OK Gus!!

Other than Baker, the EMHC "patient" about whom I have most frequently written in recent years might be Gustavo Rodriguez. Gus' current slave cabin is on the section of the plantation known as N Unit (at least I think so--they move him around so much, I can hardly even keep track!).

Gus complains a lot, but probably quite appropriately. The thing about complaints by "patients" is, they are almost never believed, and they are very likely to draw retribution, from staff and other "patients" who act at the behest of staff or with apparent permission from staff.

Gus has been incessantly bullied lately, by a couple patients named David on N Unit. They repeatedly put post-it notes on the door to his bedroom with hearts, saying "I love you," implying Gus is gay. They disrespectfully mocked his Christianity, from which comes his morality to motivate his sincere complaints about the unjust way things are run. This week Gus admitted that he responded to the Daves in kind, for which he was very apologetic to me. I don't know exactly what he did, but it was probably not as bad as what I would have done. 

I'd love to be targeted myself for "bullying" by guys like those two Daves! I'm pretty wedded to the old saw about "sticks and stones can break my bones" and it's very hard to hurt me. But I probably know more about power in human relations than anybody who will ever try to bully me, and high school football taught me to relish physical force, outgoing or incoming. I loved playing defensive line and a solid ground offense. A passing game is pretty, but the point should be hitting. Bullies are cowards and they ostentatiously identify themselves by never using sticks and stones, only pathetic words. They just throw the ball.

The popular concern over emotional damage from bullying is a waste of attention. Bullies can be ignored, or laughed at, or beaten to a pulp when a discrete opportunity presents itself. My youngest child was bullied for awhile in grade school. I explained to him how to confront the bully directly and aggressively. We drilled a routine together, and when my son applied it, the bully went away and never came back.

Anyway, here's the reason it's worth my time writing about this on my blog.... The recent "bullying" by the two Daves on N Unit was knowingly allowed and assisted by staff. As Gus walked through the day room, he was hit with derision and catcalls from patients who were sitting together at a table with STA Kristine Iglesias and STA Erica (last name under investigation). Patients at EMHC are supposed to be helped, to improve their mental, emotional and behavioral health. They are not supposed to be ganged up on, insulted, etc., by the whole combined environment. It would have been extremely easy for Kristine and Erica, sitting right there when this occurred, to say, "Hey guys, that's inappropriate and unnecessary, so just knock it off."

In fact, it was Kristine's and Erica's job to tell the Daves to knock it off. They didn't do their job on this occasion even as they fail to do their job most of the time. They have no clue how to do their job, they have no pride in their work, they are corrupt, hopeless and degraded. Long ago, my friend Rodney Yoder tried to explain to me that these people are scum. The professional title, "Security Therapy Aide," is a joke. STA's smoke weed in hotel parking lots with patients on conditional release, and go upstairs for promiscuous nights, never thinking about anyone they are betraying, including themselves. (Right, Kristine?)

Anyway, I sure am on Gus' side! And any of you idiots who might like to come after me for that.... Mmmmm! 

Now this is going to seem nonsequitur, but maybe I can tie it in.

As I was writing, the Fox News show "Outnumbered" was featuring a discussion about implantable brain chips that could connect people to AI and digital devices for "enhancement" of various human abilities. One comment from the panel was about the potential benefits and the dangers of such technology being comparable to those which also come with psychedelic drugs. The point was essentially, "OMG, we just have to be sure these things are ethically controlled." Everybody agreed, "Oh yeah, excellent comparison!"

No, it's not an excellent comparison, because psychedelic drugs will certainly resist all attempts toward "ethical control." Those substances are the absolute personification of "NO CONTROL... NO ETHICS!" Like Jesus (from Matthew 10:34-36) they do not bring peace, but a sword. And in high irony, also like Nietzche's last men they say they have invented happiness, and they blink.

Will STA Kristine Iglesias ethically control psychedelic drugs? 

Happy Super Bowl to all!

Court reports are incoherent: more on Baker, "testing" for delusions, lies

The overseers on the psychiatric plantations in Illinois are required to report to one court or another, at least once every three months in writing, about each and every slave. This serves to support the fallacy that "patients" are being "treated" for their "mental illnesses" according to a scientific medical plan, or at least a plan reasonably expected to improve individuals' mental conditions so they can be released into the community at less risk to themselves and others.

Everyone wants to believe the fallacy, so the periodic court reports are very important. I recently spoke to a public defender from Rockford, IL who hasn't had a conversation with her client, a guy enslaved at EMHC as Unfit to Stand Trial (UST), for a couple years. In theory, it's everyone's job to get this guy fit for his day in court, to either be found guilty and sentenced, or not. He tells me he wants to go to trial, he wants a fair one, and I believe him. He certainly understands the charges against him and the legal process. But his attorney says she can't work with him (or "he's not capable of assisting in his own defense") because he's totally delusional.

