And did I mention that Judge Dreiling overrode my attempt to explain the situation at Glenwood Apartments, and defend myself, claiming something like, "We just aren't concerned with that now." In the State of Oklahoma, it seems, the Department of Mental Health, and the District Court of Tulsa County, it's not convenient or worthwhile to listen to anyone with a mental illness defend themselves. Never mind those pesky Constitutional Amendments. Once they have been accused by hearsay, sworn to by a mental health "professional" who was not present at the time of the alleged threats, and who did not see fit to investigate the truthiness of the accusers, it's all over but the "treatment" to ham-handed behavior modification.
How the state and county circumvent and violate state mental health law
I'm still working on a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States. As I was looking up laws and regulations, this once again came to light. On the day I was picked up and interviewed, I filled out, signed and dated a "DMHSAS Designation of Treatment Advocate". The form says:
"Each person served by a licensed mental health provider or organization has the right to name a Treatment Advocate. This can be someone with whom you would like to partner during your course of treatment. A Treatment Advocate should be someone you trust and whose advice you value, such as a family member, spouse or partner, or a friend or representative from an advocacy organization. You have the right to set limits regarding the level of involvement of the person you select and you have the right to change your selection at any time. You also have the right not to name a Treatment Advocate. If you choose to name a Treatement Advocate, this person must agree to serve and adhere with all policies and rules addressing confidentiality."
This is governed by Oklahoma State Code Title 43A, sections 1-109.1 (including, "The individual designated as a treatment advocate shall act at all times in the best interests of the consumer"), 3-424.B ("the right to communicate with legal counsel, a treatment advocate, or the Department may not be denied."), and 4-107a.B ("the right to communicate ... may not be denied").
Further, the regulations of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services state: 450:15-3-18. Right to consultant opinions (a) Every consumer has the right to request the opinion of an outside medical or psychiatric consultant at his or her own expense and the facility shall not impede access between the consultant and the consumer. (b) Every consumer shall have a right to an internal consultation upon request, at no expense. The second opinion shall become part of the consumer record. (c) The facility's medical director shall review the second opinion as well as the treatment team's opinion and shall document decision.
Governance by the Hippocratic Oath is questionable, at best.
I filled out this form, dated 8/3/10, and wrote: "Dr Beaman OU Psych Dept 619-4400". I wanted the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic involved because I had been going there for the previous seven years for medication management for depression and PTSD, demonstrating that I took my medication faithfully (after all, I had asked for something to help me deal with an internal hell) and had not committed or planned any violence. I expected the O.U. Psych Clinic to point these things out in my defense and mediate my "treatment".
Instead, on August 6, 2010, District Court Judge Theresa Dreiling filed a court paper declaring that TCBH held the medical information that "is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility". That is patently false. I had not only been consulting with the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic for the previous seven years, but also with the O.U. Adult Medicine, and then Family Medicine Clinics.
The TCBH Psychiatrist who was allegedly treating me, Dr. Lori C. Miller, who signed as a "witness", mental health evaluator, and petitioner for detention and commitment, informed me that I could not talk to Dr. Beaman, or for that matter anyone else at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic. Her excuse - they were "not admitted to practice" at TCBH. When I got someone in supposed authority from the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic on the phone to beg them to intervene on my behalf, that person refused to become involved, claiming they couldn't. ODMHSAS regulations state that a "consumer" has a right to at least an internal second opinion. After I applied for one, a psychiatric technician, one of the grunts on the floor, informed me that it had been decided above his pay grade that I just wasn't going to get one.
Well that's understandable. If psychiatrists at TCBH (paid by the State of Oklahoma) are going to pick out who needs to be their captive patients and get them committed by the County District Court without any fuss, it just won't do to have any exculpatory information come to light. And it won't do to have another arm of the State mental health system interfering, just because someone has been a patient there for most of a decade. That would all have to be repressed regardless of any State law or regulation, or any Constitutional right to due process or equal protection. I suppose that complaining about this state of affairs, as best one can, is what U.S. Federal District Court Judge Terrance Kern refers to as "frivolous", and even "illogical".
In Barefoot v. Estelle (1983) the Supreme Court of the United States says of the duties of federal courts in death penalty cases, "They need not, and should not, however, fail to give nonfrivolous claims of constitutional error the careful attention they deserve." But in our system of justice, it seems this can't apply to cases of false involuntary commitment; in order to justify the indefinite imprisonment of a single sexual predator in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), the Supreme Court has declared that it is not possible for such imprisonments to be "punitive", because they are "treatment".
Faced with a mental health system that would betray us even after we ask for help and spend years within it, and faced with the kind of justice that, for the sake of twisting logic in the cases of a few, rolls over us like a plague and then refuses to hear our pleas, it is no wonder that our society is more violent than others.
For the better part of a year, I've been getting dunning letters from people I never heard of addressed to Susan B--. They allege that this person has a bill for something like T-Mobile for about $1500. Lately I've been getting calls from people looking for Susan B. I always figured they were scams, intended to snooker the easily confused into responding to bills for services one never ordered.
Now I wonder. It could be a kind of sideways identity theft. Just pick a name and address out of the phone book and pretend to be related and living at the same address. But if T-Mobile actually sold services to this phony person, you'd think that T-Mobile would have taken more care to make sure that this person actually exists.
