in the brain and the apotheosis of the brain itself, the use of drugs and other somatic tactics (ECT, etc.), the subordination of other specialized knowledge (psychology, social work, religion) to psychiatry; the prioritization of public funds for what we call "mental health," the shaming of anyone who might be called "anti-psychiatry," and the establishment of legal and financial advantages for pharmaceutical companies and medical enterprises. It's a very big socio-cultural machine, and everybody is supposed to be competent to use it and responsible for getting it repaired when a need arises.

But our civilization has forgotten that this is all a strategy and a machine to be used in the game of life. People believe it's just true. That's why sex is such a big problem: it points insistently to the fact that we sorely need to improve our strategy. Sex embarrasses us. Or maybe (more significantly) it shows that we are missing some of the rules to this game, or that we cannot even identify the goalposts and the opponent.

Of course, we have been repeatedly embarrassed by sex throughout human history. (Think Trump and Stormy Daniels, Mata Hari, Giacomo Casanova, Caesar and Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and Eve!)

In the more specific history of psychiatry, practitioners were frequently embarrassed. Freud's psychoanalysis was originally billed as science, but it was never popular and available except for repressed rich people who wanted salacious stories. By the 1970s, psychiatry had to renounce libido in favor of neurochemistry to remain a medical specialty that paid well. In the 1980s and 90s, they had to renounce an overwrought minority of their own guys who were pushing a weird theory of multiple personalities caused by satanic, ritualistic sex perpetrated against children by international cannibalistic conspirators supposedly lurking in everyone's neighborhood. (Think Bennet Braun, M.D., and Rush Presbyterian St. Lukes!)

Now they have to disavow state employees proven to have seduced and sexually abused the mentally ill people at their mercy, or other employees proven to have enabled the seduction and abuse. These employees are all supposed to be above suspicion, so they are much more of an embarrassment as professionals who have supposedly dedicated their respective careers to working in mental health facilities, and would never jeopardize their own careers and morals.

It turns out that it's much harder to control the sexuality of human beings than that of house pets or trees. And if we try it's dehumanizing, especially when we fail, which is almost always. We have to pretend that there is no sex between staff and patients at EMHC, or that it's vanishingly rare. Otherwise, this strategy that we call psychiatry has to be seriously questioned.

Psychiatry would be revealed as a fundamental misunderstanding or disagreement with life itself: a bad strategy for the game. We don't want to know that, we have too much invested.

It would be too much work to improve or abandon the strategy.

Don't harass the working man!

My friend Julio spent many years in Illinois' so-called "forensic mental health" system. He killed somebody and then convinced a judge to send him to a so-called "hospital" instead of prison. So be it. A couple years ago, we managed to get him a conditional release, and now he's living in the community, working every day, not taking any drugs. So far, he's a success story for whoever wants it. 

The EMHC "treatment" team gets to imagine that they cured him of the mental illness that caused him to kill somebody (no mean trick). The court that committed him and then released him gets to say it had an accurate sense of justice for not just locking him up for life. I get to say I was right for advocating for his release even though he refused to buy into the required psychiatric state religion. His kids get to have a dad again after a long time. Our capitalist society gets one more taxpayer back on the rolls. Julio is an all-round, pretty good boy.

But he needs to be finally discharged. The plantation system keeps trying, as it always will, to reel him back down to their fields to pick their cotton. He's not much better than a fugitive slave as long as there are conditions on his freedom. He has to live where somebody tells him to live, he has to show up for "meetings" that are part of somebody else's program, and the people running the "meetings" don't care if he thinks he's working a paying job in the real world, because they figure they still own him.

"You had work until 9:00, Julio? So what? I told you to come to the 8:00 meeting!" This was the ignorant harangue from a very young, self-important, new employee named Mario at the group home recently. It actually became an assault and battery, when Julio's chest was aggressively poked by Mario's hard finger, and Mario's angry voice was raised, for several other staff to witness. There could be a legitimate criminal charge or civil claim, which those who were heard laughing about the incident later may know. (Did they laugh because they thought Mario was an idiot for losing it and putting himself in potential trouble; or were they just making fun of the poor submissive slave?)

