Honest Services Fraud

(On or about November 1, 2015, the following conversation took place between a patient and a psychologist at Elgin Mental Health Center. At the moment, I hesitate to publish the names. But I may do so in the future. I believe this is evidence of criminal fraud, not merely on the part of the particular clinician engaged in this conversation, but as a regular pattern of policy and practice by the Illinois Department of Human Services. Any "forensic mental health professional" knows full well that this sort of "explanation" for mental illness and the purpose or action of medications is pseudoscientific nonsense, meant only to further the coercion of patients who would not take psychiatric drugs if they had any effective right to fully informed consent.)

Patient:  There's a lot of talk about, like, chemical imbalances, or... like, what happens when you get depression?

Psych:  When you, when you take meds, in a general way, this is what meds do... So when you have symptoms, there's usually an excess of a chemical in the brain, or not enough of a certain chemical in the brain. Right? So each med, each class of medication, is supposed to regulate which ever one it's supposed to regulate, right? Some are really specific, some are not as specific. Umm, so the whole point is, like for antidepressants, it takes like, three months to effectively get in the body and change the receptors in the brain. Right? So once you go off of an antidepressant if you've been on it for a while, it takes that much longer to come out of, to come out of the system, right? So the brain then kind of reorganizes without the meds, cuz it's not producing it in, itself, naturally, right? 

Patient:  Mm-hmm.

Psych:  So what happens is, you have these little, like partic... like little... hands, like in, in the cells, right? 

Patient:  Okay...

Psych:  And they're supposed to be filled with the chemical they need. So what they say is, is either they have too much of this chemical floating around and it changes the person's behavior, or they don't have enough, and so...

Patient:  Like what chemical? 

Psych:  Well, it depends on the chemical. So it could be, the... there's nora... norepinephrine, there's seratonin, there's dopamine, etc., etc. So, each little finger is wanting one or the other. 

Patient:  Mm-hmm.

Psych:  And they might... you might need ten, but if there's no, none of that dopamine floating around, you might only have, like, one... and that usually has significant change on the body, because you need a ten.

Patient:  Mm-hmm...

Psych:  But there's no dopamine so it can catch, one little thing, flying around. 

Patient:  So, this is... before you take meds. that...?

Psych:  Right. 

Patient:  What causes depression?

Psych:  Well, there's many things that can cause depression. I know I'm not being specific cuz there is no specific, if we talk about the mic... micro, like molecular pieces, of what goes on in the brain, that's kind of how the medicine helps at the receptor level. Right? So pretty much, you want the chemicals that you want, in the little... spaces. 

Patient:  Mm-hmm...

Psych:  And if you don't have enough, you lose receptors, that's not good. If you have too much of the chemical, that's not good either. So you always want to be in the middle. 

Patient:  Okay.

Psych:  What happens is, is the meds regulate, so that you're supposed to have ten? You have ten... I'm just using that number.

Patient:  Yeah, like ten... receptors.

Psych:  Right. So, if you're supposed to have ten, the chemical makes sure, the meds, make sure you have ten. 

Patient:  Okay.

Psych:  It doesn't make sure you have one, or... fifty million, it makes sure you have ten. And that's why there's always, like, tweaking of the meds... Because everybody's body metabolizes that differently. So if you go off the meds, like for example, Xanax, has a high, high half life? That means it stays in the body without having to take it all the time. 

Patient:  For a longer period...

Psych:  Right. Depressive meds... that's a little bit longer, too, so it'll take a little bit longer for you to start getting way depressed.  Antipsychotics... you want to do that one? This is a, you know, we can do whichever, I'm here all the time, so... so... so...

Patient:  Are you saying that the medications would, like...

Psych:  When, when a person who's never had medications, and they're depressed...

Patient:  Mm-hmm...

Psych:  That means you're not getting enough of dopamine, seratonin, norepinephrine, of something, the body cannot, making enough for you? 

Patient:  So there's a chemical imbalance?

Psych:  Typically, yes. 

Patient:  Wow.

Psych:  So that means that your body's supposed to naturally be producing something... it's like, even like a vitamin D deficiency. Your body's supposed to have enough vitamin D, for whatever reason you're not. Some people can get enough of it from the sun, some people can't, so they have to take, additionally, whatever it is. Even like iron. So as women get older, even like women in general, we tend to have a low rates of iron. 

(Aside, to male voice nearby...) We're trying to do that right now, you're welcome to come and help us...

Um, so with iron...

(Aside again...) Ooohh! Come on, we got to do something uplifting, not gonna make us cry again.

So, uh...

Patient:  I've just realized my, I've got my phone time...

Psych: Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead...

Patient:  So let's talk about it...

Psych:  Yeah.