It's funny though, I know this guy, I've attended his monthly treatment plan review meetings ("staffings") a number of times over the last year while his lawyer was refusing to return his calls. He seems completely normal to me: articulate, good humor, no strange ideas that seem delusional at all. And no one on his treatment team ever mentions "delusions" that they notice. As best I can tell, the public defender in Rockford is the only person noticing "delusions."

What she's talking about is likely just her disagreement with a client about how to defend a case. She doesn't believe his story, or she doesn't like him, he acts like he thinks he's smarter than she is. It's a PD's job to figure that out though, not to hire "doctors" to fix it (she already gets her salary, and the expense of her office is on the taxpayers). What's supposed to happen is a jury and a trial, not interminable, useless "treatment" (yes all my quotation marks are extremely sarcastic) for $800+/day. For godssakes, make it work, earn your salt! Fine, maybe this guy will be convicted. But he and the citizens of the state are your clients, you're a Public Defender.

When I tried to question the whole situation, I was referred to the court reports, which the PD says she reads as authoritative proof (every one of them) that her client is hopelessly delusional. I doubt it, because the court reports are (at least ostensibly) written by the clinical treatment team, and I speak to those people. Those expert mental health professionals all say the only reason this slave is stuck on the EMHC plantation is the court (and the PD) won't take him back and give him a trial. They don't know any medical treatment for that.

Court reports can be said to say almost anything because they are cobbled together out of competing viewpoints from hedging, insecure, corrupt bureaucrats, cut and pasted, and generally incoherent for any purpose beyond CYA. Following are excerpts from a recent court report.... I've written a lot about James Baker over the years. He played basketball every day when I first knew him, and kept up with much younger guys very well. Now he's a gentle and polite, charming elderly man who cannot walk without assistance; he's certainly no threat to anyone at EMHC, or anywhere else. I'm quite sure everyone on his treatment team would say the same. Just incidentally, he hasn't needed any psych drugs for decades.

Mr. Baker continues to maintain stability on the unit... (he) has maintained his assigned treatment group schedule.... 

He remains at his baseline behavior. He remains calm and not a threat to himself and to others and maintains stability on the unit. He completed his unit incentive program and participated in the unit monthly event. He is actively engaged in group and is often observed verbally contributing to discussions in a meaningful way. In Cognitive Behavioral Skills, Mr. Baker was noted as providing insightful responses and participating in the cognitive re-framing activity. 

Mr. Baker advocated for himself properly with a new trust fund staff that did not complete a transaction as requested. His debit balance account was corrected on 01/03/2024.

Mr. Baker is is in the process of being referred for placements, then planning to be recommended for conditional release.... He has agreed to go to a nursing home as part of the conditional release process.... Mr. Baker consistently maintains appropriate behavior and observes all hospital protocols while in community....  

There is no rational justification for keeping this man under lock and key for $800+ per day on Illinois taxpayers. I honestly don't know who is perpetrating this injustice and this honest services fraud. At one point, it sure seemed like it was Richard Malis-with-malice. But the incriminating signatures on the quoted document are Rose Adler (Social Worker), and Tasheen Mohammed, MD (Psychiatrist).

But back to that court report itself. It's Baker's most recent, with a cover letter dated "January 2024" from Victoria Ingram, Psy.D., to Honorable Tyria B. Walton, Circuit Court Judge in Room 304 at 26th and California. (Apparently Vicky Ingram is unable to figure out the precise date when she signs court reports, or she has some practical reason for not wanting to incriminate herself about timing.) In addition to the above positive portions, the text also includes:

He has chronic delusions.... He needs to cooperate with additional testing to verify the extent of any cognitive delusions to assist in determining further treatment recommendations and appropriate aftercare placement. Due to the nature of his mental illness he constitutes a threat to public safety, if not treated in a properly supervised and structured setting.

So according to Adler and Mohammed, on one hand Baker is well behaved, with adequate intelligence and self control, and EMHC is working on a conditional release recommendation to move him to a nursing home. But on the other hand, he has (unspecified) chronic "cognitive delusions" which they want to test for (I'd love to know how they'll do that!) to be sure he won't threaten public safety, even though he can barely walk.

What is a state's attorney and a judge supposed to make of this incoherent report from the mental health "experts" to whom they sold this black man back in 1987, during the ironically recalled "decade of the brain," supposedly to get his disordered brain medically fixed?

