20 Steps for Fraud, Obstruction of Justice, Modern Slavery

 Here’s how it works. 

1. Somebody does something so ugly that virtually all of his/her fellows just want him/her gone. 

2. The person is arrested, charged and taken to trial. 

3. The prosecutor, judge, jury, and/or other people involved see no real hope for justice because the offender is too damn crazy, and cannot apparently understand or be understood. 

4. All involved agree to pretend that the offender has a brain disease that can be cured by psychiatric “medicine”.

5. The offender gets locked up in a “hospital” operated by the Illinois Department of Human Services. 

6. A “Treatment Plan” is written to slowly disable the offender from ever being able to do ugly things in the future. 

7. The “Treatment Plan” is followed in such manner as to dehumanize the offender without grossing out the public, and allow anyone directly involved to say they are “helping”.

8. The offender quickly learns that the whole “medicine” and “treatment” pretense is a charade, but he/she copes and plans to get out. 

9. The offender is an object of constant close surveillance from a team of professionals to make sure he/she never tells anyone that the whole “medicine” and “treatment” pretense is a charade. 

10. Illinois taxpayers foot the bill at $800+ per day. The people putting on the charade get their piece of this action.  

11. Rarely (but increasingly more often these days), somebody complains that this whole system is destructive and ought to be abolished. 

12. The complainer is said to be crazy like all the locked-up offenders, and his/her complaints are ruled “unfounded”.

13. Very rarely, the complainer is able to offer good arguments and/or proof. 

14. In exceptionally rare instances, some public authority like a court, or somebody in the media, starts to believe the complainer. 

15. Some of the people who get paid for putting on the charade feel threatened by exposure. They look for ways to reduce or eliminate the perceived threat. 

16. The threat reduction tactics include perjury, intimidation, and defamation, at least. But occasionally they go so far as murder.

17. Meanwhile completely unaware, Illinois taxpayers continue to foot the bill, not only for the vast “medicine” and “treatment” scam, but also for lawyers to protect the scammers from exposure. 

18. The lawyers gradually learn or suspect that the scammers are in fact scammers, but they try to do their jobs and represent them anyway

19. The lawyers end up violating rules and codes of ethics, and getting caught. 

20. Almost everyone laments. Only a few learn something and start over in more honest jobs. 

Guys! You should refuse to tolerate me, publicly or privately...

I'll start out this article by apologizing for my recent relative absence. It has been several months since I've published an article here, and I know EMHC employees have probably been pining away, anticipating my latest words of wisdom or insult, for far too long.

Two discoveries motivated my (gracious, I hope) return today.

The first was the fact that one earlier article (my discussion of MRT back in October, 2016) received very positive reviews, and stimulated excellent conversation among Drew Beck, Faisa Kareemi, Hasina Javed, and several others. 

I should probably clarify something for Drew. I was not agreeing with psychiatry in opposition to MRT, or with MRT in opposition to psychiatry, in that article. My point, rather, was that patients at EMHC are required, simultaneously or within a continuing process of "recovery", to profess full faith and belief in two directly contradictory concepts.

Such an incoherent demand on drug-suppressed cognition is probably not quite as destructive as, e.g., years of sexual abuse at the hands of "beneficent" captors, or a forced pregnancy.... But it surely can inspire profound distrust.

Right, Drew? You said you had been making the same arguments in my blog article on MRT yourself, for a long time. I was very happy to find out we were on the same page, in a sense, philosophically. And, it seems to me that MRT is not quite seen as the panacea that it might once have been. years ago, at Elgin. Maybe that's a joint, small victory that you and I can share some pride in?

On the other hand Drew, you were baffled about how I could agree with psychiatry if I didn't believe in mental illness. First of all, I'm a lawyer. Thus, I'm trained to agree with almost any idea for a moment or two, just in order to better understand and more effectively refute it.

But I honestly was not favoring the psychiatric view (that people only do bad things because their brain chemistry is out of tune) over the MRT view (that people have to admit being evil and repent), in my article. I think both sides of that argument are impractical.