Patient:  But, um, cuz I'm trying to understand and I'm also ... I think I'm sick, building a sinus infection right now...

Psych:  Oh, yeah, so you're like, wah, wah, wah... Okay.

Patient:  Ya, I don't feel good.

Psych:  No problem. Remind me to bring up, the iron one back, cuz iron is a good example. Cuz everybody is supposed to have so much iron but women naturally do not have enough. 

Patient:  That's why we take iron supplements.

Psych:  Right.  And then that makes us constipated, right? 

Patient:  Yeah.

Psych:  But then, if we go off of the iron, we end up right back to where we started, meaning that the body's just not equipped to produce as much iron. So it never just naturally...

Patient:  So the same thing happens with the medication when it, when it comes...okay, when it goes out and you're back to the way you were before...

Psych:  Right, right, but there are some meds that make...

Patient:  But do they cause, do the meds cause a chemical imbalance?

Psych:  Well they're supposed to cause, like a... chemical neutralizing of the things that you're supposed to need. It's supposed to be balancing.

Patient:  Okay.

Psych:  So that's why, when they lower people's meds or they titrate meds... some of the meds need to slowly be titrated, like benzo's, cuz you can have high rates of seizures. So they try to slowly, on the ones that will be problematic, taper people off, even with the anti-depressants, right?

Rabbi Stern, Star Wars, Psychiatry

Many years ago, Rabbi Stern of Congregation B'nai Amunah in Skokie, Illinois gave a high holiday sermon, about an hour long, consisting of his personal review of the original movie, Star Wars. It was a brilliant demonstration of why this guy got the big bucks from one of the most successful American Jewish temples of the time.

Stern's last line, which really brought the house down, was of course... "May the Force be with you!"

In those days there were no SSRI's. ADHD was barely getting started. People may have believed in "chemical imbalances" in their brains, but not as blindly as they do now. It was not an issue that the authorities had to insist upon; and people believed in psychoanalysis and confession back then, too.

This weekend, with the record box office for Disney's new Star Wars movie, we are reminded that traditional American culture is still strong. It is strong around the world in the face of violent jihad, strong despite internal political squabbles between left and right, and strong against the debilitating influence of ultra-materialistic, "you-are-your-brain-and-that's-all-slave!" psychiatry.

The real conflict of our age is not what the media pretend it is. The real rebellion is against a Psych Empire, a true slave system wherein such exalted "experts" as Jeffrey (Darth?) Lieberman are the captains of medical teams, the rulers, to be obeyed or even worshiped by everyone else who is a mere "sick patient". When the patients don't bow down and proclaim sincere belief in the rightful authority and ultimate benevolence of their doctor-masters, it's because of their disease, of course! It's "anosognosia".

The Empire would allow no one to aspire to full natural recovery from mental health problems. It orders drugs for all its slaves, and requires acceptance of general, chronic disability. The Empire's white-clad storm troopers can catch and imprison anyone who refuses to be "treated". Taxes are extracted from the people of the planet to pay for the inflated salaries, the extravagant ritual sacrifices ("research"), and the construction of fortresses ("hospitals") demanded by state psych bureaucrats.

But the Empire has secret weaknesses, and there are rebels who refuse psychiatry. Perhaps the death star those rebels will destroy despite long odds is the DSM; perhaps it is the Murphy bill; perhaps it is the corrupt forensic mental health system of a certain state. But there will be victory, and celebration, and triumphant music. Just like in the movie.

We can count on it. Truth, however fought, will ultimately prevail.

May the Force be with you!

Congratulations to (the legendary) Rodney Yoder!

For more years than Rodney Yoder cares to think about now, corrupt state actors spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to keep him locked up in Illinois' only maximum-security psychiatric "hospital".

During the jury trial for which I was his legal counsel, celebrity hired-gun psychs swore under oath that Yoder was the most dangerous psychotic they had ever encountered.

He finally got out of the Chester Mental Health Center hell hole. Despite the long and bitter injustice he was forced to endure, he has been a productive, law-abiding member of the community for a decade now.

Yoder never took the drugs. He never bought into the fraud. He resisted, and won. He made a good number of people whom he always called "psycho-quacks" (e.g., Daniel J. Cuneo and Syed Hussain, both of whom continue to rip off the people of Illinois to this day!) look like the fools and the gangsters they truly are.

Well done, Rodney!

Your new granddaughter will tell her children and their children your heroic story.... Perhaps in a world where psychiatrists can no longer imprison and torture innocent people.

Psychiatry makes the mass shooters

David Brooks recently wrote a column entitled "How Radicals Are Made" in the New York Times. Several points he made about mass movements stuck with me.