It's nonsense and fraud. I can hardly blame the poor, harried PD in Rockford for wanting nothing to do with the whole business, and simply burying her client in the state nuthouse.

It's just that she lies when she says she knows from the court reports he's totally delusional. 

The people running this aren't delusional, they lie. It doesn't help.

 

Two Carroll defamation cases

$83 million! 

OK, so Jean Carroll was defamed by someone who is much more powerful than Michelle Evans, Ryma Jacobson, Marjorie Antona, Remedios Tiu and Terry Krystoff. But maybe Lauren Carroll (no relation to Jean) was defamed more severely.

Jean was merely called a nutjob, a liar, delusional or sick, when she complained that she had been raped. For that defamatory name-calling she won a huge jury verdict. Lauren was criminally prosecuted on a single, unsubstantiated report by someone officially declared to be mentally ill and dangerous, and the media was recruited to immediately trumpet the allegation that Lauren physically abused a disabled person. Lauren's attackers, like Jean's, have been sued for defamation.

I didn't closely follow the Carroll v. Trump case; but I filed the Carroll v. Evans case with claims for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and I am the lead attorney for the Plaintiff. So far, I'm not expecting $83 million. But who knows? Trump was an idiot to go after Jean Carroll the way he did. He is losing, big-time, and no matter how that case eventually ends, after years of appeals and continuing bad media at the height of the presidential campaign, it won't be worth it to him. Likewise, EMHC and IDHS employees made a huge mistake by maliciously scapegoating Lauren Carroll. 

It is said that the jury awarded Jean Carroll tens of millions in punitive damages to teach the Defendant in that case a lesson, to punish him, and deter him from doing what he did over and over again, as he says he will. He has a net worth of billions, so it arguably takes at least tens of millions to deter him. In fact, he even bragged about that himself. He asked for that verdict, thinking the Plaintiff was a nobody and he could just run over her and shut her up.

Similarly, somebody among the Defendants in Carroll v. Evans obviously thought Lauren Carroll was a nobody who had no practical recourse against false and defamatory public allegations. They figured they could manipulate the Illinois State Police, the local newspapers and TV stations,  and the Kane County State's Attorney's office, to get some cheap publicity or credit to cover up their own horrible and still declining reputation as sexual abusers, and just get away with it. They have proven that they have no interest in righting the wrongs of psychiatric slavery or reforming the mafia culture of their bureaucracy.

The individual Defendants in my Carroll case don't have personal billions. But they have their union and the Illinois Attorney General: air cover from government and organized labor, who are far wealthier even than Trump. What jury award will deter them?

I think we'll just see.

Ketamine: Don't get fooled again... meet the new cure, same as the old cure!

For a few months, or maybe a year (but not two), it seemed as though ketamine therapy, either infusions or nasal spray (Janssen's Spravato) or both, had somehow slipped into some respectable status as medicine. There were innovative clinics and innovative therapists popping up everywhere. In Chicago, there's a business which even has the name "Innovative Ketamine" with multiple clinic locations. Here's their trendy North Side spot just off Clark Street, an easy walk from Wrigley Field:

Maybe the guys who opened this one figured it's a location with excellent prospects, considering how chronically depressed Cubs fans have to be. Or are they chronically manic..? Which psychedelic is good for that again? Oh baseball!

A recent entrepreneurial operation in Phoenix tries to show some good cheer and possibly refer to 1966 Beatles nostalgia, from the height of the original psychedelic movement (Sunday driver, yeah...):

That graphic design above the name sure looks like dissociation to me, like somebody is K-holing and can't find their way back into the body.... And just by the way, nostalgia was long considered a serious mental health problem. Soldiers who suffered from it had to be brutalized, of course, that has always been the "treatment" for "mental illness" and it still is. It took me so-o long to find out. I found out.

But all of a sudden, ketamine "treatments" are looking less innovative, and more like... just plain stupid. You pay lots of money, apparently for nothing in the way of legitimate medicine that actually cures depression or PTSD. Of course, that goes for all of psychiatry. Except that stuff like SSRI antidepressants and other useless but harmful drugs, along with ECT and years of forced "hospital" confinement on a plantation like Elgin Mental Health Center doesn't get paid for by the patient. The taxpayers always foot those bills, so the patients don't have to be as wealthy as the ketamine suckers in Wrigleyville or the Valley of the Sun.

Cute "clinical" operations like Innovative Ketamine and Daytryp, or frustrated overseers like Vik Gill at EMHC, have to just hope against hope that insurance will eventually pay for these "services." But forget Medicaid! There's no way any psychedelic therapy will ever be safe enough or effective enough, without intensive counseling before and after a person takes the drug. That's prohibitively expensive, not to mention that nobody knows how to do it anyway. "Mental health" has been too medicalized for too long, and practitioners no longer have the slightest clue about, or any confidence or familiarity with, talking cures. It's just MEDS über alles! That's the total thought.

