Mayor Adams, and lessons of history

2023. Too many crazy people in the streets and the subways, embarrassing the city and the political leadership? Well there’s always the old standby: round them all up, get them out of sight, and pretend they’re “hospitalized” for their own good. 

The police can do it, after all, and when the ugly people are gone the city will look better. Maybe that will be worth some votes. Who cares if homelessness is really solved? We don’t know how to solve the real problem, but this is politics, we know that. 

1850. Too many slaves escaping to the north, making the South’s critical economic institution unstable and encouraging northern abolitionists? Well, let’s  pass this “bloodhound bill” to round them all up, and summarily enforce the old fugitive slave law.

There are plenty of entrepreneurial slave hunters, after all, so the plantation owners can always get their property back. Maybe that will save the Union. We sure can’t see how to solve this with Christianity, but it’s really politics and maybe we’ll avoid a destructive war.

Lessons. The great compromise of 1850 was bullshit.  Mayor Adams’ plan for so-called “involuntary assistance” (who can say that phrase with a straight face?) to those “suffering from mental illness” is bullshit. It’s not easy to bullshit human nature, you have to lie to yourself big-time. African Americans were 5/5 human (not 3:5) all along, and there’s no such thing as “involuntary assistance,” that’s a total oxymoron. These are not subtle facts, they are outstandingly obvious, common sense. 

The great compromise on slavery was a useless waste of time, it only incited everyone to total war. The dream of America as a Christian city on a hill was dashed forever at Shiloh, Antietam and Cold Harbor. The  New York plan to expand forced “treatment” will prove equally useless, and it will destroy any remaining public standing and confidence in scientific medicine. The overarching sociocultural value of health will be dashed forever at Elgin, Chicago-Read and Chester.  

Susan Knauss

 OK, once again, I promise to apologize for and retract anything that turns out to be untrue....

Susan Knauss ("Susie" to her slaves on K Unit) is an Activity Therapist at the legendary Illinois state "hospital", Elgin Mental Health Center (EMHC). According to the State Comptroller's website, she got her pay check for $6300.00 yesterday. Time for some Christmas shopping, Susie?

From a LinkedIn profile picture, Susie looks to be in her 50's or 60's, white lady, grey hair. She hasn't been at EMHC for very long, barely two years. She previously worked at St. Coletta of Wisconsin and Anne M. Kiley Developmental Center in Waukegan, IL. Bachelor's degree (maybe two) from Eastern Illinois University in 1990.

Being new at EMHC possibly accounts for a couple very serious mistakes Susie is making. For one, she has become a bit too close with some of her "patients". This is colloquially called boundary issues. In particular, Susie has been seen sitting in the K Unit day room with a couple of "residents" behind her, looking over her shoulder at her laptop screen, and pointing directions or touching the screen to navigate to whatever they wanted to see online. I'm pretty sure there are strict rules against allowing the slaves any internet access. 

A couple hundred years ago there were laws in the American South against teaching slaves to read, so there's precedent for the internet ban at EMHC. I disagree with it, but for now it's the rules. There's also a very clear precedent for the point about boundary issues, right where Susie works on K & L Unit as recently as 2017. It evolved into a huge flap, and is still costing DHS substantial legal fees. 

Another recent mistake by Susie may be even more serious. She inserted a report in one slave's medical chart, which detailed a whole conversation with him that just never happened. She totally made it up! Susie may think she can get away with this, because it'll be her word as a "mental health professional" against the "mentally ill" slave's word. But when you put something totally false in writing in a legal document, immediately after it supposedly happened (but didn't), there will be sharp, reliable memories that will contradict what you wrote, and you'll probably get accused of, if not charged with, perjury. 

I'm just sayin'. 

In case I don't post again in the next ten days, Merry Christmas to all!

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

I recently had an interesting back-and-forth on Twitter with a San Francisco psychiatrist named Joe Pierre. He had first posted a link to an article in Vogue, by a woman who was very thankful for her psychiatric diagnosis, which had apparently helped her by offering an explanation and the beginning of a solution to her hypomania.