The 8:00 "meeting" that Mario was so strict and self-important about may have been group counseling, or a substance abuse session, which in theory is mandated by the conditions of Julio's release from EMHC. But anybody with decent intent and a modicum of sense knows that a real, honest job is more therapeutic than all the mental health nonsense any bunch of middling, would-be "slave-overseers-cum-mental-health-professionals" can throw around at night when everybody is tired and short tempered. 

Julio is well into middle age. He did his years of time. He learned how to be tolerant and non-aggressive even when idiots like Mario are being idiots. He takes no psych "medications" that the taxpayers of Illinois have to pay for. Nobody notices any "mental illness" in him. He's a productive citizen, a working man. Give him credit for that.

C'mom guys, don't harass him! He's the kind of "mental patient" we all want, the kind we can brag about to legitimize expensive salaries and cumbersome bureaucracies.

And he's very rare, in fact maybe a fable.

What the doctor ordered

The Chicago Sun-Times features an editorial today which bemoans the "infectious disease" of people flocking to social media to seek guidance from online quacks and laypeople. 

It must be said (and it totally amazes me that a reputable newspaper editorial board would set themselves up for this criticism!) that laypeople are not always online quacks and online quacks are not always laypeople. The Sun-Times promotes itself as "the hardest working paper in America." In this case it is working extremely hard... to protect an orthodox medical guild which appears to be in full panic over loss of status and likely loss of power.

The editorial implies that anyone who googles physical symptoms as a first response will get harmful advice more often than not, and probably deserves to suffer or die for their anti-medical heresy. It exhorts readers that the only commonsense policy is to see the doctor, and to see more doctors if seeing the first doctor doesn't work out well.

But the reasons people go online first and foremost are clearly: 

   a. doctors are a pain in the ass, they are arrogant and disrespectful, cost too much, take too much time, and frequently give wrong advice; 

   b. modern medicine is art to appreciate when it communicates or works well, as much as it is science to be standardly applied for perfectly predictable results; and 

   c. we trust each other more than we trust elite experts who don't even know us.

I am an anti-psychiatry fanatic in no small part because psychiatry insults and discredits medicine (not to mention the law, which may be more important). Years ago, I suggested that the legitimization of psychiatry as modern medicine has been the exact error which could cause people to stray away from expert medical assistance en masse, and start down a slippery slope of science denial or even broad social anarchy. It seems to me it has happened. I might join in the complaint of the Sun-Times but for the fact that they are only attempting to bully us or shame us, into not complaining and not even thinking about what has caused the situation.

When it comes to understanding human beings and organizing a better civilization, our "experts" are corrupt. Medicine is not merely an imperfect science, it is the ultimate quackery, because we are spiritual beings in possession of bodies, and medicine insists we must be only our bodies. 

Too many people in medicine want only to control us for their own benefit rather than help us for ours. And that's in the increasingly rare circumstances when they even know there is a difference between help and control.

When it comes to psychiatry, I sure do say chuck the doctors' orders!

As a matter of fact, hang the doctors!

Final thoughts from APAAM 2024

Paul Appelbaum made an additional important point near the end of his session on psychedelics on May 5, 2024, in New York City. He said that the experience with Ketamine over the past few years as it became widely used to treat depression, was "not encouraging."

Ketamine for depression is virtually unregulated because the drug has been a legal anesthetic since the 1970s, and doctors can prescribe it off-label as they like, without any standards of practice to guide them. New Ketamine infusion clinics open almost every day all over the country; some of those  clinics employ real doctors and some don't, but neither the FDA nor anyone else actively monitors what they do. Ketamine pills are easily ordered over the internet (like Viagra or generic ED drugs) after a "virtual medical consultation from your couch" or a simple on-line survey. The Ketamine pills can be delivered by "free and discreet shipping," once prescribed. 