Ketamine is the bellwether for psychedelics in psychiatry. The drug is extremely addictive. It doesn't do anything good that isn't done by a placebo. The whole idea is mercifully imploding. I give it a year max.

We should hope that Rick Doblin's pet ecstasy (MDMA) project will crash and burn in a couple years, too; and if there's no FDA approval for psilocybin, we won't worry as much about planes being crashed by pilots on shrooms. The only "promise" of psychedelic drugs is a nightmare!

The sooner we realize that, the better we'll avoid Helter Skelter.

Power

The issue of mental health (or at least the issue of psychiatry) is not morality, but power.

Practical questions about how and what to think, appropriate emotions, and correct behavior are not asked by individuals in isolation from their neighbors. Rather, they are presented or negotiated socially. 

For whom will you vote and why? What do you think of our political system? Are you influenced by prejudice or loyalty, or swayed by well written campaign ads produced with music and beautiful images of family and country? Are your beliefs the same as the beliefs of people you love? Do you know the law and the proper manners in common contexts? In whose presence do you use profanity? Why do you choose to follow or challenge such conventions? Thought... emotion... behavior...

If you were Elon Musk or the King of the world, you might be free to think, feel and behave almost any way you like. Being a bit less rich or having a bit less authority requires considering other people, or at least those other people who have more wealth or more authority than you.

It seems strange to me that what we call "mental health" (which is more or less ruled by psychiatry) contains almost no acknowledgement of fundamental social reality based in the dynamics of power. The "doctors" pretend that it's all a matter of scientific fact: thoughts are neurological pathways, emotion is a balance of neurotransmitters, behavior is commanded by functioning or malfunctioning brains. Mental patients simply have to be educated into the truth (which psychiatrists know best and will ultimately know perfectly if we just give them enough money) so they'll take the right drugs voluntarily.

Psychiatrists (Jeffrey "Freak of Nature" Lieberman and Richard "Malis-with-malice" come first to mind, although even nice guys like Vik Gill are equally guilty) are mistaken to think the deal is already done. Their mistake makes them arrogant, and in arrogance, they make poor presentations and become poor negotiators. The promised great breakthroughs in brain science never did happen, so now these guys are reduced to pandering to psychedelic gurus like Rick Doblin, hoping against hope that a whole new industry might emerge there, rather than a whole new "recovered memory" disaster.

It won't happen. Ketamine remains too expensive to be scalable, and all psychedelic assisted therapy will be useless or dangerous without skilled counselors and ethical facilitators who will remain few and far between. The whole psychedelic renaissance will likely collapse in the next year or two if the FDA refuses to approve ecstasy and 'shrooms as "medicine" for PTSD or depression, and LSD for alcoholism.

It's over-obviously ironic and clearly outrageous, that supposed medical professionals are now considering prescriptions of highly addictive drugs to cure addiction, drugs that were originally known to cause or mimic psychosis for mental illness, drugs that increase suicide and violence to save the world. But they are in actual fact considering prescriptions of ecstasy, psilocybin, and acid, because all they know how to do is prescribe drugs, and psychedelics momentarily look like the best high-potential power grab. The old drugs, like "antidepressants" and "antipsychotics" (sarcastic quotation marks) are discredited.

But there are even "designer" or niche psychedelic "research" drugs like "Moxy" now, with tactile and empathic effects rendering sexual boundaries in therapy almost impossible. Perfect for certain supposed "clinicians" at EMHC, Chicago Read, Packard, Alton, etc. 

Never mind "First do no harm," or truth.

"Addictive"

The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse adopts a distinctly psychiatric point of view on what drug addiction is. Their web page entitled "What is drug addiction?" defers directly to DSM5, and features lots of colorful pictures of brain scans. Hence, the U.S. Government officially endorses the orthodoxy, that this is a brain issue, a proper medical science issue: medical doctors must be in charge, and health insurance must pay.

But the brain is not what gets treated for addiction; or at least, the brain is not treated directly. Psychiatrists are not brain doctors, neurologists are. Google searches will bring up lots of information about the "neurology of addiction," but it's all theoretical, undemonstrated in the real world. There are no neurologists to go to for drug addiction, they might get paid to research it, but not to treat it. You go to psychiatrists, psychologists, or other "mental health professionals" or "substance abuse professionals" for actual treatment. The treatment is for behavior, emotions, cravings, and thinking, not for any specifically defined brain mechanisms or pathology.