I jumped on that, perhaps a bit roughly, by saying in ten years the same woman might think the exact opposite; I had seen many people change their minds about whether psychiatry had been good or bad for them, once the drugs stopped working and the brutal project of withdrawal began. Dr. Joe told me that I should "get past" my own professional experience, and my religious beliefs. Then I wouldn't be so predictably narrow minded and instead I would be able to envision positive outcomes from psychiatric treatment, and imagine circumstances in which involuntary treatment would be justified.

Well, I could have gone on and on about such suggestions and such arrogance. People don't "get past" their own experiences and their deeply held beliefs just because somebody else is sure of a different opinion. I suppose I can envision possible positive results from psychiatry and imagine justifications for forced drugging and shock; but I honestly think the results of psychiatry have been and will continue to be epically terrible, and forced "treatment" is just grossly wrong.

I still like Dr. Joe. At least I "like" him as an opponent with whom I can exchange restrained if hostile tweets, like some kind of ideological target practice. I think he's reasonably well intended and smart, and I learn from him. So I tried to cut to the quick by explaining that my "anti-psychiatry" views with which he so earnestly disagrees are all derived from a single position. That is: the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion, or condoned in non-religious fields.

To my surprise, this statement was not rejected, but quite productive of more good exchange. Dr. Joe wasn't sure exactly what I meant, but he quoted Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul: "Among all my patients in the second half of life -- that is to say, over thirty-five -- there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."

I told Dr. Joe that I know too little about Jung, perhaps only that he was considered a bit of a mystic, and he treated Clover Dulles (wife of Allen Dulles) in 1945. With that thought (of Dulles), it suddenly dawned on me that the whole conversation was high irony indeed!

Here I was, in a dialogue in 2022, with a San Francisco psychiatrist who was only marginally willing to briefly tolerate me, and the subject of Jung/Dulles/1945 became a point of some agreement.

The thing is.... When wide-eyed, soft hearted American youths had to confront the corpses stacked up like cordwood, with others still barely breathing, at Dachau and Belzec and Chelmo, and when the public contemplated the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the American holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the whole world realized on some level, we have to find a way to not ever do this again. That was 1945. Allen Dulles was still in Switzerland at the beginning of the year, with his wartime mistress Mary Bancroft, a devotee and patient of Carl Jung. By summer, they were joined by Clover Dulles. Allen, Clover and Mary all sought the help of Dr. Jung, each perhaps for a different problem (e.g., Allen for advice on how to influence the defeated German population, Mary and Clover probably for more personal, less political issues).

Eight years later, Allen Dulles signed off on Richard Helms' brainchild project, MKUltra. He also made sure that his own CIA had a complete monopoly on the world supply of LSD. The drug was initially considered by the MKUltra researchers to be a breakthrough offensive weapon in the emerging war for men's minds, by which anyone could be rendered psychotic with a single dose. But by the late 1950's various private psychiatric experimenters were recommending it for spiritual enlightenment of the whole American population. If one reads some of the reports by rich Hollywood celebrities (e.g., Adelle Davis, Auldus Huxley, Cary Grant) circa 1959 (Kesey and Leary were definite latecomers as acid celebs), it's easy to discern the over-the-top, Jungian mystical-religious, evangelical fervor.

I asked Dr. Joe if he was  aware of the connection between Jung/Dulles/1945, and the current exuberant promotion of "psychedelic assisted therapy" as a new breakthrough since SSRI antidepressants failed to cure chemical imbalances in the brain. The desperation of Dresden and Enola Gay hangs again over psychiatry's very bad year, 2022. He responded, "I agree, the connection that you imply is there."

More recently (just today, I think) Dr. Joe tweeted separately, "One of my least favorite phrases to hear is, 'I'm micro-dosing with psilocybin.' Not sure how they're defining 'micro-dosing,' but all the people I've seen using this phrase have been floridly psychotic."

I picture my Twitter counterpart strolling up Haight Street from the Grateful Dead House on Ashbury, in the direction of George Hunter White's Chestnut Street acid brothel/safe house on Telegraph Hill. I hate to underestimate him, but I can't help worrying that Dr. Joe, like almost everyone else in mental health, remains clueless. Materialistic "mind science" failed to provide any magic button for saving the world from Godless Communism in the last century; psychedelics and psychiatry will only encourage more florid psychosis in this one.

Maybe my San Francisco psychiatrist friend has some dawning suspicion that in the last resort our problem remains that of finding a religious outlook on life. Plus ça change.

