More on Turley, Amanda Calhuon, N Unit

January 6th, 2021, has been called "an insurrection." I thought, even from the day it happened, that the use of that term was a cynical political tactic which dishonored our law and our history, not to mention three quarters of a million Americans who (as Lincoln said at Gettysburg) "gave the last full measure of devotion."

Trump's riot (or whoever's riot it was) at the Capitol was an upsetting and ugly warning; but it has been made much uglier by this dishonor. I come from a family who meant 1861-1865, not 1941-1945, when they spoke about The War... and that was when I was a kid in the 1950's, barely a decade after VJ Day but almost a century after Appomattox. 

One person was killed in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. The human cost of the American Civil War was beyond anyone's expectations at that time, and thoroughly beyond our understanding in the 21st Century. That insurrection claimed at least 2% of the entire population of this country. It was more deaths than those from all other wars in our entire history combined.

It also changed the fundamental character of the country. Constitutional changes eliminated most of the sovereignty of the states. We stopped saying, "the United States are..." and ever after said, "the United States is..." The constitutional changes gave this country a much better character. But who can study that history and believe Congress and the States would ever have bothered, let alone succeeded, in working out such a far reaching remake of the whole idea, due to the death of one person in an insurrection?

I have been told that the BLM riots in the summer of 2021 were also called an "insurrection."  (I don't remember that in the media, but I could have missed the meme.) Apparently about two dozen people were killed then, but I still find the application of the term to be a silly and dishonorable political ploy. 

Perhaps a few moments during the 1965 free speech movement in Berkeley, or the civil rights protests and mass marches later that decade, prompted some comments about "insurrection" during those times, too. It's the same thing though: public relations or propaganda. The ideological causes and arguments in 2021 and 1965 were utterly insignificant compared to the complete national mobilization of all moral and material power to save the Union and end slavery (or to dissolve the Union and protect slavery, depending on which side you were on).

Jonathon Turley expressed some of this view, and other opinions, in an article this week. I mostly agree with him. Meanwhile, some people suggest that what counts is not how many people die, but whether an event upsets ("triggers") somebody. As I noted in a post earlier this month, Yale's Amanda Calhoun advises her psychiatric patients to cut ties with their own families to avoid being upset about politics on Thanksgiving.

This is wrong. It's more wrong than calling January 6 an insurrection. It actually may be one of the most wrong, ridiculous, discreditable things any psychiatrist ever said. But it's only one example of how wrong psychiatry is. Calhoun thinks we should all avoid getting into fights no matter what, no matter how we have to lie to each other, or be insulted, or fail to help others, or even lose our families. The ultimate value here is some weird, almost unrecognizable version of "safety," especially the safety of our feelings (not of our families, that's for sure!).

Ironically, the only place this supposed psychiatric value of "safety" might not apply is in psychiatric institutions. Real physical safety takes a back seat to privileges, convenience, deference for mental health "experts," and certainly everyone's ability to bury their heads in the sand when anything bad happens. It's not so bad if a patient gets injured in a fight, or if a staff who doesn't toe the administration's line gets injured. But if somebody says something sarcastic about the powers that be or those loyal overseers who truly believe in psychiatric slavery... well, that's "verbal aggression" and that's bad. The overseers can dehumanize the slaves with fake "diagnoses" of non-verifiable, non-falsifiable "mental illness." Just don't ever give STA Quinton Ivy the finger--he gets away with battery!

An immediate example (just today!) of this distorted version of "safety," is N Unit at EMHC. Dr. Vik Gill has a "patient" who continues to violently attack anyone in sight for no reason. The eighth such attack by this same individual in the last couple weeks happened this morning. Somebody will be seriously injured soon. Dr. Gill can't do anything about that for two reasons. One, he has no clue how to improve anyone's behavior, he only knows how to drug people. And two, he's at the mercy of a fundamentally corrupt EMHC culture which thrives on violence among the psychiatric slaves as a method of control.

The Illinois Department of Human Services theoretically has a facility for violent "patients" like Gill's: a separate plantation called Chester Mental Health Center. Gill's violent patient should have been sent there  a long time ago, before eight other patients got beat up. 

It's possible that Gill wants a violent patient on his unit for some purpose of his own, but I don't think so. I think he's being set up by somebody above him. Somebody wants Gill to look bad, so they won't approve sending this violent patient to Chester.

The overseers stab each other in the back all the time.

Retraction and apology

An STA on Hartman Unit persistently asked a patient to tell me I falsely accused her in a post on this blog, of having sex with mental patients at EMHC. The post at issue is "Sex with mental patients again and again" published July 8, 2024. I accused a couple dozen people in that article. In the post itself and in other separate posts on the blog (e.g., here, here, and here), I repeatedly promised to retract any challenged accusation against anyone willing to tell me it was untrue or unfair.