I wouldn't know how that works - I've been using a pre-paid by the minute service for years for an emergency phone. I wouldn't touch a contract service. They cost way too much. I won't even sign up for cable TV. I'd even like to disable the Internet connection on my phone.
I took one of the letters to the Post Office today, and the mailman suggested contacting the Police. The Tulsa Police? They work for the likes of me, do they? They don't even bother to interview neighbors before dragging a person off to local loony bin, or even to get sworn statements from the people claiming to be threatened.
When someone ran into my truck in the Apartments parking lot, and I got parts of his taillight lens and photos of where they fell out of his truck, They couldn't be bothered to do anything because They didn't see it happen, and They don't bother with collisions on "private property".
If I took this to the TPD, They'd probably arrest me for allegedly stealing my own identity. Less work for Them, I'm sure.
I can see how conservative Christians would object to gays married with kids, because Christians do it so much better. Hold in all the work problems until they get home, and let loose on the kids. Make threats if a kid gets a wrong look on his or her face. Whip and terrorize them if they don't get the message.
Gays are so limited; they just couldn't manage that much parental involvement.
Dad always wanted to make an impression on us. He said so often enough and freely demonstrated the technique. It got a lot worse in Albuquerque, where he got even with the insects with double doses of Chlordane on the garden vegetables. He was too manly to take precautions.
Protracted neurotoxicity from chlordane sprayed to kill termites. K H Kilburn and J C Thornton http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522193/
I could watch him cross a room, and he would yell, "What are you looking at me like that for! I'll give you something to look at!" Of course, I couldn't really see his belt whenever it was swinging in from behind. I was watching because I was afraid of him.
In one particularly memorable and spectacular red-faced, spitting rage, he screamed at the top of his voice, "I know you're intelligent, Don! I know you are! I just don't see how you're ever going to make it in life!" No kid between 12 and 16 ever forgets something like that.
The Favorite Son, the one Dad liked, has his ways of making an impression. His favorite jeer sounds like a particular sterile cross-breed of equine, which comes out in high-low pitch, "Now! Do-o-o-n!" He hated it in high school when his classmates applied the same sequence to him in the manner that Johnny Carson used to gently apply to a certain profane comedian named Lenny. But now it's his turn.
In the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, there's a Licensed Professional Counselor that likes to point out to people in doubt that if they have problems with a lot of other people, "Then who's the common denominator? It's you." She likes to make her impression on people who can't forget.
Now my Mom is old and less healthy, and wants her family to all get together and make nice for her. We should all just forget the past and get along. My inability to forget about it is a major stumbling block that makes her feel so bad. But it's kind of hard to get past things when everyone else is perfect and never has to have an adult conversation about it. For them, jeers have always worked so much better.
This, from the family who left me in the local loony bin, where the LPCs love, or at least feel duty-bound, to punish people for not seeing it their way. That if we are in any way tempted to suicide to escape all those lasting impressions and current failures, then it's just our personal responsibility to get over it. And of course, we should be feeling guilty for not shaping up.
Abraham Lincoln had his moments. Like when he said that God wasn't on either side of the Civil War. So what is it about Christians, especially conservative Christians, that makes them so proud of hurting people. Whether it's whipping and terrorizing small children, or segregating the ill and disabled from proud and productive work, or making a senior strain hernias, arthritis and a back damaged by a drinking driver on heavy labor, they seem to get such a righteous charge out of it. As if it validates some idea that God loves them best. And of course you can't tell them anything about it. If you do, then you're just not taking personal responsibility. You're just trying to hurt them.
Take my brother. Please. He hasn't changed much over the years. When we were little kids in grade school, he found that he could say nasty things that hurt my feelings. He played that like his favorite toy. Then one day I'd had enough. I turned it right back on him and played the snotty jerk to his face. You should have seen the look on it. That wasn't fair! I wasn't supposed to make him hurt.
One day I was tired and zoned out. He backed up, sat down on his bed, and broke one of his favorite model planes that he had built. Of course it wasn't his fault; it was all mine. "Why didn't you tell me it was there!"
In high school we had two beds in a room, each with a reading lamp on the headboard. One night I was trying to get to sleep. Not always easy because of the nightmares, anxiety and depression. But he just couldn't be satisfied with his reading lamp. He had to have the overhead light on. He wouldn't turn it off when I asked him, and when I did, he would march right over to the switch and turn it back on. Several times, until I waited there in the dark, and socked him in the eye. He wasn't the one being mean; it was all me.
These days, when people are doing things he finds offensive, like living on the dole when there's no work, or asking for social justice, his favorite jeer - "Well, it's all about me!" Indicating not so subtly his disgust with people who are so self-centered that they don't consider and adopt his moral righteousness.
The Favorite Son can tell his brother to hazard the rent with extra expenses, and strain old, painful injuries moving things out of his mother's house - or lose them. The things that one accumulates and invests feeling in to make up for the lack of a love in a family. But that's not his problem. His only Christian responsibility is to tell others what they ought to be doing. No, it's not his responsibility; it's all mine.
Nope. Not much change at all. It seems to be a complete mystery to him why other people might find that incredibly annoying and hard to forget. Well he's right about one thing; it's always been all about him. And a lack of personal maturity and responsibility.
