Gabby & Latwon, Gus, Peter Neumer (light entertainment now)

OK, enough with philosophizing and grand plans to solve everything. I want to get back to the nitty-gritty of misbehavior and corruption at Elgin Mental Health Center and all around IDHS!

Gabby and Latwon remain visibly inseparable on Faiza Kareemi's K Unit. Everybody can plainly see that this female staff and male patient have some special relationship. The only one who apparently worries about it is my guy Gus. And what he gets for noticing, is arbitrary losses of privileges (LOP's) which are really thinly disguised retribution.

(Just for the record, I don't worry much about special relationships between staff and patients. It's bound to happen, people are perverts. But it totally amazes me that EMHC/IDHS is so willing to casually foster more civil lawsuits and demonstrate the psychiatric slave plantation character of the system! In fact, if I ever worry about this, it's because it might be too good to be true, somebody might be setting me up.)

My guy Gus needs to get other "patients" on his side, but on K Unit they are nearly all effectively bought off. It's more of a mafia-like culture than most other parts of the plantation. The guys who are willing to shut up and accept cheap favors for not verifying Gus' "unimportant" allegations of policy violations, or for shunning or harassing Gus, are encouraged to believe they will get positive reports to their criminal court judge about their treatment progress. 

It's also pretty easy for low-ranking overseers to call one person's protests and complaints "symptoms" when it's only one person (and when the "symptoms" are those of bullshit "diagnoses" to begin with) so any lone protester or complainer can be psychiatrically buried.

But if Gabby and Latwon are in love or infatuated (like Christy & Ben, Christy & Mansoor, Christy & Angelo, Erica & Michael, Michelle & Mickey, Shinzetta & Kevin, Mark & Jennifer... and how many other illicit plantation "couples" we may never know about -?- going all the way back in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings), it will come to a bad end for them, and for anyone who has ignored or swept the clues under the rug in exchange for phone, snack or contraband favors.

Going up the food chain a bit, Peter Neumer has resigned as IDHS Inspector General, supposedly to accept a job as Inspector General for the Chicago Park District. I'm not sure whether that's a more prestigious position, or maybe the Park District has more money to pay him than the state has... or whether it's another example of the strategy that seems to have been adapted from the Catholic Church, just moving people to some other place if they were complicit in abuse, and hoping the victims will lose track. 

It seems to me that Chicago parks are a smaller sphere of responsibility than the whole state of Illinois. On the other hand, soccer games and picnickers are more pleasant than mental health by a long shot!

Keeping it light here.

A three-point plan

I believe that our problems with mental health and substance abuse will become far more tractable if we make these legal reforms:

1) Totally eliminate the insanity defense;

2) Fundamentally reform rules about mental fitness to stand trial; and

3) Change medical control over drug access to requirements for prescribed expert information and advice.

In criminal cases requiring an element of mens rea, the so-called "insanity defense" is superfluous anyway, because a jury can determine that the defendant did not have criminal intent. For example, if a mother was so delusional (e.g., from the side effects of psychiatric drugs) as to truly believe that cutting her five-year-old's head almost off would save the beautiful child from hell, that her daughter would go immediately to heaven and be happy rather than be abused by sex traffickers and sold into slavery, maybe it's clear that the mental knowledge of wrongdoing requisite to the crime of murder was lacking.

Some U.S. states have reduced the use of NGRI pleas to nearly zero, by revising presumptions, burdens of proof and procedures. Illinois, unfortunately, is not one. Here, anyone who ever had any contact with the mental health system is encouraged by the criminal courts to consider an NGRI plea when they're charged with almost any felony, all the way down to assault and car theft. It has virtually become a system where a prosecution has to be approved by the psychiatrists before a defendant is even allowed to plead guilty or not guilty.

Judges and juries simply cannot defer to medical experts about whether crimes were committed and whether punishment should be meted out. This is a difficult social task, requiring semi-divine wisdom over the long haul. We have a system of English law which acknowledges the imperfect nature of human judgment and strives to mitigate the errors caused by imperfection. Our system can be compared, very favorably in my opinion, to the Napoleonic or inquisitorial system, which relies on finding the wisest possible humans who are expected to judge more perfectly than others. 

