PSYCHOPLASTOGENS

This is a rather new word, which apparently means "substances which cause/enable molding of the mind," i.e., from my perspective, "brainwashing drugs." 

It is mostly synonymous with "psychedelics" but implies a bit of materialistic brain theory (perhaps "dendrite manifesting" instead of the older and more romantic "mind manifesting"). According to Wikipedia, it was coined in 2019 by David E. Olson, a professor of chemistry, biochemistry and molecular medicine at UC-Davis.

When I first encountered the word in an opinion piece in JAMA Psychiatry, I vaguely recognized the bio-implication but immediately wondered why anyone needed a new word to replace Humphrey Osmond's venerable old "psychedelics." There might be various explanations. Maybe the medical profession wants or needs to separate itself from the history of 60's craziness. They'd love people to think that if they use LSD, it will be in connection with careful, scientific research, not at all like those reckless adventures of Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. If they do push such a brand, it will be a lie of the same magnitude as the "chemical imbalance" myth.

Kesey and Leary only pushed acid into mainstream America a decade after it had been thoroughly researched in very well-funded government programs, designed with the successful precedent of the Manhattan Project firmly in mind. The researchers of the 1950's abandoned psychedelics for the simple reason that unlike with the nuclear weapon experience, they discovered they could not control any aspect of these drugs. They couldn't control the effect of LSD on any particular person at any particular time, and they couldn't control the market supply or (most surprisingly to themselves) the demand. The central message of LSD was simply, no control.

Merely calling psychedelic drugs "psychoplastogens" will never change the essential reality of no control. "Bad trips" will happen at about the same frequency as they did in the Haight in 1967; inspired musicians and tech engineers, micro- or mega-dosing, will imagine "enhanced creativity" only to burn out far too quickly; and here or there we will see a new Charlie Manson horror story, or a new Richard Helms atrocity.

People are people, and they will not be substantially remade or redeemed with a pill. Dr. Gill will still have to talk to that hypo-manic patient on N Unit, and Dr. Malis will still have to listen respectfully to his delusional patient on Hartman. No matter what fancy fiddling these guys can ever do with neurons and brains to emulate Nathan Kline or to follow Professor David Olson, there will be no chemical salvation. 

Whenever I hear or read this term "psychoplastogens," I will suspect that the speaker or writer is:

1.   trying (and tragically failing) to sound like a scientist;

2.   actively covering up idolatry of drugs and brains;

3    hoping to brainwash other people for money and personal power;

4.   utterly hopeless about really communicating with an individual; and

5.   unable to create anything from scratch.

These "psychedelic renaissance" people and these supposed "scientists" who actually believe there can be such a thing as psychoplastogens look for the living in a place of the dead. 

Psychiatric slavery

Perhaps the single best dramatization of the "slave plantation" character to which the Illinois forensic psychiatric system so obviously aspires, is an elderly (age 77) African-American patient at EMHC named Jimmy Tutenk. A former forensic program director confided in me several years ago that he really wanted Tutenk to get a conditional release, because it just doesn't look good when a recipient of services dies in custody.

I've written about Jimmy several times. I think he was a drug user at an early age, grew up in bad neighborhoods in Chicago, got into the "mental health" system, killed somebody, was found NGRI, got coerced to take more drugs, finally decided completely on his own that he'd get off all the drugs, and got punished for that at EMHC for many years by several treating psychiatrists including none other than Richard Malis-with-malice, who literally kept Jimmy in chains until a judge forced an end to it.

I once had a plan to get a picture of Jimmy being loaded into an EMHC van in his chains, to go to an opthamologist appointment for his glaucoma. I figured I could blast that picture all over the internet with some suitable caption about "American slavery then and now." It never happened because of the very sensible judge, who basically told Malis, "Go in the jury room right now with Tutenk, and fix this." 