No one ever bothered to convince me or tell me directly that my accusations are untrue or unfair. People are afraid to call me, either because they know that if their bosses find out they called me they'll be in trouble, or because they think I'm crazy and thereby dangerous to talk to. Maybe I don't blame them, but I want to point out that I'm going beyond my promise in an effort to show good will. It took me months to even figure out who the Hartman STA was, and what blog post was disputed. No one I ever accused by their full name, no one I actually know, has complained to me. My articles only name people in such ways that they can identify themselves or each other. 

Nevertheless, I hereby retract any accusation that anyone ever had sex with any mental patient. I apologize to all who have not been convicted of this crime, and hereby presume it only happened once in all of history. (The perpetrator in that single instance was convicted and sent to prison.) Although I have been told by long-time staff at EMHC that a whole list of individuals should be named as perpetrators, I now realize any staff who ever told me anything like that are liars. Anyone who says the crime I was accusing a couple dozen partially identified people of is endemic at EMHC and throughout the Illinois psychiatric slave plantation system is hopelessly brain damaged and psychotic. 

I would like to know how I could have been so mistaken about this, so anyone willing to help with my re-education is welcome to connect. I would prefer to sort it out completely, so that I know for sure who all was falsely or unfairly accused, whether by me, by my sources, or both. I really do not want to falsely or unfairly accuse people!

But what I long believed was that the Illinois Department of Human Services runs institutions that effectively perpetrate sex slavery under a guise of "medical help" for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. This would be incredibly damaging to enslaved individuals, and to the social order, not to mention to respect for the law and medicine in this state. If I must stop complaining and accusing, I sure do hope that I was delusional, for the sake of the victims, and the perpetrators.

If anyone  were in fact up against a mafia-like system with many weapons, legal and illegal, the truth would be very difficult to tell, because the truth might end such a system. Slavery, sexual abuse, fraud, and denial of due process are illegal and ugly. The public would not knowingly pay their taxes for it, so the system would have to fight the truth to survive.

That system does not, after all, sell so-called "mental health services" to those who actually consume them. The consumers don't pay: only others who dislike them or find them troublesome pay.

Help me out guys, I need to know whether my complaints and accusations are accurate or completely crazy, and whether my whole point of view is just plain wrong. Maybe after all, IDHS is a fantastic, benevolent group of medical mental health geniuses, and its consumers are uniformly thankful for it and toast its health every Thanksgiving.

Right? Maybe I need to shut up instead of complaining more loudly more often.

Maybe I should tell my clients to take drugs.

An old lesson

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote about what it means to debate the "Existence of Mental Illness." My friend Rodney Yoder commented from his own bitter experience that being locked up in, e.g., Chester Mental Health Center, is social segregation or correction, punitive as a matter of explicit and implicit policy. It is not medical help, "...and the average person understands this all too well."

The window dressing of psychiatry demeans both medicine and the law precisely because it encourages the public to pretend ignorance of social policy choices. There are standards of behavior which simply will be enforced one way or another, and legitimate scientific medicine never has much to do with that. The function of so-called "mental illness" is at least to deflect responsibility, and at best to encourage faith or hope for future progress. 

The problem is it wastes honest human effort in present time, and it ruins the public fisc. Yoder, as an avowed atheist, would argue that this is ever the result of religious faith. His mentor Thomas Szasz, and his expert witness Nelson Borelli, both wrote long and eloquently (as no compliment) that psychiatry is best seen as a state religion.

Two weeks ago today, the American election demonstrated some serious impatience with continuing poor results from social policy choices. The world is on edge, and people want change. They may not know exactly what change they want. They may bounce around between increasingly radical promised "solutions" for years. Nobody knows what will happen, but the understanding of the average person is much better than the authorities apparently believe.

People are not generally stupid, they're smart enough to survive. Some are infinitesimally "smarter" than others, but only for moments at a time. We have (contrary to elitists on our left) no real competent educated class; and (contrary to delusional reaction on our right) there certainly is no subspecies or race "higher" than the simple diverse majority, however deplorable or morally upright they may be. There certainly will never be "brain treatment" breakthroughs to afford broad salvation.

The Jewish High Holiday Prayerbook contains a page I memorized many years ago, which is the best prescription I can think of:

In well doing rather than in well being seek your salvation.

Leave for awhile the narrow sphere of your concerns, and with Israel's ancient seers ascend the mount of vision. Thence behold the millions of your fellow beings madly struggling for air and light and a place in the sun, and tearing each other's flesh in the panicky scramble.

You will forget your small cares in the woes of the defeated and helpless multitudes. The pang of compassion will grip your heart, a pang that for ought we know is the stirring of God within you. 

And you will cry, Oh that men were united to do Thy Will with a perfect heart!

Then descend into the valley where men die struggling. Thither take the vision, the pang, and the prayer, and transmute their urge into deeds of love. 