I should also hasten to add, FYI, that there is no Scientology belief that "mental illness does not exist." The relevant Scientology belief, as it is clearly stated in the published Creed of the Church, and as I explained more fully in the first article I ever published on this blog, is "That the study of the Mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields." Either educate yourself, or be more polite!

Which brings me to the second discovery that motivated this article, especially it's title.

A February 24, 2022 article in Psychiatric News is entitled, "Let's End the Destructive Habit of Doubting Psychiatric Illness." The author is Daniel Morehead, M.D., a veritable scion of the royal American psychiatric establishment. His rather aggressive admonition to  all of you mental health professionals is, you sure better toe the line, actively defend the psychiatric faith, and never tolerate people who don't believe in it (like me); in fact, you'd better fight all those crazy anti-psychiatrists (like me)!

The article itself is transparently weak and illogical as an argument. But it makes up for that with sheer aggression and fear mongering. 

Morehead doesn't seem able to acknowledge that "medical" is not exactly the same concept as "real". He appears to think mental illness being "real" is the same issue as mental illness being "medical". But in fact, the only way to tell if something is medical is by asking yourself whether medicine treats it. An obvious example is homicide: do we give the perpetrator anti-psychotic drugs, or prison? If we give her drugs, then the homicide was a medical issue; if we give her prison, it wasn't. Only our actions and opinions after the fact provide the distinction. However, either way the homicide was real.

He also conflates "biologically abnormal" with "damaging". But surely a marathoner who runs 26.2 miles in two hours is biologically abnormal, although his ability is not damaging.

Morehead also seems to have no question whatsoever about whether psychiatric "treatment" is a categorically wonderful thing, even in the face of so much evidence that, e.g., disability due to mental illness has continued to increase rapidly in the last half century, and that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much more likely to fully recover in third-world countries where drugs are not available for it.

I think most mental health professionals would feel nervous reading the argument in this article. It's too childishly shrill, even when you don't consciously identify the precise logical errors and missing or contrary evidence. The first time I read it, I seriously considered that it might actually be satire.

However, Morehead has impact. What he does, really, is declare war on anti-psychiatry. He demands that all mental health professionals must recognize the danger posed by people like me.

Morehead says you guys should refuse to tolerate me. What's unreal about that is, you already recognize me as a human being who might be tolerable. You even agree with me sometimes, or find me interesting. Drew Beck, Faisa Kareemi, Hasina Javed and others liked my article about MRT. Years ago, an EMHC psychiatrist told her boss, "Mr. Kretchmar is a valuable part of our treatment team!" (I thought that was a bit exaggerated, but I didn't mind.)

Hey, it's true that I'm a long-time Scientologist. But I also have plenty of credentials as a tolerable person: college degree, license to practice law in Illinois, a wife of 46 years, three kids and three grandkids, dogs, a nice house and neighbors who are all good friends, good Scotch whiskey.... 

It would be a pretty safe bet that any one of you would find it far more natural to come over to my house for a Fourth of July party, than to "refuse to tolerate" me, as Daniel Morehead demands that you must.

Morehead is a fanatic. I think you guys can read his call to arms and recognize that. The top of the food chain in psychiatry, those arrogant, racist leaders like Jeffrey "freak of nature" Lieberman (and perhaps a couple M.D. psychiatrists at EMHC, whose initials could be JPC, RM, SH), are just delusional. I don't believe they'll get many of you to enlist.

Me and NAMI 2

Jessica Hart, a NAMI PR and lobbyist, continues to send me appeals for help. Following is her latest, and my latest response. (My apologies for formating transfer complexities.) 

____________________________

Stuart , 

First responders – from law enforcement officers to EMTs, and paramedics to emergency room doctors and nurses – deal with the unimaginable every day, and the COVID-19 pandemic has added to their already difficult job. 

 

In far too many communities, first responders must also take the place of an inadequate mental health crisis system. Unfortunately, that often causes delays for the individual and their family to get connected to mental health care quickly, and it adds to already strained emergency services.) 