I wonder, when I have to keep my Father's temper so tight in its cage, if I'll ever be able to go back to church and have any feeling of grace and forgiveness. A long, long shot that is.
I called Mom at my Brother's this afternoon to see about going over to visit her tomorrow afternoon. She has been staying there recovering after heart problems. She said that my Brother and Sister-in-law asked her to leave and find a place of here own. She's been staying in their bedroom on the first floor to avoid the stairs.
She's moving to assisted living here in Tulsa, and she doesn't sound happy about it. She had been living in her own home in Arkansas for 50 years and doesn't want to leave it. I told her that I would support her whatever she decided, then found out that it wasn't all her decision. If I had what they had, I'd put in an elevator, or at least a chair lift, and let her stay.
Trying to cheer her up a little, I pointed out how many years she could pay the rent with the money she has in banks. And she said, "Oh, I hope I don't live that long." I know the feeling. It came for me when I was a small child and found out how little the other parent wanted me.
But my Brother likes to prove he's in charge and rolls right over people no matter what. He's given me a month to get my things out of her house so they can sell it. The gas for one trip would cost me just about all the extra I could afford in one month. I do hope he gets over his testosterone poisoning, but it appears to be terminal. Not that I would do anything - I can resist temptation.
But for him to make Mom feel that low - what a mensch. All heart. What kind of god wants people to treat each other this way?
NPR and most liberal news outlets have the habit of reporting only the call for "if we could just do something that would save just one life", to justify more gun control. But I don't see it reporting on the places that already have those laws. The Guardian does better: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list
It shows that Puerto Rico, which has gun laws that limit firearms to one per house, with just one box of ammunition, along with massive registration, has a homicide rate of 18.3/100,000. Mexico, another country with tough gun laws has a rate of 9.97/100,000. The United States has rate of 2.97/100,000, despite being first in the world for gun ownership. Both Puerto Rico and Mexico are torn with drug cartel violence, and Puerto Ricans are moving in drove to the U.S. to escape it. Moving to the place that has more guns than almost anyone. Where they feel safer, as even NPR reported. NPR just didn't mention the gun laws.
As for background checks, most states have draconian mental health laws that make it a commitable offense merely to be accused of being threatening while mentally ill. The accusations often become proven fact as due process goes out the window. Just look at the psychiatric hospitals who committed tens of thousands without any mental illness or record of violence, in the State of Texas alone (Source: Houston Chronicle "Profitable Addictions" series, 40+ articles), after the Supreme Court 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision. One could parody the elevation of psychiatry to near-infallible status in that decision with: "Although your heart surgeon has never seen you or your medical record, and has heard about you only through hypothetical questions, don't worry about a thing - there is no convincing evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable."
No doubt, as far as the gun control wingnuts are concerned, the more people on lists who can't own guns, the better. No matter if they got there through medical fraud, or the kind of "treatment" that people of color used to get under Jim Crow. Ah, NPR, show us your true colors. We hardly knew ye.
The Courts give us separate and unequal justice, depending upon who can afford a lawyer. They dismiss out of hand the vast majority of cases brought by those who try to argue their cases on their own, without a lawyer. Usually hanging the dismissal on any single error that gives a Court plausible deniability, like the old literacy and pencil tests that kept Black people from voting. It's not like the people they dismiss know enough to dispute the Courts' decisions.
People talk about banning guns and magazines as if "it could save just one life". It never seems to occur to them that one of the significant factors driving the high rate of violence in this country may well be the certitude that if we can't afford a lawyer, the Courts deny us any other path to justice.
If we can't pay for justice, we can't get any.
Not surprisingly, this falls hardest upon those with less income, opportunity and education, who make up the majority of the prison population - people of color. But not just them. It hits anyone who lives on the margins, like people with disabilities, mental illnesses and homelessness. The people that Judges care so much less about, perhaps because they think such people are parasites who don't contribute to society. And who generally aren't allowed to have proud and productive work, perhaps because those who can afford lawyers think such people don't have anything to contribute.
Thus, access to justice in this country suffers from segregation as fundamental as that addressed by the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education case. Separate and unequal.
The fact that Courts let this sorry set of circumstances continue on and on and on, because we don’t know how to put our complaints about them in lawyers’ terms, may be our burden, but it is not _our_ shame.
At the very bottom of this issue, we have ingrained bigotry against people with mental illnesses in society, in the legislatures and on the judicial bench. If a Court searches the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A, it will find that one type of penalty does not exist. There are penalties for such things as stealing from petty cash, operating a mental facility without a license, malfeasance with narcotics, physically assaulting patients, failing to report elder abuse, falsely accusing someone of elder abuse, falsely accusing someone of having a mental illness, and misrepresenting to police that someone has a mental illness. There are even perjury penalties for swearing in court documents that someone has a mental illness.
But there is not one single penalty either for falsely accusing someone with a mental illness of being a threat, or for falsely depriving a person with mental illness of liberty and due process. It comes closest to the latter in 43A-5-103, making it a mere misdemeanor to unlawfully or maliciously confine a person in a mental or drug treatment facility. But the language in 43A-1-103 that defines a person with a mental illness to be in need of treatment if anyone alleges a “reasonable fear” of threat, and the language in 43A-5-204 that gives immunity from civil suits for medication (and treatment) prescribed in “good faith”, virtually nullify that provision. Nor does Title 43A demand that the methods and means of “treatment” and the results of that treatment be tabulated and recorded to assure that they are safe, fair and effective.