Psychiatrists have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are not any such wisest possible humans!

Likewise, these "mental health experts" should not be trusted to say whether an alleged perpetrator is fit to stand trial. On any given day, Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for the costs to "hospitalize" at least a handful of defendants who understand perfectly well what their legal situation is, and what the process will be in court. They constantly argue that they shouldn't be at EMHC but want to go to trial ASAP; and as far as I can tell they only need to be "treated" because they disagree with their public defenders about trial tactics and strategy. 

This is absolutely not some manifestation of chemical imbalances in these defendants' brains for arrogant idiots like the crew on the tenth floor at 26th and California to "diagnose" and send back to Dr. Malis-with-malice to cure at EMHC by drugging them to make their trials more fair! It's a scam by petty bureaucrats who are too lazy or too incompetent to do their jobs in a rotten criminal justice system. If a defendant wants his/her day in court, there should be a much stronger presumption of fitness. "Unfit to stand trial" should be as obvious as the Defendant is physically incapable of communicating at all, or even getting out of bed to come to court. 

These reforms to NGRI and UST laws and definitions are pretty easy. I could probably write the bills for our General Assembly in an afternoon. The last reform, to drug policy, is more interesting.

I wrote about this some years ago, and here and there my ideas got some favorable response. I have never received any suggestion or comment that made me think my specific plan to turn drug regulation on its head would not work. I haven't reviewed it myself more recently, in the context of the current, ballyhoo'd "psychedelic renaissance." My instinct is to worry a little more about easier access to dangerous drugs in the short run; but in the end, the only way to simultaneously solve substance abuse and mental health coercion will remain more individual responsibility, less reliance on the supposedly benevolent authority of false "brain experts."

So that's the 3-point program to save the world in mental health: unceremoniously dump the insanity defense; let accused criminals have their day in court; and solve drugs with education and responsibility. 

You're welcome!

Why we're not solving mental health and substance abuse problems

There are simple reasons why we have not solved, and might never solve, problems in mental health and substance abuse. But it might be possible to solve these problems, if we can honestly and creatively confront the reasons we have failed to do so. I count three reasons:

First, we erroneously believe insanity is brain disease.

Second, we mistakenly think we can manage people like animals.

Third, we confuse help and control.

Insanity is not brain disease. If you want to use medical metaphors just to prevent the careless exclusion of doctors who are so insecure about their social value anymore, you could probably say it's moral disease or moral atrophy or moral disorder, or something like that.

More fundamentally, insanity is just a compulsion or constant intention to stop or destroy (anything and everything). Anyone who kills or enslaves another human being is insane. Actually, anyone who knowingly commits or omits actions to cause more harm than good is insane, at least for the time it takes to do that. The fact behind this is the basic goodness of the individual. People naturally try very hard not to commit crimes or hurt others, because they are good. When they become obsessed with stopping and destroying, they are not being themselves, but have (covertly, unconsciously) "chosen" at some point to solve an overwhelming confusion by being a synthetic, evil entity.

But the bottom line is, even if brain disease can cause a convincing appearance of insanity, insanity itself remains a decision to be evil or stop and destroy things in response to an unsolvable confusion. When psychiatrists fiddle with brain chemistry they are more likely to create insanity than to cure it.

People cannot be managed like animals. This is mostly because people are almost always smarter than animals, and they usually like each other more than they like most animals. People have (human) animal bodies, of course. But they sometimes consider that their integrity to themselves is more important than their bodies, and that their self-determinism and honor are more important than their immediate lives. It is doubtful that non-human animals indulge in the luxury of such considerations very often, if ever.

The whole psychological model of "the human animal" was a philosophy of political control, which bucked up against ancient and much better understanding, beginning really as late as the Nineteenth Century. With the advent of the modern state, life became complex and leaders like Bismarck needed to become more extreme. Apparently in response to the confusion of modernity, when there were suddenly over a billion human beings for the first time, and complex machines became powerful enough to transform life, the idea that man is merely an animal made a good excuse for killing as many people as necessary to maintain "order."

