Gus: So tell me Joe... What can I do to make our relationship better and more productive?
Joe Basso: What?
Gus: Tell me what I can do to improve this social worker-patient relationship between you and me?
Joe Basso: (Long pause...) Well, um....What do you mean?
Gus: I just mean, is there anything... something that I can do to make this better, so that you and I can work together?
Joe Basso: (Looking away, looking up at the ceiling...) Uh... I'm not sure what you're talking about.... What do you mean by that?
This conversation, or a very close, nearly word-for-word version of it, actually occurred this morning on N Unit at EMHC. Gus is the guy whom everyone (at least according to Vik Gill) supposedly dislikes more than any other patient. Joe, officially assigned as Gus' caseworker, actually doesn't even work on the same clinical unit. He was assigned to Gus after Xiaomara Ramirez apparently became worried that Gus might accuse her of doing unethical things with male patients in her office, while the window in the door was papered over so no one could see in.
Gus never did accuse Xiaomara of any such misconduct, he only mentioned the obstructed view through her office door window, which was in fact against clear facility policy. I was the one who recalled an earlier pattern of misconduct by an EMHC social worker. A male patient was sexually abused, several times a week for years, in an office just like Xiaomara's, on a clinical unit just like N Unit. That social worker was convicted on felony charges and sentenced to a prison term. The state was then forced to defend various individuals who worked within steps of the door to the office where the sexual abuse occurred, against claims that they failed or refused to prevent the resulting harm. That civil case was litigated for nearly seven years before it finally settled.
But in any event, Xiaomara kind of freaked out, and insisted on dumping Gus from her case load some months back. Joe Basso was the low-ranking staff conscripted to take over. His office is on M Unit, which is separate from N Unit. Gus cannot go over to M to talk to his social worker, and Joe doesn't come to N any more often that he absolutely has to, so they don't talk much. It's awkward, clearly not very attuned to any therapeutic purpose, and Joe seems to resent Gus for that. But after all, Gus is disliked more than any other patient at EMHC, as certified by Dr. Gill, M.D. psychiatrist. Thus, Joe can feel easily justified for disliking Gus, too.
The thing about all this is, it's a painfully clear demonstration of the fact that the so-called "mental health professionals" who man the psychiatric slave plantations for which Illinois taxpayers spend about a billion dollars a year really have no idea what they are doing. They are not real doctors who have real scientific medicine to help anyone recover from real illnesses. They are shysters, merely desperate to feed at a rapidly dwindling public trough.
At best, they are apparatchiks who wanted to help people a long time ago, but don't think about that anymore because they're only hiding in the machine, hoping no one will see them so they can survive long enough to get a pension.
Gus sees them. When he asks Joe Basso what he can do to help things improve, Joe can't even think with that question. All Joe wants is no trouble. Help is incomprehensible.
This state should abolish psychiatric slavery. Close EMHC!