Ironically, the only form of this drug which is actually approved for treatment resistant depression, Janssen's esketamine nasal spray Spravato, is strictly regulated to require a minimal amount of counseling or observation along with the administration of the drug. This counseling or observation makes the treatment much more expensive for the added safety. That expense incentivizes the on-line prescription business, and nobody knows who is doing what with this drug.

Appelbaum suggested that if and when LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and other psychedelics are approved for research or treatment of mental disorders, requiring them to be removed from the FDA's Schedule 1 (designating drugs that have no approved medical use), they will rapidly spread out of control the same way Ketamine did. Juxtaposed against the more banal, even jocular attitudes of the presenters in Stephen Ross' session the previous day (which seemed to be that psychedelics are just medicines to be "studied" for endless collection of crunchable statistics and massive amounts of mostly unevaluated "scientific" data), Appelbaum's warnings were even more stark.

A guy sitting next to me laughed out loud when I leaned over and whispered to him, "Hey, wtf... just prescribe shrooms, man!" as a sarcastic response to some presenter's long-winded worry over the complexities of psychedelic assisted therapy and informed consent.

____________________

It really was altogether strange to me that Drs. Brody, Wilkins, Ford and Lake would have been perfectly happy to never mention that staff are just as likely to be the perpetrators of sexual abuse of patients as other patients are. I have to speculate about this glaringly illogical absence of mention, in the session I attended Sunday morning.

The first thing that occurs to me is an oft repeated, supposedly humorous truism: in any psychiatric hospital it can be quite difficult for outsiders to distinguish the patients from the staff, because they are all totally nuts. It turns out they're all about equally perverted, too. The only difference that applies to sexuality is, patients in a secure setting can be controlled, whereas staff must be predicted.

But just as important as the universality of sexual aberration is the last century's history of psychiatry. As I read it, at the beginning of that time, curing mental diseases had been an extremely unsuccessful medical project. Then Freud came along to make everybody think that great hope lay in long, open and honest talk about sex, leading perhaps to development of standard, rational manners on the subject. That didn't work either, and it was definitely never scalable for big profits. After a few decades, psychiatry gravitated back to medicine (drugs).

Part of the historical sequence brought professional embarrassment to an entire generation of would-be doctors, over the quaintly salacious, often fantasy-based details featured in most psychoanalytic therapy sessions. Headshrinkers looked a lot like perverts. To be accepted as real medical experts on the brain (or mind), psychiatrists just had to stop talking about sex.

This severe, still oddly informal and un-admitted proscription is now reflected in byzantine regulations, requirements and policies for reporting every slightest suspicion institutional staff might ever entertain, of possible patient abuse. In Illinois, state employees are required to refresh their training for this every two years, and they all know they must report anything suspicious within four hours.

But guess what, nobody follows the rules. When it comes to sex, nobody wants to know what anyone else is thinking or perhaps doing, because they don't want anyone to wonder what they are thinking or what they might do, themselves. Nobody can safely accuse the person in the office next door, because then they might be asked to leave their own office door open.

To top it off, state-employed "mental health professionals" all have to hide the fact that they have no slightest clue how to really do what the public pays them for: medical cures for emotional, cognitive and behavioral difficulties. They look over their shoulders every day, anxiously wondering, "Who might know that I am incompetent?" 

It's a perfect recipe for a slave plantation or mafia culture.

The people who attended the general session on sexual violence Sunday morning in New York certainly had no willingness to confront my honest questions directly on point. Dr. Brody offered only a weak justification for the omission of any perspective or acknowledgement that staff do sexually abuse patients. There were forty or fifty people there, and my impression was that they were all institutional mental health staff. Everyone remained "cheerfully professional," hoping perhaps that they could remain immune to any accusation.

___________________

The connection between psychiatric "treatments" with psychedelic drugs and sexual abuse of patients lies in the fact that substances like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are all about no control. No control of thinking, no control of emotion, no control of behavior, no control of supply and demand, no control of the body, no control of therapy, no control of sexuality, no control of law. This is the precise opposite of science or reason. 