Such "order" ultimately manifested in 1945: 30 million war dead, social and economic ruin, true existential threat to our whole species and all life on Earth.

The curious little error which, in my view, ties the psychiatric idea that insanity is brain disease together with the fundamental psychological concept of man-as-mere-animal... is the failure to distinguish help and control. Both are legitimate activities of society. Every good person wants to help others and is pleased to be helped by others. But it seems that accepting control from others and exerting control over others come less easily for most of us.

Thus, when we are faced with a necessary task of control, we wish it were really a helping project, and we pretend. If we should control a crazy person so they don't hurt themselves or others or destroy things, we call it "treatment" (help), and we say if the person doesn't want our help, it's because their animal brain is defective. The truth is, we are afraid to tell the crazy person, "You are making us nervous so we are going to control you now." So instead, we lie and say, "You need to take this medicine to help balance the chemicals in your brain."

(NEXT: A three-point plan to solve it all!)

WE MUST STOP!

 Forcing people to be "treated" is an abomination.

Where medicine is helpful, people ask for it and want it. They even want it when it just might be helpful and they don't quite understand why, as far as they can tell it's just magic.

So why does psychiatry have to threaten its patients to get them treated, while dermatologists and ophthalmologists have two-month waits for appointments for regular patients? Veterinarians are also backed up for weeks, at least in my neighborhood. But within a short commute, there are two state institutions where hundreds of mental patients are held involuntarily because otherwise they would not accept the drugs that the doctors say "help" them. And Illinois has four more plantations like that scattered around the state, plus quite a few locked psych wards in private hospitals.

It's completely unnecessary to be anti-psychiatry or a Scientologist, to notice this glaring contradiction. Psychiatry claims to be medical help, but the people buying that claim are not the patients: the patients don't want or ask for this "help," and the real customers are people who are afraid of the patients or fed up with the patients.

Most state psychiatrists I know have private practices, too. They'll argue that plenty of their patients are voluntary. The trouble with that is, every one of those "voluntary" patients knows that if they tell their "doctor" certain things (e.g., "I am done with these rotten SSRI's, I feel like just checking out of this rotten life!") or if they fail to tell their "doctor" other things (e.g., "I believe in ADHD, and my son has a chemical imbalance in his brain that needs amphetamines just like diabetics need insulin!"), they can be threatened by some unfriendly state power.

Each step you take on that slippery gradient of mental health makes it more difficult to turn back, and at the bottom you find yourself held down by six goons or chained, while Richard Malis-with-malice forces the needle into your body with drugs to turn you into a subhuman slave for your own good.

The reason I have spent twenty-two years representing and advocating for "mentally ill" people found not guilty by reason of insanity or unfit to stand trial for violent crimes, is that the state institutional system is the ultimate redoubt of an evil regime which must be obliterated if there is ever to be a social order on this planet based on human rights and respect.

Many of my clients are good people, or potentially good people. They are hard to help. But their slave-masters are bad people, and they are easy to frustrate. I just love to frustrate bad people; it makes me happy, like sailing and walking on the beach. If I can help a couple good people along the way, that's fine.

The main thing is we must STOP forcing people to be treated. It degrades both medical science and the law. If you're afraid to control others you will be controlled by chaos. And if you're afraid to hurt others you surely will.

ABOLITION!!

When Lincoln called the banners in 1861 there was no national consensus about abolition of slavery. Britain had abolished the Atlantic slave trade and was actively suppressing it. But the views of crazy people like John Brown were very far from generally accepted. Africans were believed to be naturally inferior, unassimilable into Anglo-American civilization; and the most advanced (by our modern moral perspective) solution to the problem of slavery in the southern states was a mass deportation scheme. 

It took several hyper-condensed years of brutal, destructive  military conflict and unparalleled political struggle to convince America's greatest President he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a purely military strategy disconnected from moral issues of slavery, and later succeed in passing the Thirteenth Amendment. He had to tear the USA to pieces and put the country back together again in a new form.