No apologies to my friend Rodney Yoder for being religious. And no apologies to the IDHS plantation overseers for being antipsychiatry.

We simply have to work.

Baker and Malis-with-malice

Dr. Richard Malis has a patient who has violently attacked other patients at least half a dozen times lately. In theory, one primary purpose of mental health treatment in an institution like EMHC is to keep crazy people from hurting themselves or others. But this patient of Malis-with-malice keeps on hurting others, and nobody does anything about it.

Today I found out that the latest casualty is my friend James Baker. James is an elderly African-American man who has been at EMHC for several dozen years (most of his life). Malis' dangerous, uncontrolled patient just walked up and cold-cocked him this weekend, sending him to the hospital! James only has one good eye, and the vicious, totally unprovoked blow to his head caused bleeding in that good eye. More medical evaluation will be necessary, as well as a very thorough investigation into why this patient of Malis-with-malice is allowed to wonder around the clinical unit freely to attack others at will.

Malis-with-malice tried to keep James Baker in chains for a long time, making it very difficult for him to get regular ophthalmology care for his glaucoma, until a Cook County Circuit Court judge finally put a stop to that. Now this violent patient, whom Malis just glibly allows to assault and batter people may have damaged Baker's one good eye. A casual observer might be forgiven for suspecting that this is on purpose.

Long ago, Rodney Yoder told me that psychiatric plantation overseers "dog fight" patients just for fun, and as a tactic of control. More recently, Barry Smoot has explained this as the characteristic "failure to protect," as reflected in the title to his book.

Anyone injured by Dr. Richard Malis-with-malice's violent patient should call me. You may have a civil claim.

Turley and the Yale Psychiatrist

I frequently read Jonathon Turley's columns because I agree with him about the indispensability of the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. Today, Turley takes Yale psychiatrist Amanda Calhoun to task for telling the public that it'll be just fine over the holidays, to cut off communication with your family members who voted for the wrong presidential candidate so you won't be "triggered" by hearing political views contrary to your own.

For Turley, this is a freedom of speech issue. He thinks we need more speech, more communication, more discussion, rather than speech controls and disconnection from family. He also thinks this is especially important in the context of elite universities like Yale. I certainly don't disagree with him.

However, I think the fact that Amanda Calhoun is Yale faculty is much less significant than the fact that she's a psychiatrist. She's encouraging family estrangement in the name of "mental health." I sure hope she gets sued for alienation of affection. (In fact, if anyone who reads this is negatively impacted by Amanda Calhoun's horrible advice for the holidays, or by similar advice of any other psychiatrist, call me, maybe I'll take your case on a contingency fee basis!)

It's not uncommon for psychiatrists to believe that their "expertise" is far more valuable than such a pedestrian thing as family. If only everyone were a good enough "patient" to take the drugs and electric shocks that psychiatrists prescribe, and to totally buy into the "diagnoses" of (fake) brain diseases, we wouldn't even need families, right? If only the psychiatric religion reigned supreme in the USA, we wouldn't need elections either.

Turley thinks Calhoun's view is political. It's not, it's psychiatric. The thing is, psychiatrists like Calhoun actually believe the only rational politics is to put them totally in charge.

They're wrong: that's prescribed harm, prescribed slavery.

More on "up for grabs"

My guy Gus has gone without any treatment plan review (TPR, or "staffing") in two of the last six months. This is a significant departure from established IDHS policy and practice, if not a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code.

In April 2024, Gus had no TPR because his assigned social worker, Xiaomara Ramirez, just refused to work with him after he suggested she was papering over the window of her office door so nobody would see what she was doing in there. (Actually, I was the one who suggested that, and I hearkened back to the social worker sex-with-patients flap circa 2017, which seemed darkly instructive.)

Then this month, October 2024, Gus' new replacement social worker, Joseph Basso, just didn't have time to arrange any staffing. After all, Joseph doesn't even work on the same clinical unit where Gus is housed, so the lines of communication are very slow or administratively awkward and responsibility is cloudy. Joseph probably doesn't want the thankless job anyway, and people higher up the food chain like Michelle Evans, or James Corcoran, have had to lie so much, every day for so long, that they no longer have the capacity to care.

Obviously there isn't much of a mental health treatment team for Gus at EMHC. In fact, it's becoming more obvious every week that there's very little legitimate mental health "treatment" for anyone at EMHC. 

There certainly is no recognizable teamwork toward the noble purpose promoted on that bronze plaque in the Forensic Program Building lobby: RELIEF AND RESTORATION, A PLACE OF HOPE FOR THE HEALING OF MIND, BODY AND SPIRIT. I don't recall seeing staff laugh out loud when they walk past that plaque on their way to their offices, but it seems like they must laugh to themselves.