Those professionals who do treat drug addiction come with a plethora of impressive sounding academic credentials and licenses, from clinical neuropsychologists to social workers to twelve-step facilitators. The only medical doctors in the crowd are psychiatrists, who fiddle with a lot of drugs that will randomly and unpredictably (mostly badly) affect your brain, and electricity that will damage it so you can't remember things. A new category may soon be psychedelic therapy facilitators, who will say psychedelic drugs are "non-addictive", and promote them to cure addiction.

But people who use psychedelics can become psychologically addicted to the altered perceptions and mystical revelations that come with "tripping." Repeated LSD use quickly causes tolerance, requiring a frequent user to take increasingly larger doses for the same effect. MDMA ("Molly"/"Ecstasy") is notorious as a "highly addictive drug" for its production of extreme psychological dependence. But LSD and Molly are leading candidates as "treatment" of addiction, including alcoholism. Of course, this is awkward for branding of psychedelic therapy facilitators.

Addiction is a highly variable phenomenon. For example, some people actually enjoy cold turkey withdrawal from nicotine (I did, 40 years ago). Others suffer such nagging torture that they literally cannot quit smoking without complicated help. This variability in addiction may be true with most drugs. I've known psychiatric patients who stopped whole cocktails of psychotropics with no obvious problems, and others who went crazy just trying to taper off a single SSRI antidepresssant.

But psychedelics are unpredictable by a whole higher order of magnitude, and not only for possible addiction. The informed consent task is completely different or impossible, because risks of a "bad trip" depend on so many factors that will never be clinically controlled, and benefits are mostly extolled and sought by the public as mystical or spiritual breakthroughs. Only MAPS tries hard to establish some modicum of what they think might pass for "science" with the FDA, so there can be enough money in "Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT)" to pay for lawyers who will defend against sexual abuse lawsuits.

It is tempting to predict that psychedelic drugs will be the death of psychiatry as a medical specialty. If the APA and British RCP (Royal College of Psychiatrists) make the mistake of hitching their wagons to the ongoing "psychedelic renaissance," they'll risk turning themselves into Timothy Leary apostles. They might as well just climb aboard that painted bus to the destination, "FURTHER."

The death of psychiatry will be good, but collateral damage will be terrible: more people will take psychedelics. Practical military and intelligence establishments won't be duped into killing innocents again, but we may see a fresh crop of Jim Joneses and Charlie Mansons.

And the sexual abuse will give therapy itself a bad name. 

Football

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the U of M Hospital. My father was an architecture student born in Battle Creek, Michigan, whose father was a general surgeon; my mother was a pre-med Southern belle whose father promised her she could do anything she wanted in her life. 

As a baby, I was rocked to sleep to "Hail to the Victors Valiant!" But my maternal grandmother also had me singing, "I wish I was in the Land of Cotton" by the time I was in grade school. We had family in Alabama who were plantation owners long ago, and one of my own children now has the middle name Saunders, after them.

Until I was fifteen, no game came close to the Rose Bowl for importance. Michigan often won it, which made them "the champions of the west." My grandparents watched pro football, but it seemed to me as a kid that it never inspired the emotion my parents always had for Big Ten games in the Big House. There was no Super Bowl until 1967, the year everything changed in the American culture around me. (The missile crisis and assassinations alerted me to mortality, but the Summer of Love and rock 'n roll made me want to live, and create, forever.)

Funny, 57 years (not forever) later, I just spent New Year's Day in California only a few miles from the Rose Bowl. I watched Michigan beat Alabama with my whole family, some of them typing "Go Blue! and "Hail!" incessantly, on a group text for those Wolverines. What a great game! (It was hard to believe my mother wasn't watching, somewhere.) I also have a close friend who's an Alabama alum.... Oh well, Tide.

Maybe there is some symbolic reenactment of "The War" in this football game between Yankee and Southern schools. After all, the first Confederate capital was Montgomery, Alabama, and CSA President Jefferson Davis was an Alabamian. On the opposite side when Lincoln called the banners in 1861, he only requested one regiment from Michigan, but the governor enthusiastically sent him seven; one of those was George Armstrong Custer's "Michigan Wolverine Cavalry" which battled J.E.B. Stuart (my namesake!) at Gettysburg.

It's commonly thought that American football is violent, an imitation of warfare. The sport was invented in 1869, only four short years after Appomattox. Maybe this year's Rose Bowl result is a bad omen for the future of slavery (which is exactly what coercive psychiatry immitates). Lots of analogies, symbolism, emotion and hope in all this, right?

On the other hand maybe it's just football, and that's good enough.