But one of the greatest regrets of my legal career is not having succeeded in getting Jimmy Tutenk released. He's only a year and a half from his Thiem date now, after three and a half decades at EMHC! When I first knew him he played basketball every day; now he has a hard time walking, and probably will be in a wheelchair from now on. What a tragic, ugly waste!

I asked Barry Smoot why the system could possibly want to keep Tutenk at EMHC any longer. He said that's easy: Tutenk is valuable property. He causes little or no trouble, he's an easy patient to deal with and he's worth federal dollars like other patients, but for less expense, at least for the moment. It's a short-sighted business calculation, but not entirely irrational.

Tutenk's current social worker and his psychiatrist were the only two clinical staff to attend his monthly treatment plan review yesterday. They have an acceptance for Jimmy's placement in the community already, despite his not taking psych drugs, being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and having committed a homicide. That speaks volumes.

But why should EMHC let the value and the income that this slave represents for the institution be transferred over to Bobby E. Wright Transitional Homes? They can keep him at EMHC for another year and a half, under transparently ridiculous but arguably "clinical mental health" logic like, "Well, he might benefit from doing the community reintegration program (which consists of two or three trips to local malls) for the fourth time. We did change it a little bit since he did it the third time... now we not only go to the mall, but also to McDonald's!"

There's no conditional release packet being prepared for Jimmy Tutenk. Nobody is bothering. He's easily maintained property like Barry Smoot pointed out.

They don't even need the chains anymore, he can't run!

               ________________________________________________

Quick note: It's only August but this is my 57th article posted in 2023, which is my highest ever for any calendar year since I started the blog in 2009.

Confidential information

A staffing yesterday featured a major, and majorly flawed strategy, by the masters and the overseers in the Illinois psychiatric slave plantation system. It's called, "protecting the confidentiality of medical and mental health information." This strategy goes a long way to help cover up real crimes which are utterly endemic, like staff sexual abuse of patients, staff failure to report suspicions of sexual abuse of patients, falsification of medical records, and perjury.

Needless to say it also helps in a huge way, to more generally deceive the tax-paying public into believing that EMHC and the other IDHS plantations are really "hospitals" where people who only did bad things because of a treatable disease can be successfully cured. This of course, is the big lie. The best people I have ever known in twenty-plus years at Elgin Mental Health Center are no better at "curing mental illness" (but on the plus side, no more likely to sexually abuse those in their custody) than an average layperson. However what distinguishes them as "professionals" is, they are all much more competent than a layperson with the bureaucratic procedures and justifications for, and the eccentric vernacular of, psychiatric slavery.

One item in that eccentric vernacular is "HIPAA!" as a near-magical incantation which means, "Everybody has to shut up now, everything is secret! Anybody who talks is in a lot of trouble." Following is my response to this incantation during yesterday's staffing for my guy Gus.

He is Gustavo Rodriguez from Aurora, IL, date of birth 10/10/1963, adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity on a charge of aggravated sexual assault. He is an involuntarily committed "patient" (psychiatric slave) housed on K Unit at Elgin Mental Health Center, 750 South State Street, Elgin, IL 60123. I don't remember his bullshit psychiatric "diagnosis" or I'd include it here, he wouldn't care.

Gus' current treating psychiatrist is Robert "Boris Johnson" Sharpe, the gnomish little outside-contracted (non-union) character who still needs a haircut, and who spearheaded complaints in yesterday's staffing about Gus "...posting confidential information about other patients," perhaps in an attempt to convince his boss, James Corcoran, that something should be done so that Gus will stay away from me. Gus tells me a lot about day-to-day happenings on K Unit (and some other units), and I occasionally, although probably not as often as he would like, write about what he tells me on this blog.

Gus' current treating psychologist is Stoika Meyer, a slightly severe, frenetic-looking woman in her fifties or sixties, who attempted to extract information from me about where I live(!), when I saw her in the forensic program building reception area at EMHC this morning. I probably could have chanted "HIPAA" just to see how that would work on her. Stoikie is another outside-contracted, non-union staff like Bobby (Boris) Sharpe. Her role in the staffing yesterday was apparently to convince James Corcoran that lots of patients on K Unit complain about Gus. The thing is, she's the one inciting or soliciting those complaints, in what seems to be an organized campaign to discredit and isolate Gus.