For three days in a row last week, EMHC was reported to be short some number of critical clinical staff: seven staff down on Friday; five down on Saturday, four down on Sunday, just on one unit! Morale is down the tubes even more than normal. People just aren't showing up, and sooner or later that will mean more than skipped monthly staffings. It will result in security failures and tortious malpractice. Patients and staff will be seriously hurt, and if somebody dies the media may notice!

The plantations in southern Illinois are even worse than EMHC. I just spent a day at Choate. Seasoned public servants there are throwing up their hands and even joining me to just poke sticks at the mad dogs who run the system. There's no hope for rational improvement, the only course left and the only real entertainment is to sit back and watch it all burn down. 

Writing this on Election Day, I can't help comparing the situation at EMHC to the scene in the United States. The microcosm and the macrocosm are alike horrible. In fact, the idea that all human problems of thinking, emotion, and behavior are malfunctions in the brain which medical doctors know how to fix with drugs or other brute force, is key to understanding both disasters. 

Psychiatry is a false and suppressive concept that has infected our whole culture. It's hardly surprising that nobody wants to hold a monthly staffing for Gus.

Who reads this blog?

I occasionally review the statistics of page views for this blog, which can be fascinating data. Just for example:

• The single article which has gotten more views than any other, out of 433 or so, is from October 8, 2010, entitled "DSM 5 Proposal". It has gotten 5,250 views, about 2000 more than the closest runner-up. One obvious reason is that it's been published for a long time; another reason is that I have repeatedly promoted this one on social media. I'd like to think people also find it thought-provoking. It speaks to the first of two very simple points I harp on about psychiatry: "Diagnosis" is bullshit; and "treatment" sucks.

• Every now and then I notice patterns in the views. They can be telltale, because the universe of my readers is pretty well limited to mental health professionals who work in the Illinois plantation system as overseers of psychiatric slaves. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in attention to an apparently random assortment of old articles that have not been viewed for many years. One such, just this week, is from April 4, 2016, entitled "Chart Note Rebuttal." In 8-1/2 years this particular piece of writing got a grand total of about 1,400 views, but almost 1000 of those were prior to 2018. The article popped up this week though, suddenly getting seven new views.

RefusingPsychiartry has been a subject of regulatory investigation recently, after allegations were made (primarily or exclusively by Robert Sharpe, M.D., a particularly vicious overseer at Elgin MHC) that it sometimes reveals private information of my clients, thus violating my duty of confidentiality as an attorney. To the best of my knowledge, none of my clients have ever complained of anything I ever wrote about them. Bobby Sharpe would of course say they're all mentally ill after all, so as a psychiatrist he knows better than they do what's good for them. He probably believes he should even advise them or decide for them who their lawyer should be, and he probably also believes there's no need for any mental health law after all, as long as an M.D. psychiatrist is available to take charge. Tragically, many judges and attorneys often act as though they agree,

There may be an organized effort to censor me, which I should take as a high compliment but for the nuisance. With some degree of paranoia, I now tend to review the blog statistics with thoughts about who at ARDC is reading which articles. The one attorney who has admitted to running an investigation into Bobby Sharpe's allegations against me certainly is reading it and I welcome that, although I haven't heard from that attorney in quite a while, and I rather expected more "meet and confer" after I promised to cooperate fully. 

In any event, I have always invited criticism and protest from anyone whom I criticize on RefusingPsychiatry. I have publicly corrected or removed articles which I came to believe, after they were published, were unfair or untrue. But the story I have always told, and will always continue to tell, remains that the Illinois forensic mental health system is hopelessly corrupt to a point that it causes far more harm than good. The plantations must be closed down, and the masters and overseers must be prosecuted or removed from all positions of power to control people under a false guise of "medical help."

When I call people "masters and overseers," I am only pointing at a few of the guys I know at EMHC or in IDHS. Most of those I've met in 22 years of work are good public servants who got into the "mental health" profession because they wanted to help. Vik Gill is a decent doctor; Vicky Ingram is a very well-intentioned administrator. Many others, even some I have sued, are basically good people. The problem is, they discovered after taking their particular jobs that it's not possible to help the way they had hoped to, from inside this corrupt system. Then they started justifying and equivocating and fibbing and hiding. Now they find themselves demoralized or confused, and others find them stupid.

Ninety-five-plus percent of the people at EMHC are good guys. It's only a small handful that I call "masters and overseers." Consciously and publicly comparing that small handful to the earlier bad guys from the beginning of the Ruffin-Tibbets Century is not mere rhetorical flourish: it is practical, because it generally enables prediction. Slavery based in bio-material delusions propagated as "science" will repeat certain social patterns, over and over again through history.

However I must admit, I didn't really see the regulatory action against me coming out of Bobby Sharpe's hostility. I didn't mean to corner him so badly, and I didn't predict that he would have to turn quite so rabid.

Surprises are the spice of life.