Involuntary psychiatric patients (psychiatric slaves), and the clinical staff who pretend to treat them (psychiatric plantation overseers), are alike, trained to be followers or true believers in a "mental health" mass movement. The reason an NGRI acquittee cannot easily refuse medication is not because she needs the drugs to be symptom-free or non-violent; it's because self sacrifice and self renunciation are required by this movement, driven by wild hope about brain disease that will soon be cured with treatment advances which never arrive but always remain just around the multi-billion-dollar research corner.

Brooks quotes Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic, The True Believer: "(M)ass movements denigrate the individual self. Everything that is unique about an individual is either criticized, forbidden or diminished." I suspect that every client I've ever had at Elgin Mental Health Center would certify that, as exactly what their so-called "treatment" is most about!

More Hoffer quotes from Brooks' article: "The individual's identity is defined by the collective group identity..." and "make-believe plays perhaps a more enduring role than any other factor."

NAMI, Fuller Torrey's Treatment (Torture) Advocacy Center, Jeffrey Lieberman's APA, Elgin Mental Health Center Security Therapy Aides and other clinicians, along with all of their "patients", are constantly encouraging themselves and each other to be "mental health" people above and beyond all else. And the make-believe, the fantasy, is that it's all about medicine, brains and brain science.

Ironically, David Brooks offers a very rational framework to remedy terrorism, even as the single most destructive mass movement in modern history ("mental health" defined and controlled by psychiatry) is creating terrorists with unprecedented efficiency while apparently remaining invisible, not only to Brooks, but to the whole intellectual leadership of Western civilization.

They simply have never identified the correct target.

To all staff, William White Cottage, Elgin Mental Health Center

June 25, 2015

White Cottage Clinical Staff

Elgin Mental Health Center

750 South State Street

Elgin, IL 60123

RE: Illegal harassment

To All Staff:

PLEASE BE ON NOTICE that unconscionable, frequent taunting and ridiculing of a patient violates standards of care and principles of mental healing. There can be no pretense of any “hospital” or therapeutic milieu, when staff take opportunities to flagrantly torment or make fun of the people they are supposed to be helping.

Many of you have witnessed certain staff sneeringly tell a certain patient on the unit, “You need meds,” or sarcastically moan when this patient walks by, “Oooh, poor girl…!” Disrespectful, offensive communication from one or two individuals (and everybody knows who does it) is nothing but provocation. It is worse than unprofessional. It really proves that the perpetrator doesn’t like or cannot do her job.

These incidents and examples of harassment are being documented, and legal action will eventually be taken. Anyone who doesn’t try to stop such behavior will be presumed to have encouraged it. Please feel free to call me on my cell at any time in complete confidence, if you have any questions or thoughts about this.

Staff should behave better than patients. If they can’t, they will probably have to go.

Yours very truly,

Randy Kretchmar

cc:       DHS General Counsel, CCHR International

To: Members of the United States House of Representatives House Energy & Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee

June 16, 2015

Dear Chairman Upton, and Members of the Committee:

You held a public hearing today, concerning H.R. 2646, the “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act”.  My concerns with that bill center on two facts which cannot be honestly disputed: 1) mental health treatment is only effective in inverse ratio to the amount of coercion it must employ; and 2) it is the flagrant, unreasonable medicalization of human problems in thinking, feeling or behaving that has dramatically increased stigma and disability.

In short, psychiatric drugs and shock work poorly for any purpose of improving human behavior or the human condition; and forced drugs and shock work so poorly that they are a horrific human rights abuse.  Despite persistent blind faith or “hopium” from such quarters as the National Institute on Mental Health, the verdicts of real science admit no future prospect for peace and happiness from psychiatric fine-tuning of individuals’ brains.

Perhaps one clear, ironic sign of utter desperation among proponents of continued psychiatric coercion and ascendant legal authority was a statement by Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, in his testimony before the Committee today….

Dr. Lieberman makes a habit of glorious prognostications about advances in “brain science”.  But the truth, which his peers at the APA and NIMH are consistently admitting these days, is that after a century of fully funded research, neither schizophrenia nor any other psychiatric “diagnosis” is any better understood or validated than it was in the days of Benjamin Rush!  Medical science has nothing to do with psychiatry, and it quite possibly never will.

Dr. Lieberman simply must scapegoat someone or something, to divert public attention from the truth.  Enter, “stigma” caused by a bogeyman, the “Anti-Psychiatry Movement” or the Church of Scientology.

I have been a full-time practicing attorney working exclusively in the mental health field for almost fourteen years.  I spend all of my professional time with mental patients (often violent psychotics) and their service providers, including many very well-intended and competent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, criminal court judges and state hospital administrators. 