Rachel Nelson is Gus' social worker. She made a fallback argument for the team yesterday, that even if Gus' (and my) "posting of confidential information" isn't illegal, it's immoral because Gus wouldn't like his peers doing the same thing to him. But Gus doesn't care. (See the paragraph above, with his full name, etc.)

My first main point here is, HIPAA doesn't apply to me or Gus, because we are not medical or mental health professionals. If they want us to shut up, they should try to get a relevant court order that won't infringe against constitutional speech or press freedoms. The mere incantation definitely won't fly here. And actually the whole accusation about "posting confidential information" seemed to fall pretty flat with Dr. Corcoran. (He didn't have any great interest in the hoopla over Gabby and Latwon being inseparable on Faiza Kareemi's "love unit" K, either.) He finally piped up and said that all these complaints are normal, minor personality conflicts that occur on any clinical unit. His priority would be to work hard on how to get Gus out of EMHC!

Corcoran's priority is certainly correct, from any point of view. Almost twenty years ago, clinicians and administrators at CMHC and EMHC, plus legal counsel for IDHS and prosecutors in the Circuit Courts of a couple Illinois counties were all telling me they wanted to get Rodney Yoder the hell away from their establishments and out of the media. He caused too much trouble and embarrassment for the state.

I would hesitate to bet that Gustavo Rodriguez will rise to a level of such extraordinary public relations and media acumen as Rodney Yoder showed. But I am confident that as long as Gus is a slave on the Elgin plantation, there will be copious details and embarrassing stories about day-to-day lives on the units posted on this blog. Gus isn't my only source for this material, but he's a pretty good one.

Those details and stories will also end up in public records of lawsuits.

TOCS California

OK, I'll jump back to a wider sociopolitical scene today. (You're welcome, K Unit.)

There is a movement for a ballot initiative in California called TREAT California. It's the brainchild of Dr. Jeannie Fontana. Dr. Fontana seems like a dicey character to me, because she apparently believes that if enough Californians take psychedelic drugs, the problems of mental health will be solved and the world itself will be redeemed. 

I would suggest that the initiative should be renamed "TOCS California" with TOCS standing for Trip Out Californians to Save the world" (and TOCS by the way might sound like "tax" with a West Coast accent, which would be appropriate here).

Jules Evans recently called Jeannie Fontana "...the Barbenheimer hoping to bring tax-payer-funded psychedelic therapies to all Californians," in an article with a picture of his subject looking very much like a classic Barbie doll right under the headline, TREAT California: the Manhattan Project of psychedelics?

Evans points out several issues with this intiative, including historical precedent that strongly suggests it could quickly become a corrupt boondoggle (did that happen with the atom bomb, too?!), and the prospect that over-promising benefits like the total salvation of humanity will blow back against promoters.

The corrupt boondoggle issue is raised partly because of Barbenheimer Fontana's own record with the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), an earlier initiative that California taxpayers funded to promote stem cell research. CIRM was fraught with conflicts of interest for 20 years and never developed a stem cell treatment that became available to the public. It ultimately gave about 90% of its funds to the private projects of board members.

Dr. Fontana told Jules Evans that she has learned a lot since she was with CIRM. During the pandemic, she divorced her husband and found universal love in Mexico by eating chocolates made by a shaman with psilocybin and ayahuasca. Then she proceeded on a real magical mystery tour, with ibogaine, MDMA, Ketamine, mescaline, DMT, and lots more psilocybin. Now Dr. Fontana wants to define a new industry through which everyone can take these drugs and be part of "the unifying force of the universe," which she knows in her DNA (?) will enable us all to "have the relationship of knowing."