The essential instinct of psychiatry is not scientific, it's religious. Psychiatrists are selling salvation with much the same pitch as Jim Jones or Charles Manson. They want to play God, or Satan, and their only affinity for science is as a means to power. With psychedelic drugs they would dissolve the personalities of their patients, and wantonly insert their own personalities, which they insist are much better.

They have always failed in that, and they will continue to fail.

Lincoln South at Packard again

Social worker Shelby Daniels stated at about 10:15 AM in a treatment plan review on May 15, 2024, that her patient, Ethan, was said by CP staff to be "overly fixated on working out." This is a negative characterization which could arguably imply (and in this case was probably meant to imply) some mental illness or personality disorder, or even a potential danger to the therapeutic milieu or the community.

The first problem with such (laughable) "professional mental health expertise" is that CP staff means any one of several people, and we don't know who. The second problem is that we don't know how fixated is overly fixated. The third problem is that we don't know what fixated even means. Thus, if such a casual, probably speculative comment by an unknown person ends up in a medical chart as a pretended "clinical observation" reported as if under oath, it becomes very poor, unreliable, prejudicial, and possibly perjured "evidence" indeed! 

The forensic mental health system thereby discredits itself and endangers the reputations of those medical and legal professionals who work in it, supposedly to help patients and serve justice. It also (needless to say!) pisses off the patient and his lawyers.

But this is exactly what staff at all of Illinois' state-operated psychiatric facilities do, day-in and day-out: they rumor-monger and natter about people they don't like, and pretend they know something about mental health which makes them worth their salaries. They are ignorant, mean people who sponge off the taxpayers and deliver no value whatsoever to society. They are my enemies, and I must do my best to love them.

In this case. Ethan told me that Shelby let it slip when he queried who said he was overly fixated on working out, that the comment was in some email. Shelby probably just wanted to disavow having spoken to any real individual. Ethan then came back and asked who sent the email. Shelby said she didn't know, she didn't remember who sent it, it was just a big, long email which incidentally included that comment among lots of other stuff.

Hmmm. That is plausible. But it certainly raises more questions!

Will Shelby Daniels, or the person who sent the email, or some IDHS information technology manager or custodian, delete that email at some point in time? Shouldn't it be preserved as evidence? After all, the report, or the opinion or whatever it was, came up in a monthly treatment plan review for a patient, apparently as relevant clinical information. If evidence is destroyed or tampered with, that could become a serious due process issue.

Or alternatively, if this "Ethan is overly fixated..." is just an unimportant bit in a mass of information that's part of routine traffic, why did Shelby mention it prominently at the start of a monthly review?

My guess is that the "treatment" team just doesn't like Ethan, and they instinctively feel like they have to discredit him. I don't think he takes meds (that would certainly prejudice Dr. Cash against him!), and he's very recalcitrant about sucking up, admiring or even respecting the plantation overseers. He just doesn't want to be a slave.

This is a wonderful situation to watch, top-drawer entertainment! These oh-so-superior people (Cash, Daniels, et al.) will founder, perhaps dramatically, on the rock of somebody (Ethan or any other high-functioning and reasonably honest NGRI patient) who patiently and intelligently refuses to bow down and tell the lies they want him to tell.

I will help Ethan get out of Packard; but the longer he's there, the more it might benefit my own prospects... to "burn Atlanta and march to the sea." War is hell, right?

Psychiatria delenda est!

APAAM 2024: an incriminating moment

At 10:30 AM, Sunday, May 5, 2024, at the American Psychiatric Association's Annual Meeting in New York City, a session was held which was entitled, "Responding to Reports of Sexual Violence on Psychiatric Inpatient Units."

It should have been entitled, "Responding to Reports of Sexual Violence on Psychiatric Inpatient Units, as long as No Staff are Suspected Perpetrators." (Sorry for my bitter sarcasm here, but this was the most discouraging moment of the whole APA weekend in New York!)

Four clinicians were presenters: Benjamin Brody, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College; Victoria Wilkins, Ph.D., also of Weill Cornell; Elizabeth Ford, M.D., of Columbia; and Kati N. Lake, Ph.D.  About 40-50 people attended, most of whom were mental health professionals who work on in-patient psychiatric units.