I am also a life-long Scientologist, as are my wife of forty years and our three adult children.  If such a thing as “a virulent Anti-Psychiatry Movement” exists, and if as Dr. Lieberman suggests, such a movement can be blamed for the stigma of mental illness, then you may call me before your committee, because I should surely have to answer for that personally!

Jeffrey Lieberman’s assessment of the situation is disingenuous or flat-out mistaken.  And I beg your pardon, I have never been motivated in my work by financial designs.  I know many Scientologists.  They don’t pay me, or have any prospect of financial gain from opposition to psychiatry.  Quite the opposite, I assure you.  Publicly questioning such a social orthodoxy as the medical mental health model (however destructive and pernicious it may eventually be seen to be in the judgment of history) brings only expense, inconvenience and knee-jerk reproach from one’s own community.

Please consider the details of H.R. 2646 very carefully with a skeptical eye.  Listen to the perspectives of some people who are not so wedded to the current, rotten psychiatric establishment, people who do not deviously offer up mythical scapegoats and excuses for a hundred years of failure. 

And please try not to buy into Lieberman’s slander against my religion.

Yours very truly,

S. Randolph Kretchmar

APA Annual Meeting in Toronto

For the second year in a row, the APA gave me a huge discount off the price of admission to their annual meeting, for being an advocate with an organization that they would certainly consider to be part of the fearsome "anti-psychiatry movement". (I love the irony in that... although mentioning it here may cost me in the future. I'm not sure if they're magnanimous with known enemies, or just incapable of evaluating freely available information.)

The Toronto convention was huge. It was all over the downtown portion of this beautiful city. When I arrived at Canadian immigration on my way in, the officer said she could tell what conference I was there for because I didn't look very happy about it. She added that she had overheard some very interesting conversations.

I'll just summarize a couple high points, and perhaps write more later....

My first class was on "Treatment of Schizophrenia". I'm actively litigating right now for two different clients who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, involuntarily confined and/or forcibly drugged.

One of the four presenters in this class was Rajiv Tandon, MD, who was part the DSM5 committee that dictated the newest definition and "reality" of schizophrenia itself. Dr. Tandon was surprisingly forthcoming. Among his admissions:

• there is "incredible heterogeneity in schizophrenia;"
• there appear to be hundreds of genetic causes and, "We don't know what this means;"
• "We still have not defined what exactly is wrong;"
• treatments are empirical and experimental only; the drugs are clearly not well targeted, or targeted at all for that matter, to any known specific brain pathology, thus they can cause more trouble than they're worth;
• prophylactic treatment of any "prodrome" should be with omega-3 fatty acids, definitely not with anti-psychotic drugs.

At the end of his presentation, a young Canadian psychiatrist asked Dr. Tandon whether it was actually unfortunate that the DSM5 committee had elected to retain "schizophrenia" at all as a diagnosis. Between the "incredible heterogeneity" and the clear threat of stigma, shouldn't the concept be abandoned as both meaningless and damaging?

Dr. Tandon implied surprising agreement with this, but claimed that it was really a World Health Organization issue, after all. The APA must avoid being accused of "American imperialism" by the rest of the world, for taking so radical a step as to abolish schizophrenia. He added that, "Changing the term would imply that we know something about why it should be changed, which we don't."

So I guess the bottom line from the APA on treatment of schizophrenia (whatever that is) in 2015 equals something like, "We have no idea what we're doing, even after 100 years of trying to figure it out with billions of dollars from the public fisc. But we are very concerned about public relations..."

My second class was "Evaluation and Treatment of Behavioral Emergencies." Despite the fact that the most time was spent discussing the details of drugs new and old, there was also a prevailing opinion that the magic factor in emergency psychiatry is "de-escalation". There was much common sense in this, and some fascinating statistics. Apparently psychiatry works far better with the least possible amount of coercion (what do you know!): all five speakers agreed with the principle.

The problem of course, is that so-called "treatment of behavioral emergencies" remains essentially a euphemism for police action. There's no way to fundamentally separate it from coercion. An explicit point was made that chemical restraint, defined as treatment with drugs not to ameliorate any medical condition but only to control a person's movement, violates civil and human rights.

The disingenuous solution... and none of the speakers had any problem posing it with a straight face... was to call "agitation" a medical condition. This is no less arbitrary than the idea that all human problems of thinking, feeling and behaving are medical conditions, which is of course a central tenet of orthodox American psychiatry.

However, what was most impressive here was the apparent lack of all insight that merely presuming any agitation to be a medical condition was a semantic trick. Even Jon S. Berlin, with whom I was quite positively impressed, had no comment indicating awareness of this. 

I think it just worked too well to get these guys off the hook for chemically restraining people.