Scumbags, etc.

I have represented clients who were credibly accused (by opposing counsel) of being scumbags, predators, blackmailers, wreckers of havoc upon society... and I dislike all those types of people; but the people I dislike most are those who think I'm stupid.

Clearly, anyone thinks I am stupid when they try to tell me that a man is at fault when he is in involuntary custody (to be treated for insanity) of a woman who has legal authority through her state institutional employer to constantly monitor the man's thoughts, mental and emotional condition and his most intimate behavior. If that woman is a state employee who ends up having sex with the man for her own selfish benefit, she completely ruins any possibility for a therapeutic milieu, and her action is a crime that turns what is supposed to be a "hospital" into an effective slave plantation. 

Blaming the man for the sex in this circumstance is (ironically) misogynistic, dehumanizing, ridiculous, and (most importantly) contrary to the law. A staff member who has sex with a patient at a psychiatric institution commits a felony, and the patient does not. It does not mater at all who is male and who is female or who is horny. Some people seem to believe that men always enjoy sex, that sex is always a benefit for men, no matter the circumstances (e.g., of power, coercion, force, drugs). Implicitly they think women are never sexual predators. This is contrary to wide human experience.

If my client is some irredeemable, anti-social scumbag, maybe he was made that way by being abused. And surely, any "mental health professional" who has sex with a patient whom she is being paid to help heal from such mental disorder as rendered him NGRI, is equally an anti-social scumbag. Most people, and most lawyers, don't want to work very hard for one anti-social scumbag against another. I have chosen to make that a major part of my legal practice.

The reason is not because it pays well! It's partly because nobody else is doing it, partly because I believe, whether I am realistic or delusional, that I have some special ability to tell which of two anti-social scumbags is worse; and it's partly because there is a lot at stake for the future of my community and the world.

The claim by psychiatrists that they have a better understanding than laypeople of human cognition, emotion and behavior is the most destructive fallacy in many centuries. The scam has garnered ill-deserved respect and authority for psychiatry. The public generally think of psychs as doctors rather than overseers of slave plantations, which is a much more accurate description for what they do. The drugs they have infested into our society are tragically debilitating and dehumanizing. Their apotheosis of the brain as the asserted source and only reality of the individual is spiritually and heuristically abominable.

After the first half of my life, I determined to combat psychiatry for the second half. I organized my new war around a maxim from Thomas Szasz: one need only abolish the insanity defense and outlaw involuntary treatment to precipitate the total attrition of psychiatry as we have always known it. The insanity defense and involuntary treatment ultimately live in state-operated institutions called "mental health centers." So that is where I went, and that is where I've been since I became a lawyer.

As the rabid abolitionist in Chester, Elgin, Alton, Choate, etc., I quickly noticed several useful things: 

1. State-employed mental health professionals are insecure and incompetent. They cluster together in the isolated institutions with eccentric cultures because they fear outsiders will notice that they don't know and don't like their jobs. They hide in the state bureaucracy so no one will see them or blame them for being useless and cruel. They lie under oath. They are pitiful. Those who aren't so pitiful leave and get honest work. An extremely rare few try to change things, but they are never successful for more than a year or two.

2. The flawed theory of mental health causes people to become criminal. Blaming every human failing on a malfunctioning or inferior brain justifies immorality and lack of discipline. Why not have sex with the beautiful young black boy? He wants it, the middle-aged social worker wants it, too. Uncontrolled and banned responses to natural desires are imminently justifiable when everybody in sight is "treated" medically for their personality failures and even their petty foibles, not to mention psychotic or dangerous behavior.

3. No one cares. The public wants nothing to do with insanity, they are terrified of it. When I tell my neighbors what I do they are initially fascinated, and they might even imagine I'm some noble crusader for justice. But if I see the same person a week later, they've forgotten all of it. They'd never visit EMHC to find out whether it's a hospital or a slave plantation; they're happy to pay their taxes and not think about it.

My experience over the last couple decades has made me extremely secure in whatever optimism I do retain. Sometimes that's not much, but it can always, and does always, come from face-to-face communication with patients and staff. As long as I am able to personally engage, I am not afraid, or stupid.

Fear of insanity comes from no face-to-face contact with crazy people.

They're all basically good.

Pregnancy!

This is clear, objective evidence. When a woman who is in IDHS custody because she was adjudicated not guilty of a violent crime by reason of insanity (NGRI) or unfit to stand trial (UST) for such a crime gets pregnant, somebody committed abuse and/or neglect. There simply is no way around that claim. And there are people who can and should be found liable. The state should have to indemnify those people. 

If the woman does not want to terminate her pregnancy, and if a baby is born, that child should probably get a free ride to Harvard on the State of Illinois.

Because of this hard reality, there will certainly be people who will try to convince any pregnant "patient" on an IDHS plantation to get an abortion. And they'll certainly look for a scapegoat for the abuse and/or neglect which is incontrovertible. The first impulse will be to prevent anyone from finding out. The second impulse will be to blame the two "patients," who will be restricted and mercilessly persecuted to the fullest extent of rules and regulations. And the third impulse will be to isolate administrative higher-ups from blame by focusing it all on the most junior staff down on the clinical unit. This last gets very complicated, and things tend to fall apart.

It is happening right now at Packard Mental Health Center in Springfield. It has probably happened many times before at Packard, Elgin, Chicago Read, Madden, Alton and/or Choate. It won't happen at Chester, only because there are no female "patients" to get pregnant there. There might be graves and secret records at some of these places. It might be uncovered and go public soon as a very ugly story.