Dr. Brody was very fidgety and nervous. He was a little hard for me to hear, although I was actually sitting in the first row. He spewed loads of statistics. (That seems to be a sort of automatic response to the whole world by these people, as though numbers and raw, unevaluated data in sufficient mass can protect them.) The important point Brody made early on was that some kind of investigation must be conducted into every patient allegation of sexual abuse, even if the patient says they were raped by Santa Claus. 

He didn't say what kind of investigation, and I had no opportunity to ask whether it should be... thorough or a sham, honest or part of some cynical political cover-up.

There was in fact a carefully suppressed undertone throughout this session of minimizing, or even dehumanizing, patients. Of course they will say they were raped by Santa Claus, right? They're crazy after all, they don't have real points of view. I didn't like some of the things people laughed at.

Dr. Brody was followed by Kati Lake. Her contribution was all about trauma-informed care. Being subjected to sexual violence in a psychiatric institution sure does cause trauma! In fact, Dr. Lake made the quotable statement, "The hallmark of sexual violence is betrayal of trust." She also repeatedly suggested that mental health professionals ought to ask patients a different question than what they have been trained to ask: they should not ask, "What's wrong with you?" but instead, "What has happened to you?"

At some point Victoria Wilkens mentioned that patients know everything that's happening on a clinical unit. This was a point of agreement for Dr. Brody. He replied (nervously fidgeting), "Yes, they certainly know what's happening better than staff: that is 1000% correct!"

Almost all of this hour-and-a-half session was about how to deal with patient-on-patient sexual violence. E.g., the perpetrator has to be treated, too; but there are legal, even criminal implications, and that complexity along with the trauma factor (which extends beyond individuals to the whole milieu) must be competently managed.

Only Dr. Ford ever mentioned the elephant in the room, and she did so very briefly, with a mere passing comment: "Sexual violence can also be perpetrated by visitors, or even (implying... as unlikely as it may seem, or as rare as we all may know it to be...) by staff."

I stood up immediately when they called for questions or feedback from the audience, and thanked Dr. Ford for acknowledging, if only barely, the reality that my entire legal practice is all about. Sexual abuse of involuntary mental patients by staff is absolutely endemic in state operated psychiatric inpatient facilities. I asked the panel why this reality was so severely, desperately, avoided in the session.

Dr. Brody fidgeted a bit more. He offered what was to my mind a comment, not an answer: There are other ways to deal with that, like strict rules about boundaries and the ability to fire or even prosecute staff who violate the rules. "We don't owe staff any treatment, we only owe that to patients."

I responded that if indeed patients know what's going on on a clinical unit better than staff, and if indeed the hallmark of sexual violence is betrayal of trust, then surely the whole therapeutic milieu that's necessary for any mental health treatment to occur at all will be utterly ruined by the kinds of situations that I am suing people for in Illinois. I described the claims we have filed, e.g., for a young black man who was seduced by his middle-aged white female social worker into a three-year sexual affair that took place entirely on the inpatient clinical unit. I mentioned that the social worker did eventually get fired and go to prison for that; but the patient still attempted suicide three times within a few months after he was released, and he will never again trust anyone who offers to "treat" him.

There was some back-and-forth with the panel, but nobody in the audience was willing to comment or engage. This was obviously not their preferred subject of discussion. I can't say for sure whether that was because it just wasn't very relevant to their experience, or whether it was all too relevant. I sure suspect the latter.

Afterwards, I had a collegial conversation with a Dr. Kayla Isaacs, M.D., who spoke about a patient she recalled, obviously delusional, who complained virtually every day that she'd been raped the previous night in her psychiatric hospital room. (What to do, what to do?)

I also asked Dr. Lake if she was familiar with Lucy Johnstone, the psychologist from England, who as far as I know invented the idea that patients should be asked what happened to them instead of what is wrong with them. She didn't know of Lucy, but Dr. Wilkens piped up to say that she was familiar with her.

As I walked out of that room, I got the funny feeling that these people might be talking about me, and they might have been suspicious of me. 

They sure as hell should have been!