If the U.S. Supreme Court searches its own record, it will easily find implicit and explicit references to the “dangerous tendencies” (Addington v. Texas, 1979) of people with mental illness, used to justify society’s need to protect itself from them, and the state’s parens patriae right to protect people with mental illness from themselves. It puts people with mental illnesses in a special category that allows the states to preventively detain them on the mere suspicion of "dangerousness", and then deny to them the full protections of law given to those who have actually committed violent crimes. We don’t have to go far in our history to see a striking parallel. All we have to do is to substitute the terms “Black” for “mentally ill” and “nigger” for “disturbed” to see that every concept of inferiority and threat involving people with mental illnesses has already be applied to people of color. It was and is called Jim Crow.
Justia columnist and Cornell law professor Sherry Colb (2011) notes for the purpose of argument that while the ratio of people committing violence is reportedly 2 to 1 mentally ill to not, the ratio of people committing homicide is 8 Black to 1 White, and 10 male to 1 female. Demonstrating that some forms of bigotry are, in the terms of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “more equal than others”. Parens partiae becomes Big White Brother only when the same principles are applied to people that Judges care about.
Colb, Sherry F., Aug 10, 2011, Armed and Crazy: Should Mentally Ill People Be Permitted to Own Firearms?, http://verdict.justia.com/2011/08/10/armed-and-crazy
I stopped over at my brother's house last weekend to visit Mom, only to have him scream to get my attention and demand that I park out on the street because "your truck leaks a lot of oil". That's one of the important things in my family's life, and it brought back a few more.
About 15 years ago, as I recall, I was living at my parents' house again after surgery looking for cancer (not found, but still not forgotten) and the failure of hundreds of letters for employment to make use of my new Ph.D. I was tired, depressed, sitting on the couch, and laid my head back to rest. Only to have Dad scream at me to get it off the couch so I wouldn't leave an "grease" on it.
Not only did I not use anything in my hair because of asthma, I scrubbed and scraped it and my scalp every night with soap and my fingernails to keep from getting ugly wens. But there wasn't any point in telling him that. He knew for a fact that I was dirty.
Another time, when my uncle was visiting, Dad got infuriated about a toilet with a liberal spray pattern on the seat and the floor. This had not happened in the months preceding while I was there. But there wasn't any need for him to yell at his brother (a mostly nice guy) with a belly so big that he may not have seen his own equipment in many years, much less where it aimed. No, I was there. So he yelled at me. He knew for a fact that I had to be the dirty person who did that.
Fortunately, in another context but still related, Licensed Professional Counselor Julie King explained it all for me a couple years back at the local loony bin. "All that matters," she said, "is how people perceive you." And on that basis, they kept me there for 66 days until they were sure enough that I had gotten the point. Still dirty after all these years. Most illuminating, I'm sure.
I've had surgeons cut me open from one side to the other looking for cancer I've had witch doctors and a kangaroo judge keep me in the local loony bin for their own special purposes
Banning large-capacity magazines and rifles with military appearances (but not the same full-auto function), is a bit like banning beer kegs and big cars with tail fins (like those on rockets and military jets) to cut down on drunk driving fatalities.
The whole thing was started by a gun control advocate named Josh Sugarman (of the Violence Policy Center and National Coalition to Ban Handguns) who deliberately styled military look-alikes as "assault weapons" to make people afraid of them and set a precedent for banning all firearms.
"Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons." -Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Sugarmann
Now, who ever heard of anyone using this particular style of rifle to blow people away in mass killings, until Sugarman and the news media made a big issue of them, making people afraid that this is what would happen. It is quite possible that in creating the fear, they created the monsters, terrorists who want that kind of attention for whatever twisted reasons suit them. When teachers do this to children, making them fail in school by constantly telling them they will fail, it's called a "self-fulfilling prophecy". Create the monsters and they will come.
Ain't politics grand?
Some say these firearms have no use but to kill people. Wrong. In the vast majority of cases, decent people use them for target shooting competitions, including those which train civilians as marksmen before they ever volunteer for the military. The Congress created the Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship in 1903, run by the U.S. Army until 1996, which administered the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Now known as the non-profit Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice & Firearms Safety, according to wikipedia, it still sells military surplus bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles for training purposes to qualified law-abiding buyers. Which helps to make our military arguably the most effective in the world.
In researching Federal Fraud laws with regard to medical information, I found the following interesting items:
AMA information sheet, Federal Fraud and Abuse Laws, citing: Federal Civil Monetary Penalties (Section 1128A of the Social Security Act/42 USC 1320a-7aa), (Section 1128B of the Social Security Act/42 USC 1320a-7b), Federal Civil False Claims Act (31 USC 3829-3733), Health Care Fraud and Scheme (18 USC 1347), Theft or Embezzlement in Connection with Health Care Benefit Program (18 USC 669), and False Statements Relating to Health Care Matters (18 USC 1035). Including the statement: "The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, Public Law 104-191 (HIPAA), clarified that the term "should know" includes, with respect to information set out in a claim, "acts in deliberate ignorance" or in "reckless disregard of the truth or falsity" and "no proof of specific intent to defraud is required.""