Abraham Lincoln had always found slavery repugnant, but by the time he took his oath of office he was uniquely destined to be a military leader with no opportunity to engage in moral disputes over race or human equality. He won the war before he was assassinated: the rest, for which the whole world remembers and honors him, was incidental to his real job. (The best history of this is McPherson's Tried By War.)

I have little or no idea what it might ultimately take to abolish involuntary psychiatry. When I tell my neighbors, or even my own family, that we simply must do so, their confused reaction is reminiscent of the American Colonization Society in the early 19th Century, i.e., "Well, all those people who really are mentally ill and dangerous obviously can't live with us, so where are we going to put them?"

I try to explain that the whole idea of putting those people somewhere is moral and scientific nonsense. They have to live with us. Medicine will never cure problems of human cognition, emotion and behavior. These are not, never were, and never will be issues of the body or brain. They are in the end, necessarily religious issues.

"Treating depression" or "mental illnesses" is a sick joke now, the biggest and most obvious failure of our science and our civilization. That failure threatens to discredit the very value of reason in human affairs. Psychiatry's current drastic resort to brutal psychedelic mental and neurological landscape-leveling, with a forlorn hope of "integrating non-ordinary states of consciousness," is equivalent to the artillery barrage on Sumter when we failed to solve slavery with Christianity.

Now we have failed to solve insanity with medicine. Will we have some new destructive war? What will the collateral damage be? Whatever happens, forced psychiatry will not survive.

We need a Lincoln, and I’m not it; but I can keep suing the bastards.

Adverse effects

Aixalà's review discussion (in Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness) of adverse effects of psychedelic drugs comes only after almost 200 pages of hagiography (as if of Saint Mushroom, Saint Molly, Saint Ketamine, etc.). Given the context of this book, the adverse effects discussion is surprisingly gruesome.

The other thing that's surprising is that the leading expert on the subject is none other than Sidney Cohen, M.D., who has been dead for 35 years. Cohen was the character who gave LSD to Auldus Huxley and Clare Booth Luce (among other elite socialites) in the 1950's. Later, he debated Timothy Leary and warned about the drug's extensive dangers.

On pages 194-196 of Psychedelic Integration, Aixalà writes:

Sidney Cohen has investigated the adverse effects of psychedelic therapy perhaps more than any other author. Working as a psychedelic therapist over the years, Cohen became quite interested in the adverse reactions, devising a model of description and classification that evolved over the years.

Cohen describes the adverse symptomatology following the use of LSD and classifies it in two main groups: 1) acute reactions and 2) prolonged reactions. However, he does not make such a distinction in all his publications, and some confusion remains regarding the types of adverse events he catalogs. We know (and it will be addressed in the corresponding chapter) that difficult experiences can arise during the acute effects of any psychedelic experience, regardless of the substance or the context. A thorough discussion regarding how to best deal with these acute episodes well surpasses the objectives of this book. Therefore, we will focus on the prolonged reactions that occur and linger after the experience, as they are the ones more closely related to integration. Within this category, Cohen distinguished four different groups of adverse effects: 1) prolonged psychotic decompensation (schizophrenia, intermittent reactions, or flashbacks); 2) depressive and anxious reactions (the most frequent complication, according to Cohen); 3) the activation of psychopathic or anti-social tendencies, anti-social behavior, and letting go of social responsibilities; and 4) paranoid reactions or the confirmation of delusions of greatness in relation to the transcendental aspects of the experience.

While the phenomenological description of the symptoms is extensive, the classification seems to change as his model evolves, with the different categories eventually including many overlapping elements. Cohen affirms that these episodes are infrequent, and most of them may be resolved in the course of a few days or weeks by means of psychiatric medication, but he also reports cases in which the adverse effects persisted for months or years. In this regard, Cohen's approach to the integration and comprehension of these phenomena follows the aforementioned diagnostic line, quite confusing and impractical when trying to prescribe courses of treatment.