It doesn’t have to be this way. A mental health or suicidal crisis deserves a mental health response.) 

There are an estimated 240 million calls to 911 each year in the U.S., and over 19 million of those calls are mental health related. Just like law enforcement responds to a crime in progress, firefighters respond to a fire, or EMTs respond to a broken leg, we must #ReimagineCrisis.

 

When people call 988 after it goes live in July 2022, professionals who are best trained to help with a mental health crisis should be the ones to respond. Mental health advocates and first responders all know this change is needed, so everyone gets the right response – and an equitable response – that connects them to the help they need.

During Day 4 of REIMAGINE, A 988 Week of Action, ask your members of Congress to #ReimagineCrisis by investing in a mental health crisis system in their fiscal year (FY) 2022 budget.) 

ACT NOW

Thank you for your advocacy. 

Jessica Hart 
Senior Manager, Field Advocacy 
NAMI Government Relations, Policy & Advocacy Team

Pronouns: She/Her

 

*988 will not be available widely until July 2022. If you or a loved one are experiencing a crisis, please call the National Suicide Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text “NAMI” to 741741.

______________________________________________

Jessica,

When a “mental health crisis” is occurring, it means that a person is acting dangerously or obnoxiously. The person is scaring or offending someone, or endangering him/herself sufficiently, so as to cause calls for third party help with the situation. 

The emergency help needed is to control the threatening/offending individual’s behavior to avoid harm. It is not to provide immediate medical intervention for a stopped heart, or obstructed breathing, or a broken hip, or a gunshot wound, or a drug overdose. 

I believe it is absolutely critical to understand that behavior control is a different errand from medical help. We must attend very closely to that distinction, lest we completely abdicate all social and moral authority to expert doctors.

A pill for every antisocial mood or act, a psychiatric expert for every rule of etiquette, no responsibility of individuals, but only dictates by objective standards handed down? Of course that is an impossible society! 

I have no problem with more emergency mental health response teams, provided only that they are explicitly NOT ruled by any medical/psychiatric model of forced drugging and threatened involuntary hospitalization. 

Ultimately, until psychiatrists are no longer the leading/ruling authorities of mental health teams, help and control will remain utterly confused, and mental health itself will continue to be at least as dehumanizing as the roughest law enforcement. 

NAMI has always suggested a 180-degree opposite view: that psychiatry should ultimately cure all social and moral questions by treating errant chemistry in brains.

Your organization is a substantial part of the problem; your advocacy cannot lead to any creative solution. 

S. Randolph Kretchmar 

Kretchmar & Cecala, P.C.

1170 Michigan Ave. 

Wilmette, IL 60091

847-370-5410

Sent from my iPhone

Me and NAMI

Following is an email I recently received from a woman who is apparently up the food chain a ways, in NAMI’s PR and lobbying function. Below her email, I post my response. 

____________________________

Stuart, 

Our country’s lack of an effective and widely available mental health crisis system leads to tragic results for people in crisis. For marginalized communities, limited access to crisis care and all types of mental health treatment cause even more devastation. And in too many places, a person in crisis is more likely to come into contact with law enforcement instead of a mental health professional. 

 Since 2015, nearly 1 in 4 fatal police shootings have been of people with mental illness, with 1 in 3 of those being people of color. People with mental illness are also overrepresented in our criminal justice system, and Black individuals with mental illness in jail are more likely to go into solitary confinement, become injured while incarcerated, and stay in jail longer – where mental illness is often left untreated. 

We need to change the status quo and ensure that every person in crisis gets help, not handcuffs. We can and must do better because a mental health crisis should not lead to trauma and tragedy. 

When 988 launches in July 2022 to provide mental health and suicidal crisis response, our communities need to be ready to provide robust crisis services that can respond to a range of crisis calls and needs. Every person in crisis, and their families, should receive a humane mental health response that treats a person with dignity and connects them to appropriate, timely, and culturally competent care. 