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001: with (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
U.S. DOJ Criminal Resource Manual 903, which states with regard to 18 USC 1001: An often-raised defense is the claim that because the alleged act or activity has no reasonable relation to the Federal government, no Federal jurisdiction exists. … In describing the situations in which the prohibited conduct must occur, the courts have construed the statute broadly and stressed that Section 1001 protects the government "from the perversion which might result from the deceptive practices described." Bryson v. United States, 396 U.S. 64 (1969).
I could be wrong, but wouldn't you think that applies to people exaggerating and falsifying medical information in order to assure an involuntary commitment in the State mental health system, which accepts money from both state and federal taxpayers? And that Federal laws about the deprivation of civil rights under the color of law, and conspiracies to commit such acts, would then apply. And then, if it is a violation of Federal law, you might even think that a Federal District Court would be willing to hear about it. Well, unless there's some bigotry involved.
What do the two states, one ranking near the bottom in education and health care, have in common? Apparently, it's the acceptance of "negative charting" in health care as "good faith" performance of state employee duties in the first case, and "proper" in the second. "Negative charting" has at least two different definitions in health care. It can be a) not recording ordinary or normal conditions on a patient's chart, or b) doing exactly the opposite, and recording normal results which would be "negative" indications of illness, or c) emphasizing only negative aspects of the patient's condition in order to ensure insurance payments. Depends on who you ask.
Since at least 1995, both Congress and the U.S. Government Accounting Office have recognized definition (c) as health care fraud. See GAO Reports 95-17, Medicare: Allegations Against ABC Home Health Care, and Waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare program : joint hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and Environment and the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, May 16, 1995 (1995)
The State of Florida thinks so, too, in it's training on the Florida Baker Act, it's own mental health and commitment law. See www.bakeracttraining.org/files/faq/ba-receiving_facilities.pdf, page 29: "Since negative charting for the purpose of obtaining insurance payments would be inappropriate, one would assume that the insurers aren't aware of Florida law."
As does the Journal of Financial Crime. See Brian K. Payne, (2006) "Problems controlling fraud and abuse in the home health care field: Voices of fraud control unit directors", Journal of Financial Crime, Vol. 13 Iss: 1, pp.77 - 91. At least, one would suppose so from Mr. Payne's other publications, such as White-Collar Crime: The Essentials, Brian K. Payne, Sage Publ, Los Angeles, London, etc.; Chap IV Crimes in the Health Care System, p 83: "Types of home health care fraud include providing unnecessary services, billing the system for services that were not provided to the client, overcharging, forgery, negative charting, substitute workers, double billing and kickbacks." Which Mr. Payne held earlier in "Crime in the Home Health Care Field - Workplace Violence, Fraud, and Abuse", Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd., Springfield, IL; 2003.
But not the State of Mississippi, which in its Court of Appeals in Whitt v. MMRC, Case No. 95-CA-00946 COA, 8/12/97, it held that, "The difference between negative charting and false charting is that false charting is lying; whereas, negative charting is a form of documentation used by home health care nurses which focuses on the problems of the patient, and not the positive aspects of the patient's health. By focusing on the negative, Medicare payments are assured. ... Negative charting is a widely accepted practice within the profession [home health care]. ... Whitt has not shown that she was asked to falsify records, but merely asked to change the records to reflect proper negative charting, a procedure widely recognized in the home health care industry."
It seems that the Oklahoma Attorney General and the Executive Branch do not even make that distinction. When presented with evidence that not only was medical evidence exaggerated in an involuntary commitment to the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, but that it was also falsified, the A.G. has responded that no state employee can be sued for the "good faith" performance of their duties. Following complaints sent to the State Department of Health and Board of Osteopathic Examiners, those worthy bodies could find no cause for action.
Ain't politics and bigotry grand? I wonder how much it costs the taxpayers.
If you are like me, you never heard of him before today, or knew that he was an internet prodigy who helped to develop technologies that millions use. He also had trouble with depression. The news says that he believed in an open and free internet, and that the U.S. Justice Department was prosecuting him to the limit for downloading millions of pages from the online journal library, JSTOR, without paying for them.
I don't agree with Swartz's action, but I think I know how he felt. Some say that genius and madness are close. Witness the painter Vincent van Gogh, his missing ear and his reported suicide. More like, it's because anyone with depression who wants to feel good about something has to try harder. Whether it is art, science, engineering or some other challenge, sometimes, if not often, only the satisfaction of accomplishment can ease the pain. Otherwise, it's like Prometheus, with his liver growing back time after time just so the eagle can tear it out and eat it again, bit by agonizing little bit.
The loss of all hope of accomplishment is worse than death. In its zeal to prosecute and make an example of him, this is what the U.S. Department of Justice took from Aaron Swartz. Almost like it did when the FBI went to prove its manhood on the Branch Davidians. But this time, they took out someone who arguably had a lot more to contribute to the world. Someone whose future work might conceivably have helped with the battle against terrorists. All over a philosophical difference that JSTOR reportedly didn't want to prosecute, and already-published academic information that had no apparent national security implications.
Oddly enough, some people never seem to realize that when they start a peter-matching contest, the only peters anyone else can see are the ones sticking up above their shirt collars. Something the Justice Department has a hard time learning. So if yahoos are cheering or jeering about this death, the hell with them.
