One of the most valuable rights involuntary "patients" have, enshrined in Illinois' Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code [405 ILCS 5/1-100 et seq.], is the right to unimpeded, private and uncensored communication with anyone they choose. Section 2-103 of the Code presents a few, slightly elaborate qualifications or exceptions to this right, but the intent of the law is more clear from the careful, precise language of the qualifications or exceptions themselves.
For example, the law makes the Director of any particular plantation (e.g., Sara Broyles at Packard) personally responsible for ensuring that this right is respected, and personally accountable to issue written rules and written explanations of any restrictions of this right.
In other words, it is very clear that the law does not intend for individual clinicians on the units to spontaneously make up rules about phone use or restrict "patients" from using the phones in any arbitrary way when they just feel like talking to any friends or family, for any reason. This is important, by the way. Section 2-103 appears in the chapter of the Code which is entitled, "Rights of Recipients of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Services." (Emphasis added.) It's a matter of rights, not merely an administrative detail. They have to let patients talk on the phone as freely as possible, and they have to organize and document doing so.
Well, there's this social worker on Lincoln South Unit named Michael Fitz who seems to believe he can gratuitously violate the intent and letter of this law, for his own purposes of (perhaps) proving that he can punish and harass a "patient" whom he doesn't like on any particular day or who causes a mere nuisance once in a while. Fitz may also need to prove he's smarter than the "patient", or failing that (since he definitely isn't smarter), prove that he can overwhelm that "patient" and treat her or own her as a slave. Packard is a plantation, after all. Fitz is an overseer, he's absolutely not any helping professional.
Yesterday at about 2:00 PM, Fitz's "patient" got a phone call from a friend she had not spoken to in a long time, who may not have even known she was "hospitalized" (I am heavy on the sarcastic quotation marks for this article) in Illinois. She spoke with her friend for about half an hour, and hung up. The friend called her back to continue the conversation after about twelve minutes. But Michael Fitz, who evidently had been meticulously clocking the phone time of this "patient", quickly interrupted to say in a hostile or impatient, arrogant tone, "You've been on the phone for an hour and forty-five minutes, and you have to hang up!" The "patient" complied, and Fitz went back into the office or nurses' station from which he had been surveilling the phone use with an eagle eye, and wrote up a report.
Later, the evening shift staff on Lincoln South (who only must be presumed to have read Fitz's report) unnecessarily and unpleasantly admonished the "patient" that she had to "follow the rules and not spend so much time on the phone."
But what rules? As best we know there is no written restriction signed by Sara Broyles saying that no "patient" may spend more than some stated amount of time on the phone. The rule (Section 2-103) is unimpeded, private and uncensored communication with anyone. Not to mention, if Fitz actually wrote that the "patient" had been on the phone for an hour and forty-five minutes, that was a false report possibly amounting to perjury; and there was no one else waiting or asking to use the phone at any time while Fitz's "patient" and been on it. Fitz was just being a petty tyrant, acting arbitrarily out of spite. But of course, this is normal on the plantations. The slaves must be kept under control and dominated by any means.
Section 2-103 also mentions attorneys, and apparently gives them special importance as far as "patients'" communication access goes. (See, 405 ILCS 5/2-103(d).) A recent experience with the same "patient" and her social worker Fitz (among other overseers of slaves at Packard) illustrates how the spirit of the law, often, is frustrated by the plantation's desperate obsession to control the slaves.
Several Defendants in a federal case I have recently filed consider that they should remain as the Plaintiff's clinical team, and that they need not have their attorneys present in a treatment plan review meeting which I attend as an advocate for that "patient". This seems rather dicey to me, but I know several of the plantations are severely understaffed to the point that they are technically unable to provide mental health and developmental disabilities treatment as required by law. (I wrote about this in some detail recently.) So, maybe Packard is as severely understaffed as Choate, and their calculation here is, it's better for Defendants in a civil suit to take the chance that they may inadvertently provide evidence for civil claims, than to end up being criminally culpable.
The "solution" to this quandry, as best I can decipher, is to carefully clarify, or get me to admit, that I am only the "patient's" advocate when I attend a treatment plan review (TPR), and I am not acting as the Plaintiff's attorney for those minutes while the Defendants in the case are present without counsel. I went along with this the other day, even though I'm not sure I understand or anyone can predict all the implications.
For practical purposes, of course it's all nonsense: first and foremost because the "treatment" the "clinical team" is supposedly "planning" in a TPR is itself pure nonsense, when they pretend to be curing a non-existent brain disease with their horribly damaging "medicine" but cannot even bring themselves to efficiently diagnose a condition as obvious and medically treatable as pregnancy, and they implicitly admit all that in an opposition attorney's presence, without their own state-provided counsel; secondly, in the particular case, these Defendants will settle or not according to the specific facts discovered, not according to shades of definition unless they want a jury trial with lots of media.
As I've written before, pregnancy is a stubbornly objective fact, especially when it's carried to term; and a child is an expensive responsibility that somebody will certainly have to pay for.
So prevent communication, severely control phone use, and maybe words will count more than deeds.
Right, Fitz? Right, Gadson?
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