Today is Day 2 of REIMAGINE: A Week of Action to Reimagine Our National Response to People in Crisis, hosted by NAMI. Ask your members of Congress to #ReimagineCrisis by investing in a robust mental health crisis system that will reduce the need for a law enforcement response and end tragic outcomes when individuals and families call for help.

ACT TODAY If you haven’t already registered for this week’s events, sign-up here and attend as many sessions as you can. 

Thank you for your advocacy. 

Jessica Hart 

Senior Manager, Field Advocacy NAMI Government Relations, Policy & Advocacy 

Team Pronouns: She/Her 

988 will not be available widely until July 2022. If you or a loved one are experiencing a crisis, please call the National Suicide Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text “NAMI” to 741741.

Did you receive this alert from a friend and want to get news and alerts from NAMI directly? Sign-up today! Sign-up Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Instagram NAMI is non-profit and non-partisan. We support policies that help people with mental health conditions and their families. NAMI is here for you. If you would like mental health resources or to speak with someone, call or email the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or info@nami.org. For crisis support 24/7, text NAMI to 741741. Please visit our website at www.nami.org. NAMI 4301 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 300, Arlington, VA 22203 Unsubscribe

_________________________

Jessica,

What you call “our country’s lack of an effective and widely available mental health crisis system” is really, as I see it, our prevailing culture in which all human difficulties of thinking, emotion or behavior are quite arbitrarily considered to be illnesses of the brain. The first postulate of psychiatry is, “Insanity is brain disease.” The highest technical authority which we allow to administer mental health is psychiatry. Psychiatric “diagnosis” and psychiatric “treatment” are the basic purpose. This is the source of all the social ills which you cite. 

As you suggest, we SURELY DO need to change the status quo and reduce trauma and tragedy. But the status quo is not too much law enforcement, or too little “treatment”. It’s too much medicalization, too much psychiatry!

Your own organization has a long history of contributing to this problem. For decades, NAMI forwarded and defended, even insisted upon, the myths of “chemical imbalances in the brain” which required psychiatric drugs “just like insulin for diabetes”. Even now, many years after none other than Allen Frances called psychiatric diagnosis “bullshit” — and none other than Thomas Insel admitted that psychiatric “treatment” just sucks — NAMI’s advice to people suffering mental health crises and their families remains more or less, just trust psychiatrists, take their drugs and just do what they say, after all they are DOCTORS. 

I believe that such apotheosis of medicine as our one and only sure route to salvation has become a national cult. Any improvement in our country’s mental health crisis system, any widely available and affordable help for people who are desperate, must await the demise of this psychiatric cult. The state institutions must be ceremoniously razed. The euphemism of involuntary “hospitalization” for mental, emotional and behavioral troubles must be forgotten to history, recalled only in mockery. Forced drugging and shock must be banned as torture. 

If you can credit my point of view here at all (which I doubt), or if NAMI has any ability or intent to advocate for these changes that I recommend, then please continue to ask me for money and collaboration. Or at least correspond (I would honestly look forward to that).

But if you notice that I have not signed up with your current projects, you might understand why. 

Yours very truly,

S. Randolph Kretchmar

Kretchmar & Cecala, P.C.

1170 Michigan Ave. 

Wilmette, IL 60091

847-370-5410

Sent from my iPhone

_______________________

I think have spent most of my life in conversation or debate with people who fundamentally disagree with me. It’s what I like to do. Maybe Jessica, or someone else at NAMI, will respond, and we’ll have a dialogue. 

Futile Journey, from Freud to "All Brain Disease"

Former psychiatric slaves lately freed from Illinois' iconic plantation at Elgin Mental Health Center recall with irony that a certain K Unit clinician had a bobble-head Sigmund Freud doll on her desk. Freud is of course a significant figure in the history of psychiatry. He is also significantly conflicted, variously respected or renounced, for many reasons.

In the second quarter of the 20th Century, Freud's influence was at its height; but by the 1960's, American psychiatry was hoping to become a real medical specialty. Although Freud himself always thought of psychoanalysis as a medical enterprise, his libido theory, along with the several complexes named after Greek drama or unmentionable body parts, were just too weird and disrelated from common experience. (Not everybody really wants to kill his father and have sex with his mother.)