What Public Defenders in the Mental Illness section ought to be doing
I came across this in Google, searching on the term: mental illness zealous counsel
[PDF] Working with Clients - Indigent Defense Services www.ncids.org/other%20manuals/.../Appendix%20C_new.pdf File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat Even though we are trained to zealously advocate for our clients, we are only ... procedures, is designed to require that the prosecuting attorney must make the .... evidence and conclusions regarding mental illness and danger, thereby
For some reason, Google now makes it hard to extract a clean URL.
It was a little sickening to download and read, because it shows what we don't get here in Oklahoma.
My family didn't abandon me physically after the car wreck. My parents gave me a place to stay while I was on the walker and not released to go back to work. And when I came back to Tulsa, she came with me to help out, because I couldn't drive. I couldn't even walk down stairs at Pelican's Wharf. I had to bump down on my butt. Carefully.
The way PTSD works, if you can't talk it out, then according to medical research, it stands a good chance of becoming permanent. Every time I tried to, my family refused to hear about it, often claiming that by doing so I was only hurting myself. Some even jeered.
I forgave Mom because she's given me so much other love and support. But it hurt. And the others ... I don't have the kind of family that necessarily demonstrates the love and values I've read that Christ asked of his followers.
Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing. No refunds are issued. Back issues are available for $10/copy.
We accept Visa, M/C, checks and money orders. Call to charge by phone 918-592-5550. Enter your contact information in the form below and we will contact you.
If ordering by mail, make checks and money orders payable to Urban Tulsa Weekly. Send your payment along with your complete postal delivery address to Urban Tulsa Weekly, Attn: Samantha, PO Box 50499, Tulsa, OK 74150
Address:
Address2:
City:
State:
Zip Code:
Email:
Phone:
Comments:
Urban Tulsa Weekly
1924 E. 6th St.
Tulsa OK 74104
Phone: (918) 592-5550
Fax: (918) 592-5970
e-mail: Subscriptions
COMMENTS
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
461 comments total
Sort Comments: Most Recent | Oldest First
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
And did I mention that Judge Dreiling overrode my attempt to explain the situation at Glenwood Apartments, and defend myself, claiming something like, "We just aren't concerned with that now." In the State of Oklahoma, it seems, the Department of Mental Health, and the District Court of Tulsa County, it's not convenient or worthwhile to listen to anyone with a mental illness defend themselves. Never mind those pesky Constitutional Amendments. Once they have been accused by hearsay, sworn to by a mental health "professional" who was not present at the time of the alleged threats, and who did not see fit to investigate the truthiness of the accusers, it's all over but the "treatment" to ham-handed behavior modification.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I'm still working on a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States. As I was looking up laws and regulations, this once again came to light. On the day I was picked up and interviewed, I filled out, signed and dated a "DMHSAS Designation of Treatment Advocate". The form says:
"Each person served by a licensed mental health provider or organization has the right to name a Treatment Advocate. This can be someone with whom you would like to partner during your course of treatment. A Treatment Advocate should be someone you trust and whose advice you value, such as a family member, spouse or partner, or a friend or representative from an advocacy organization. You have the right to set limits regarding the level of involvement of the person you select and you have the right to change your selection at any time. You also have the right not to name a Treatment Advocate. If you choose to name a Treatement Advocate, this person must agree to serve and adhere with all policies and rules addressing confidentiality."
This is governed by Oklahoma State Code Title 43A, sections 1-109.1 (including, "The individual designated as a treatment advocate shall act at all times in the best interests of the consumer"), 3-424.B ("the right to communicate with legal counsel, a treatment advocate, or the Department may not be denied."), and 4-107a.B ("the right to communicate ... may not be denied").
Further, the regulations of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services state: 450:15-3-18. Right to consultant opinions
(a) Every consumer has the right to request the opinion of an outside medical or psychiatric consultant at his or her own expense and the facility shall not impede access between the consultant and the consumer.
(b) Every consumer shall have a right to an internal consultation upon request, at no expense. The second opinion shall become part of the consumer record.
(c) The facility's medical director shall review the second opinion as well as the treatment team's opinion and shall document decision.
Governance by the Hippocratic Oath is questionable, at best.
I filled out this form, dated 8/3/10, and wrote: "Dr Beaman OU Psych Dept 619-4400". I wanted the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic involved because I had been going there for the previous seven years for medication management for depression and PTSD, demonstrating that I took my medication faithfully (after all, I had asked for something to help me deal with an internal hell) and had not committed or planned any violence. I expected the O.U. Psych Clinic to point these things out in my defense and mediate my "treatment".
Instead, on August 6, 2010, District Court Judge Theresa Dreiling filed a court paper declaring that TCBH held the medical information that "is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility". That is patently false. I had not only been consulting with the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic for the previous seven years, but also with the O.U. Adult Medicine, and then Family Medicine Clinics.
The TCBH Psychiatrist who was allegedly treating me, Dr. Lori C. Miller, who signed as a "witness", mental health evaluator, and petitioner for detention and commitment, informed me that I could not talk to Dr. Beaman, or for that matter anyone else at the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic. Her excuse - they were "not admitted to practice" at TCBH. When I got someone in supposed authority from the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic on the phone to beg them to intervene on my behalf, that person refused to become involved, claiming they couldn't. ODMHSAS regulations state that a "consumer" has a right to at least an internal second opinion. After I applied for one, a psychiatric technician, one of the grunts on the floor, informed me that it had been decided above his pay grade that I just wasn't going to get one.