If a female patient is told, by her psychiatrist or social worker, or by anyone, "The baby is only going to be in DCFS custody anyway, so you should terminate," that is more (mental/emotional) abuse. And it can get worse. If the female patient is put in danger from other, perhaps unstable or violent, patients, or if she is medically or nutritionally neglected and loses the baby because of that, some people might call it murder or conspiracy to murder an unborn child.

The taxpayers of Illinois have a right to find out how often this has happened, why it happens, and what should be done about it. It ruins mental health.

I know one likely "expert" to ask: Dr. Cash?

An EXCELLENT cultural sign?

I saw a TV ad this morning which included a graphic of a leaf (I think) and an advice: "Find your trash in therapy," which after a second or two changed to, "Find your self in therapy." I didn't see who paid for the ad. There was no other CTA (marketing lingo for call to action), and nothing specific for anybody seeing the ad to do. So the only likely effect intended by those who created the ad and bought the media, was momentary wondering about what trash and what self.

Maybe this is a harbinger of changing social attitudes in mental health. If so, it makes me very optimistic. I would really love to find out who the people are who created the ad, and what they think the value of running it on TV might be!

My wife and I have a very good friend who is a Ph.D. psychologist and full-time practicing professional therapist. Diane insists that she does not share my "extreme" views on psychiatric drugs, because many of her patients appear to need them. However she agrees with me that mental, emotional, and behavioral problems are not, or at least not strictly, medical issues. She also shares my near horror about the prospect that psychedelics will become a replacement for antidepressants in psychiatry.

Speculating about this "Find your trash" ad, my wife (who is actually a renowned, top expert in marketing) suggested that the intent might be to tell people needing help, "Look for a Diane, don't go a psychiatrist who will just prescribe drugs."

Although I do not believe there is significant value in the supposed "science" of psychology for any purpose other than selling things to reactive people, I certainly trust Dianes to cause less harm than Syed Hussain, Daniel Cuneo, Corcoran, Malis-with-malice, and the other plantation overseers who perpetrate the crime of psychiatric slavery against humanity.

There is much argument and frequently vicious allegation on my X (Twitter) feed, back and forth between British mental health professionals loyal to either orthodox psychiatry on one side or psychological models of "treatment" on the other. I always like it when the psychologists seem to be winning the argument. But that's not because I think they're substantially right about anything other than the fact that psychiatry is fundamentally harmful, and I'm sorry to notice that they are rarely willing to even state that view plainly.

I believe that psychiatry has finally failed as a supposed medical specialty. There were various times in the past two centuries when that could have been, and was, said. But right now, unlike e.g., in the 1960's, Western culture is generally cynical about medicine and science itself. This cynical moment will be a brief opening, because science is mostly on the side of truth and medicine is mostly helpful.

But maybe it's a chance to strike an effective blow toward abolishing psychiatric slavery, coercion and fraud. Maybe the ad I saw this morning is a good sign!

Maybe people will think about what trash, and what self.

Therapy, not violence.

On dangerously cold days....

 Does anyone wonder, while walking 100 yards across a full parking lot against a frigid wind, why this parking place, close to the door, must remain unused day after day?

The Librarian and Michelle Evans

In four separate monthly staffings for patients at EMHC in the last two days, the issue of the librarian came up. The facility library is a generally undervalued resource for patients, who are almost completely restricted from internet use, and of course, cannot have computers in their rooms. The ways that normal people get information in the real world are simply not available; "patients" are in fact cut off from much communication with the world. This is classic milieu control as described by Robert Lifton. It is the most basic feature of an environment geared to impose thought reform on individuals.

I believe this is actually contrary to the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code, at least in principle. In any event, access to the library becomes an even more critical right, and denial of such access is a particularly cruel mechanism of control, similar to close restriction or overregulation of telephone use or mail, or even solitary confinement (called seclusion in psychiatric "hospitals").

I've never surveyed how many or what percentage of "patients" at EMHC use the library frequently or at all, and how important they consider it to be to their own mental and emotional welfare and recovery. It occurs to me that it might be extremely important. Thus, making the library a dangerous or unpleasant place at EMHC could become a strategy for control or punishment.

If the EMHC library were a place (just hypothetically) where "patients" were often required to dodge sexual harassment or grooming to become sexual abuse victims, that would be a serious human rights violation. On the other side of this, if a staff at EMHC were a sexual predator, the very best job he or she could hope for might be Librarian. 

Vulnerable people could be found in the library, and privacy could be easily arranged. If (just hypothetically) a librarian at EMHC had a special proclivity for African American women as objects of erotic interest, he might be tempted to give out his private phone number to the young, pretty ones. He might spend evenings telling them how special they are, and how he'd love to be with them. He might operate that way with impunity, for years.

But the thing is, Michelle Evans is a long-time EMHC clinician (social worker) and current Hospital Administrator (i.e., the top dog, the master up in the big house with the most authority on the whole plantation). She is very highly qualified as an expert in identifying and dealing with sexual predators, and has been on the board of directors of the not-for-profit Illinois Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, since 2014!

Barry Smoot told me he believes there is much more sexual abuse of patients in IDHS custody than almost anyone even imagines, certainly far more than what gets reported to OIG. Barry and I were recently talking about what records might reveal the number of female patients who became pregnant in, say, the last five or ten years, while they were in IDHS custody. Of course most of the time, the men who get them pregnant would be other patients, not staff.... Right?

But with an expert like Michelle Evans, even a librarian couldn't get away with that at EMHC.

Right??

Happy New Year!

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!