On the other hand, the one contribution for which Freud is usually credited is the notion that sexuality is pretty central to human relationships and human experience.

Lo and behold, modern psychiatry in its mad rush to become medicine had to renounce all consideration of sexuality in the new view, wherein all mental illness is simply brain disease. Psychiatrists had to be brain doctors, not soul doctors, since after all, souls don't exist. In 1980 when DSM-III was published, this was an over-obvious marketing decision. If they could cure psychosis with antipsychotic drugs, why should they continue to embarrass themselves by talking about anal obsessions or Oedipus complexes? 

But in fact the brain disease hypothesis was weak enough scientifically, that it had to be insisted upon as a strict article of faith. In this context we might explain certain, otherwise-inexplicable aspects of the culture inside the Illinois Department of Human Services' forensic psychiatric institutions.

Elgin Mental Health Center is not a hospital, where people go voluntarily hoping for relief from suffering through effective medical treatments. Rather, individuals are sent there, being essentially sold into psychiatric slavery by criminal court judges and state's attorneys who just don't have the stomach to punish them for the criminal acts they admit they committed. 

Given this actual nature of the institution, we might adapt the point recently made by Charles M. Blow in the New York Times: It is not possible to truthfully portray American slavery without depictions of sexual violence; likewise, sexual abuse of people institutionalized under a cynical guise of psychiatric "treatment" will always be absolutely endemic, as the staff on K Unit at Elgin Mental Health Center have convincingly proven.... 

The rules about appropriate "boundaries" between staff and patients would actually seem overly strict or even draconian to most laypeople, and the protocols for enforcing those rules are amazingly voluminous. As with laws and bureaucratic policies generally, the more complex prohibitions become in a particular subject area, the more it can be suspected that behavior violating underlying ethical principles must be widespread. 

Involuntary "patients" at Elgin are supposed to be medically helped... to recover from mental/emotional/behavioral problems which were arbitrarily designated, forty years ago by a vote at the American Psychiatric Association, as discrete "mental disorders". Unfortunately the 1960's hope for neuro-psychiatric discovery of causes, and advances in treatment, just never did pan out. 

Now, the strict medical model for such help, with no outmoded Freudian attention to sex, nor even any personal relationship with a therapist, is a looming problem. Any day, the taxpaying public might realize that paying a high premium for psychiatric "hospitalization" of miscreants instead of prison... is a major ripoff.

And that one M.D. psychiatrist on K Unit, with her bobble-head Freud and her faux shock over how such a thing as sex on her unit could have ever happened... just doesn't help, at all!

ANGELO ROTUNNO! ANGELO ROTUNNO! ANGELO ROTUNNO!

Once upon a time in Illinois, a child sex offender was found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity ("NGRI"). That child sex offender was committed to Elgin Mental Health Center, the state's oldest and most renowned psychiatric "hospital".

The child sex offender was charming and intelligent, with a handsome European flair. He was quite well-liked at EMHC, perhaps a bit too well-liked by some staff. 

(I am reminded of an old comedy routine by Mel Brooks and Karl Reiner, in which an interviewer asks a famous psychiatrist, "What's wrong with loving your dog? A lot of people love their dogs..." The famous doctor responds, "No, no, no. This man loved his dog... like you don't want to love your dog!")

As it turned out, after being "treated" at the secure facility of EMHC for several years, the child sex offender just walked away one day, perhaps took a plane to Europe, and was never seen again. This caused a stir, and the escape was investigated for awhile, apparently by several different agencies. It was strongly suspected (at least) that the child sex offender was directly aided in his escape by one or more EMHC staff who liked him so much....

The obvious questions were (and remain), "Wait! How and why could this happen? Isn't EMHC a secure forensic facility, with an ethical, professional staff? Aren't child sex offenders dangerous?"

The questions were never answered. To this day, former EMHC staff who were there, and who recall the escape, still wonder why nobody was ever disciplined or even identified as the complicit staff, although at the time, everyone talked about it and everyone knew who had been involved. 