Well that's understandable. If psychiatrists at TCBH (paid by the State of Oklahoma) are going to pick out who needs to be their captive patients and get them committed by the County District Court without any fuss, it just won't do to have any exculpatory information come to light. And it won't do to have another arm of the State mental health system interfering, just because someone has been a patient there for most of a decade. That would all have to be repressed regardless of any State law or regulation, or any Constitutional right to due process or equal protection. I suppose that complaining about this state of affairs, as best one can, is what U.S. Federal District Court Judge Terrance Kern refers to as "frivolous", and even "illogical".
In Barefoot v. Estelle (1983) the Supreme Court of the United States says of the duties of federal courts in death penalty cases, "They need not, and should not, however, fail to give nonfrivolous claims of constitutional error the careful attention they deserve." But in our system of justice, it seems this can't apply to cases of false involuntary commitment; in order to justify the indefinite imprisonment of a single sexual predator in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), the Supreme Court has declared that it is not possible for such imprisonments to be "punitive", because they are "treatment".
Faced with a mental health system that would betray us even after we ask for help and spend years within it, and faced with the kind of justice that, for the sake of twisting logic in the cases of a few, rolls over us like a plague and then refuses to hear our pleas, it is no wonder that our society is more violent than others.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
For the better part of a year, I've been getting dunning letters from people I never heard of addressed to Susan B--. They allege that this person has a bill for something like T-Mobile for about $1500. Lately I've been getting calls from people looking for Susan B. I always figured they were scams, intended to snooker the easily confused into responding to bills for services one never ordered.
Now I wonder. It could be a kind of sideways identity theft. Just pick a name and address out of the phone book and pretend to be related and living at the same address. But if T-Mobile actually sold services to this phony person, you'd think that T-Mobile would have taken more care to make sure that this person actually exists.
I wouldn't know how that works - I've been using a pre-paid by the minute service for years for an emergency phone. I wouldn't touch a contract service. They cost way too much. I won't even sign up for cable TV. I'd even like to disable the Internet connection on my phone.
I took one of the letters to the Post Office today, and the mailman suggested contacting the Police. The Tulsa Police? They work for the likes of me, do they? They don't even bother to interview neighbors before dragging a person off to local loony bin, or even to get sworn statements from the people claiming to be threatened.
When someone ran into my truck in the Apartments parking lot, and I got parts of his taillight lens and photos of where they fell out of his truck, They couldn't be bothered to do anything because They didn't see it happen, and They don't bother with collisions on "private property".
If I took this to the TPD, They'd probably arrest me for allegedly stealing my own identity. Less work for Them, I'm sure.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I can see how conservative Christians would object to gays married with kids, because Christians do it so much better. Hold in all the work problems until they get home, and let loose on the kids. Make threats if a kid gets a wrong look on his or her face. Whip and terrorize them if they don't get the message.
Gays are so limited; they just couldn't manage that much parental involvement.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Dad always wanted to make an impression on us. He said so often enough and freely demonstrated the technique. It got a lot worse in Albuquerque, where he got even with the insects with double doses of Chlordane on the garden vegetables. He was too manly to take precautions.
Protracted neurotoxicity from chlordane sprayed to kill termites. K H Kilburn and J C Thornton
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522193/
I could watch him cross a room, and he would yell, "What are you looking at me like that for! I'll give you something to look at!" Of course, I couldn't really see his belt whenever it was swinging in from behind. I was watching because I was afraid of him.
In one particularly memorable and spectacular red-faced, spitting rage, he screamed at the top of his voice, "I know you're intelligent, Don! I know you are! I just don't see how you're ever going to make it in life!" No kid between 12 and 16 ever forgets something like that.
The Favorite Son, the one Dad liked, has his ways of making an impression. His favorite jeer sounds like a particular sterile cross-breed of equine, which comes out in high-low pitch, "Now! Do-o-o-n!" He hated it in high school when his classmates applied the same sequence to him in the manner that Johnny Carson used to gently apply to a certain profane comedian named Lenny. But now it's his turn.
In the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, there's a Licensed Professional Counselor that likes to point out to people in doubt that if they have problems with a lot of other people, "Then who's the common denominator? It's you." She likes to make her impression on people who can't forget.
Now my Mom is old and less healthy, and wants her family to all get together and make nice for her. We should all just forget the past and get along. My inability to forget about it is a major stumbling block that makes her feel so bad. But it's kind of hard to get past things when everyone else is perfect and never has to have an adult conversation about it. For them, jeers have always worked so much better.
This, from the family who left me in the local loony bin, where the LPCs love, or at least feel duty-bound, to punish people for not seeing it their way. That if we are in any way tempted to suicide to escape all those lasting impressions and current failures, then it's just our personal responsibility to get over it. And of course, we should be feeling guilty for not shaping up.
They sure make an impression.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Abraham Lincoln had his moments. Like when he said that God wasn't on either side of the Civil War. So what is it about Christians, especially conservative Christians, that makes them so proud of hurting people. Whether it's whipping and terrorizing small children, or segregating the ill and disabled from proud and productive work, or making a senior strain hernias, arthritis and a back damaged by a drinking driver on heavy labor, they seem to get such a righteous charge out of it. As if it validates some idea that God loves them best. And of course you can't tell them anything about it. If you do, then you're just not taking personal responsibility. You're just trying to hurt them.