But the rough beast LSD slouches again, towards America to be born. And guess what, today is Pearl Harbor Day.

Michelle -- on the count, or no?

It is contrary to regulations and law to have a staff who is being investigated for custodial sexual misconduct in contact with any patients.

STA Michelle Bogle is currently the subject of an Illinois State Police Department of Internal Investigations (ISP/DII) case, after a complaint by a patient alleging that she had been his lover. There is plenty of evidence, several other staff were witnesses, etc.

So pursuant to strict legal policy, Michelle should not be at EMHC, or at least not on any clinical unit where she would be in contact with and possibly able to seduce more patients. At the moment she's a suspected sex offender, and various people (e.g., OIG's Peter Neumer, as I pointed out yesterday) are responsible to protect consumers of the State's mental health services from her. The patients at EMHC are not Michelle's property, even though they are effectively at her mercy, and at the mercy of the institution which locks them away and is allowed to force drugs on them or call them degrading names, day-in and day-out, for years.

But I suspect that Michelle is at EMHC. In fact, several witnesses have told me that she's on M & N clinical unit, working as an STA. Yesterday I left a message with an administrator to inquire about this situation, but I never got a call back.

So this morning, I called M & N, at extension 3467, and asked for Michelle. The lady who answered the phone checked briefly, and then said, "Michelle Bogle is not here today. Try the other side, or try K & L."

Maybe they have removed her from patient contact, as they should have. But it sure seemed to me that Michelle had been on M & N recently, when she shouldn't have been. I don't think anyone is really very interested in protecting patients. I think they just want to get the cotton picked.

It will all come out. People knew, and didn't report. Sexual abuse of patients is endemic at Elgin Mental Health Center. The fundamental staff attitude is, they own the slaves, they can do whatever they want with them. But abolition will come. Psychiatria delenda est!

Peter B. Neumer and Michelle Bogle

I don't know Peter Neumer, so I hesitate to blame him for anything or say he's not doing his job....

But he heads up the Illinois Department of Human Services' Office of Inspector General (OIG). His organization is supposed to protect people like Mickey, an involuntarily committed "patient" (more accurately called a psychiatric slave) at Elgin Mental Health Center (EMHC). 

If I find out that anything I write here is untrue, I will apologize. But it seems to me that Peter Neumer's office does not protect the people it is supposed to protect. Hence, as a taxpayer I resent him for his salary of well over $100,000, which comes in part out of my pocket. He's a relatively worthless bureaucrat, in a state that cannot afford relatively worthless bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, my friend Mickey is getting his butt kicked every day at EMHC, in retribution for reporting to Peter Neumer's office that a female Security Therapy Aide named Michelle Bogle carried on a sexual relationship with him. Michelle apparently committed the felony of custodial sexual misconduct, which might be thought of as a type of statutory rape. If Michelle is convicted of this, she'll have to register as a sex offender every year for the rest of her life.

Staff at EMHC are not supposed to have sex with patients, because they wield extraordinary power over them. Patients cannot legally consent to sex. Staff can deny patients their liberty. They can forcibly restrain patients and torture them. They can ruin patients' lives, and never be blamed because after all it's supposedly done in the name of "treating mental illness" and these guys are the experts.

American chattel slavery was much the same in the 19th Century. The plantation masters insisted that they were doing what really helped their negroes, who were best fit for hard labor and hard discipline. It was consistent with God's plan for the different races of man and the different beasts of creation. I don't think Peter Neumer would have been an abolitionist. I think he would have prospered as a high-level plantation overseer, dutifully producing the world's cotton, at least until Sherman arrived to burn it all down.

It has been several weeks since Mickey came clean to OIG about the relationship with Michelle. OIG turned the investigation over to the Illinois State Police Department of Internal Investigations. According to a phone conversation today, "It's a police matter now, OIG doesn't touch it while the police investigation is in progress." Well, OK.

But here's the thing.... The state police do not accept cases for investigation when there is no credible evidence. They are investigating this one, and that means there is credible evidence. When there is credible evidence of staff sexually abusing a patient, that staff is supposed to be removed from all contact with patients (not just the victim) until the matter is resolved. That's the law, intended to protect vulnerable people whose liberty has been restricted by the state "for their own good" and to protect the community.