The talk included a meeting years later in which two psychiatrists were directly told who helped the child sex offender escape. As far as anyone can tell now, neither the two psychiatrists nor the staff who told them, ever did anything. If they had not been pretty sure that higher-ups already knew, they'd have felt strictly obligated to formally report the information. So it might be presumed that there almost had to have been a cover-up that didn't end with the unit clinical staff.

There are a lot of pretty weird stories, about e.g., EMHC staff hiding in the child sex offender's wardrobe on the clinical unit, and staff getting together to skype with the child sex offender, or visiting the child sex offender in Germany.

Long afterward, even though the child sex offender supposedly died of cancer (actually it is speculated that the death was faked despite reports that EMHC staff may have attended a real funeral)... what do you know: all records of any investigation had disappeared for months or years.

In fact, one Assistant Attorney General in Illinois is apparently not even allowed to say the child sex offender's name out loud. She is required (almost certainly not by her real individual clients, but rather by their employer, the Illinois Department of Human Services, which would love to resist a third party discovery subpoena), to call this person whose name she knows perfectly well (since it's been in civil litigation documents and press releases for four years, not to mention in the media for fifteen years) only... "the-allegedly-escaped-patient".

This is awkward. It may show a conflict of interest for the lawyer; but it also sure does cause patently silly conversation during conferences intended to simplify discovery. The fundamental problem the Assistant Attorney General is up against is that her clients lie: to her, to themselves, and to the society which pays them to help people, not just drug them and hide them away. 

Guys like James Patrick Corcoran know they have no slightest ability to help anyone. So when an involuntary "patient" is sexually used by a social worker, a mental health tech or an STA at Elgin Mental Health Center or Chicago Read Mental Health Center, or when staff at Chester beat someone to death, the standard reaction is to just shift people to other units, just like the Catholic Church long shifted priests among dioceses to avoid accountability for their crimes.

There's an extremely well-written TV series with Billy Bob Thornton, "Goliath", which contains wonderfully realistic scenes about the civil discovery process in early episodes of the first season. My favorite line is spoken by a hooker being questioned by the junior attorney on the plaintiff's team, about the main character's past: "Sorry bitch, story time is over!"

The Biblical lesson is, we should never discount a possibility, however remote, that powerful, corrupt entities might occasionally be felled by little Jewish guys with well-slung stones.

Malis-with-malice kills another patient..?

Takisha Madison.

I remember this woman as extremely anxious and arguably hostile. Obviously, in retrospect her emotions were quite rational. She was about to die. Her "doctor" was Richard Malis. "Malis-with-malice" as he is fondly known, seems to have an obsession about getting patients under CONTROL with drugs, no matter the risks, no matter the side effects, and no matter how much experimentation is necessary.

A week or two ago Tom Zubik told me, with all faux regret in his voice, how he was so sorry to say that a patient with whom I had worked had died suddenly. I did not know whom he was talking about, and of course he wasn't going to tell me, he was just probing to see if I already knew. I think he said the patient had a heart attack, so I imagined it was somebody old. Maybe Takisha was too young to have a heart attack, unless it was caused by bad drugs.

I don't even remember whether Takisha complained to me about the drugs Malis-with-malice was coercing her to take. I could probably look in my notes from a couple staffings I attended and get some idea. But Kol Nidre is tonight, so I will take a day to atone for my sin of failing to help Takisha refuse psychiatry. She was difficult to deal with, but I should have worked harder.

Meanwhile, I can only encourage and cooperate with any and all investigation into Richard Malis' "treatment" (AKA, killing) of Takisha Madison. None other than Vicky Ingram, who knows more or less all the secrets and all the behind-the-scenes skinny on the Elgin plantation, says that such an investigation has already begun.

And to paraphrase Lincoln, I can continue, if God wills that I must, to fight these slave masters until all the institutions and bureaucracies built under the false flag of "mental health" are sunk, and every drop of blood drawn by the psychiatric lash is paid with another drawn by the legal sword.

G' mar chatima tovah!