Xiamara is back!

I am told that social worker Xiaomara Ramirez has returned to her old office on N Unit at EMHC. I'm not sure anyone will even admit that she was gone for several months, and they definitely won't ever say why. The big question is whether she'll return to her old habit of papering over the window to her office door so nobody can see what she's doing in there.

Xiaomara is perhaps the starkest example I have encountered, of clinical staff at EMHC who cannot take criticism from "patients" and believe they simply don't have to even speak to those lesser humans, those mentally ill defectives, those genetically inferior slaves who should be bowing and scraping every time an overseer steps out of his/her little tiny office into the day room cotton field.

On the other hand, maybe I completely misestimate Xiaomara. I really don't know her, and my whole picture comes from one patient who has a way of holding grudges. (He passes tests for the general truth of the details he tells me though, and the people on the units who try to discredit him are idiots and liars who cannot pass those tests.)

My threat of a Passover-type plague on EMHC staff and administrators has been defused, I think. The patient who was a perfect client for a habeas corpus petition was suddenly, mysteriously granted his court-ordered passes, without the knowledge of his public defender and without any hearing or even a motion by counsel. The judge reportedly just signed an order granting the passes because EMHC recommended them. It is a clear demonstration of the fact that the courts do what the mental health experts tell them, period. In countless monthly staffings over a period of decades, I've heard treatment teams tell patients, "Oh your fate is not up to us, it's up to the criminal court." But the sad fact is, judges have abdicated their authority to assess and dispense justice, in favor of a mystical facility that they say should "cure" bad behavior medically. They imagine or cynically pretend to believe that such ability resides in the special knowledge and talents of psychiatry. This is delusion or fraud.

People seem to be confused. They just point at each other when forced hospitalization and coercive "treatment" is questioned. The court points at the doctors and the doctors point at the judges. "Don't ask me, ask him!" When something is clearly wrong, nobody is responsible, they're all just doing what somebody else says is necessary, and nobody ever knows why or whether it's right.

We take people who do really bad things, people who disgust us or terrify us, and we send them away. The age-old social mechanism of banishment was understandable and practical. The problem in modern times is that we have to feel like our "science" has made us better, like we have evolved into a rational, more capable species. EMHC isn't a prison, it's not exile, it's a hospital. Right?

That's bullshit. Illinois taxpayers spend about a billion dollars a year to make themselves fell better about experimenting on, torturing or abandoning their fellows. The bronze plaque in the EMHC forensic program building lobby is the perfect symbol of such hypocrisy and debilitating self-deception.

No wonder Xiaomara Ramirez doesn't want to be seen!