Michelle Bogle may have been removed from patient contact briefly, but she is reportedly back now, on the M & N clinical unit every day, with lots of new opportunities to sexually abuse more patients. Somebody is violating the law, and Peter Neumer's office is failing to protect people. I tried to ask the EMHC administration about this today, but nobody returned my call. 

They're too busy driving the slaves to get the cotton picked.

Resistance and orders

In Orlando for Thanksgiving, thinking of a client who shares a name with a mouse….

A staffing yesterday was much about my guy having gotten into a physical altercation with a peer on the unit. It seemed hard to know for sure who really started it or whom to blame, but after some discussion, there were a couple takeaways for me. 

One. I have always told every client I’ve ever worked with, that they must cultivate a reputation, in their circumstances as a psychiatric slave, of being more able than anyone else in sight, to walk away from fights and frustrations. Don’t punch back, don’t tell anyone to suck your dick. You can take great pride in this, it has huge historical, religious and philosophical pedigree (e.g., “Turn the other cheek…”).

Nietzsche said recalcitrance is the nobility of the slave, but a soldier’s nobility is in obedience. My clients have to understand that their relationship with psychiatrists and with the nuthouse is that they are slaves. But their relationship with me and with their peers should reflect that they are soldiers. 

This is not absolute from the beginning, I am a lawyer and I do follow rules. It’s just highly aspirational. The distinction by the philosopher points to my very best clients.

The guy whose staffing I attended yesterday is really good at recalcitrance, and he’s very funny, so I love him for that, it’s how he got my attention. I just hope he’ll do what I tell him, because I believe he can be one hell of a soldier. 

Two. In the obvious understanding of nuthouse staff or “mental health professionals”, any so-called “patient” is absolutely nobody. A member of my guy’s treatment team, during the staffing yesterday, insisted that nobody saw him get slapped across his face by a peer to precipitate the altercation being discussed.

My guy protested, that was a lie! The incident was witnessed by somebody named Shonterellio (or something like that, I probably have the name wrong). So I asked him who Shonterellio was. He said Shonterellio was a resident. 

Oh, OK! The witness was a patient, which means he is a total nobody in the eyes of staff. He’s not believed, his information doesn’t count, he’s just another subhuman slave. To check this, I asked the staff who said nobody ever saw my guy get slapped, whether she would believe Shonterellio if he told her that’s exactly what he saw, that’s how the altercation began, my guy only fought back after he was hit first. She would not answer my question.

Which proved my point, I think. “Patients” in a psychiatric institution are subhuman slaves. They are nobody. I spoke to Shonterellio myself later. He seemed pretty competent to me, and he told me categorically, my guy got hit first, he saw it. 

The staff are idiots because they believe they are more able to perceive and understand than the patients. They make the same error that was made by the British in Kenya, and even by my hero, General “Billy the Torch” Sherman: discounting the value of intelligence from black slaves.  

They will pay for that mistake, if my guys can just follow orders. Unlike the psychiatrists at EMHC, I do not confuse control and help. 

Psychiatria delenda est!

Short peace (meditation on the news)

“Down range, when this happens, you just get out on the next patrol. You need to get it out of your mind. That is how you cure it. You cure it by doing more. Eventually you get home safe. But here I worry there is no next patrol. It is harder to cure. You are already home.”

Those were the words of the combat veteran who took down the shooter in the Colorado Springs Q Club massacre. His daughter’s boyfriend was murdered, amid too many other casualties. 

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra told warriors, “You should love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long.”

From my own life experiences which might relate to such things, I would just say: BE yourself; don’t look at yourself or try to fix yourself, as though you could believe you are not already yourself. Assume a viewpoint, reach and withdraw from others and things, play, fight, get confused, have fun; just don’t ever forget that you can only be or not be, yourself.

Love peace as a means to new wars. Go out on the next patrol. Seek your enemy whom you can cherish and of whom you can be proud, and love your enemy. 

And someday when there are no more patrols, when you stand on the suddenly quiet field of your greatest victory with all the world kneeling at your feet, and all the world’s treasure at your hands: then turn and walk away with nothing but the shirt on your back. 

You will live forever. 

Psychiatria delenda est!