Perhaps more interestingly, Cohen further discusses the causes of prolonged psychotic reactions in some subjects. These include: 1)the character structure of the subject; 2) the context; 3) the insecurity and vulnerability entailed by a psychedelic experience; 4) the set and the contagious nature of the group experiences; 5) panic inducing negative experiences; 6) difficulties in "landing" while approaching the end of the experience; 7) dosage; 8) frequent use; 9) previous state of mind and stress levels; and 10) insufficient preparation.

I've quoted these pages at length because it would be difficult to communicate by any secondary description or summary of my own... how unnerving it is, that these people clearly have no clue what they're doing. Aixalà continues with an entire chapter about his very own, "new cartography based on clinical experience," in which he may try to mitigate this horrifying impression.

However... "prolonged psychotic decompensation," "depressive and anxious reactions," psychopathy and anti-social tendencies, plus paranoia... amounts to kind of a lot to mitigate!

Meet the new psychiatry, same as rhe old psychiatry.

Ten more quotes: Part 3

 (The new psychiatry, utilizing psychedelic assisted therapy, is religious, not medical.)

The interpretation of dreams was considered by Freud to be the "royal road to the unconscious," as dreams contain an inexhaustible source of psychic material manifesting itself in our unconscious, albeit in a cryptic way. The psychedelic experience could be considered an even "better" royal road since it can be induced at will and allows a better recollection of the experience. Freud hypothesized in 1940 that if we were ever to discover "specific chemical substances" that influenced the "psychic apparatus," this would result in unsuspected possibilities for therapy. Today, these substances are at our disposal....

 

Jung's analytical psychology is perhaps one of the most useful schools for the analysis of psychedelic content, given its spiritual nature....

 

There are many techniques that use body movement as a tool for introspection or transcendence: Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms (1989), trance dance, ecstatic dance, the Sufi dances of the dervishes....

 

Rather sophisticated ways of using song and musical composition are found in traditions such as in the ayahuasca church of the Santo Daime, in which some participants "receive" songs--or hymns--during their sessions and later compile them into a "hymnal," which then becomes part of the doctrine.

 

There is a particular synergy between meditation in all its different varieties and the integration of non-ordinary experiences that makes their combination especially useful. Those with prior meditation experience often find their meditation practice is more effortless and more profound after an experience in non-ordinary states of consciousness. It seems that it becomes easier, after a visionary experience, to remain in states of concentration, mindfulness, and equanimity. In turn, people experienced in non-ordinary states of consciousness often feel that meditation allows them to ground the contents of the experience and remain connected to the higher states they have encountered in their psychedelic experiences.

 

Although the spiritual dimensions of the psychedelic experience are perhaps the best known or at least the most historically emphasized, they are often the most difficult to truly integrate.

 

Although sometimes a spiritual experience manifests so clearly and overwhelmingly that it leaves an indelible mark, it can prove quite difficult to reconcile these states with our baseline physical reality and all its contradictions and painful situations. However, these dimensions hold perhaps the most tremendous therapeutic and evolutionary potential, with the power to help humanity as a whole, beyond our individual intra-psychic conflicts. 

 

The altar becomes a tangible and observable testimony of our experience. It contains elements related to the transcendental dimensions of the experience, reflecting our personal connection with the spiritual dimensions.... For some people, the altar is considered sacred during their integration processes, and it can become a permanent fixture in our homes, dedicated to our relationship with spirituality.

 

Responsibility for our own decisions and actions is a sign of spiritual maturity.

 

Rituals focused on healing have been used in practically all traditions, from shamanic cultures--such as the Andean people--all the way to Christianity, which still carries out exorcisms. Some schools of psychotherapy prescribe ritualized behavioral sequences with therapeutic intentions. Perhaps Alejandro Jodorowsky has come the closest to a new psychological shamanism, articulating and describing his psychomagic (psicomagia) practices--clearly another form of the ritual.... The prescription of rituals in the way we have outlined here requires a skilled and creative therapist who is honest, humble, and sensitive.  

I totally love his phrase, "...a new psychological shamanism."