I sure as hell am reminded(!) ...of Adelle Davis' 1961 book (as Jane Dunlap) about LSD! Davis wrote:

Many hundreds of people given LSD have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory. People who have had such experiences usually agree that deep within lie goodness unimaginable, wisdom, music, talents of every variety, joy, peace, humility, love, and spirituality, to name a few.   

Adelle Davis died of bone cancer in 1974. Her son told me sadly that his mother's final drug of choice was not LSD, but morphine, in rapidly increasing doses. We'll have to see whether Barbenheimer Fontana can do any better than that. 

As the French say, plus ça change.... 

Dan Malone

Dan is a social worker on K (Faiza Kareemi's "love unit"). Like almost everyone else who works on the EMHC plantation, he started out wanting to help people. His intentions were mostly frustrated within a few years, and he began thinking about getting away with pretenses until his state pension accrued.

Now he mostly pretends, every day. He pretends to be a "mental health professional" with special access to scientific brain technologies that enable the amazing team he's on to medically cure human difficulties in cognition, emotion and behavior. This was the pretense favored, possibly even believed, back in 2014 when Jeff "freak of nature" Lieberman gave his speech to the APA convention and tried to get people to take my picture.

That was almost a decade ago, and no one believes the pretense now. Psychiatric "diagnosis" has been widely revealed to be bullshit, and "treatment" clearly sucks as bad as ever. That doesn't mean a guy like Dan never helps anyone. But when he does help someone, it's despite any allegiance he may have to psychiatry, despite the incompetent fakers who surround him at EMHC, despite his unfortunate training in false methodologies and explanations, despite the real work that takes up the majority of his time and energy, which is pointless paperwork and lying.

With all those strikes against him, it's really quite impressive that Dan does occasionally help somebody, and he should be honestly admired for that. The problem is, he has to pretend and lie, constantly, to everyone. That just turns anybody plain, damned stupid.

On the 27th of July, Dan went to the trouble of interrogating one patient on the unit over what Gus had been seen discussing with him that day. In fact, Gus had simply been explaining a form to request preferences for phone time (or some such mundane daily affairs), in the event that the guy would be absent for a religious service when staff went around to take a poll. But Dan was very ready! or even hyper-alert, to suspect some dark conspiracy. It was stupid.

Then yesterday just after 8:00 AM, Dan made a tangential remark that Gus had better not be threatening Dan's patients! Gus asked where that came from, and it turned out that another patient had simply worried aloud about Gus reporting rules violations on K Unit (e.g., Gabby handing her cell phone around for Latwon and other favored patients to use; or the pervasive black market trade in personal possessions). So Dan arbitrarily converted that into a threat, apparently establishing his role as the protector of anyone Gus might report, even if rules (or for that matter laws, like those that establish custodial sexual abuse as a felony!) are being broken and Gus' reports are fully accurate. 

Gus has become dangerous. Not because he would ever hurt himself or anyone else due to any faux "mental illness," but because he does not like the mafia culture on K unit, and he has realized that merely to maintain his own integrity, he must write reports which disturb the status quo. Gus is apparently dangerously powerful in the eyes of some staff, because he's not afraid and won't stop. I have tried to help him with this, mostly by admonishing him to be very strict about the truth, but otherwise urging him to continue.

It just now occurs to me that my Twitter friend, the San Francisco psychiatrist Joe Pierre, spoke quite directly about this phenomenon during a recent presentation he gave. Joe tries to explain conspiracy beliefs as a little bit (but not very) pathological, and theorizes that they may be caused by a combination of epistemic mistrust and marketplace misinformation. These factors are obvious on K Unit!

I sort of regret that my advocacy for Gus may put me at odds with some staff who are essentially well-intended, like Dan Malone (maybe Stoika Meyer, too, by the way), but who have really just become plain damned S-T-U-P-I-D from lying too much.

And I think that's a better explanation than Frisco Joe's complex epistemology and Marxism.

Oh, well.

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!