Take my brother. Please. He hasn't changed much over the years. When we were little kids in grade school, he found that he could say nasty things that hurt my feelings. He played that like his favorite toy. Then one day I'd had enough. I turned it right back on him and played the snotty jerk to his face. You should have seen the look on it. That wasn't fair! I wasn't supposed to make him hurt.
One day I was tired and zoned out. He backed up, sat down on his bed, and broke one of his favorite model planes that he had built. Of course it wasn't his fault; it was all mine. "Why didn't you tell me it was there!"
In high school we had two beds in a room, each with a reading lamp on the headboard. One night I was trying to get to sleep. Not always easy because of the nightmares, anxiety and depression. But he just couldn't be satisfied with his reading lamp. He had to have the overhead light on. He wouldn't turn it off when I asked him, and when I did, he would march right over to the switch and turn it back on. Several times, until I waited there in the dark, and socked him in the eye. He wasn't the one being mean; it was all me.
These days, when people are doing things he finds offensive, like living on the dole when there's no work, or asking for social justice, his favorite jeer - "Well, it's all about me!" Indicating not so subtly his disgust with people who are so self-centered that they don't consider and adopt his moral righteousness.
The Favorite Son can tell his brother to hazard the rent with extra expenses, and strain old, painful injuries moving things out of his mother's house - or lose them. The things that one accumulates and invests feeling in to make up for the lack of a love in a family. But that's not his problem. His only Christian responsibility is to tell others what they ought to be doing. No, it's not his responsibility; it's all mine.
Nope. Not much change at all. It seems to be a complete mystery to him why other people might find that incredibly annoying and hard to forget. Well he's right about one thing; it's always been all about him. And a lack of personal maturity and responsibility.
I wonder, when I have to keep my Father's temper so tight in its cage, if I'll ever be able to go back to church and have any feeling of grace and forgiveness. A long, long shot that is.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I called Mom at my Brother's this afternoon to see about going over to visit her tomorrow afternoon. She has been staying there recovering after heart problems. She said that my Brother and Sister-in-law asked her to leave and find a place of here own. She's been staying in their bedroom on the first floor to avoid the stairs.
She's moving to assisted living here in Tulsa, and she doesn't sound happy about it. She had been living in her own home in Arkansas for 50 years and doesn't want to leave it. I told her that I would support her whatever she decided, then found out that it wasn't all her decision. If I had what they had, I'd put in an elevator, or at least a chair lift, and let her stay.
Trying to cheer her up a little, I pointed out how many years she could pay the rent with the money she has in banks. And she said, "Oh, I hope I don't live that long." I know the feeling. It came for me when I was a small child and found out how little the other parent wanted me.
But my Brother likes to prove he's in charge and rolls right over people no matter what. He's given me a month to get my things out of her house so they can sell it. The gas for one trip would cost me just about all the extra I could afford in one month. I do hope he gets over his testosterone poisoning, but it appears to be terminal. Not that I would do anything - I can resist temptation.
But for him to make Mom feel that low - what a mensch. All heart. What kind of god wants people to treat each other this way?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
NPR and most liberal news outlets have the habit of reporting only the call for "if we could just do something that would save just one life", to justify more gun control. But I don't see it reporting on the places that already have those laws. The Guardian does better: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list
It shows that Puerto Rico, which has gun laws that limit firearms to one per house, with just one box of ammunition, along with massive registration, has a homicide rate of 18.3/100,000. Mexico, another country with tough gun laws has a rate of 9.97/100,000. The United States has rate of 2.97/100,000, despite being first in the world for gun ownership. Both Puerto Rico and Mexico are torn with drug cartel violence, and Puerto Ricans are moving in drove to the U.S. to escape it. Moving to the place that has more guns than almost anyone. Where they feel safer, as even NPR reported. NPR just didn't mention the gun laws.
As for background checks, most states have draconian mental health laws that make it a commitable offense merely to be accused of being threatening while mentally ill. The accusations often become proven fact as due process goes out the window. Just look at the psychiatric hospitals who committed tens of thousands without any mental illness or record of violence, in the State of Texas alone (Source: Houston Chronicle "Profitable Addictions" series, 40+ articles), after the Supreme Court 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision. One could parody the elevation of psychiatry to near-infallible status in that decision with: "Although your heart surgeon has never seen you or your medical record, and has heard about you only through hypothetical questions, don't worry about a thing - there is no convincing evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable."
No doubt, as far as the gun control wingnuts are concerned, the more people on lists who can't own guns, the better. No matter if they got there through medical fraud, or the kind of "treatment" that people of color used to get under Jim Crow. Ah, NPR, show us your true colors. We hardly knew ye.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Courts give us separate and unequal justice, depending upon who can afford a lawyer. They dismiss out of hand the vast majority of cases brought by those who try to argue their cases on their own, without a lawyer. Usually hanging the dismissal on any single error that gives a Court plausible deniability, like the old literacy and pencil tests that kept Black people from voting. It's not like the people they dismiss know enough to dispute the Courts' decisions.
People talk about banning guns and magazines as if "it could save just one life". It never seems to occur to them that one of the significant factors driving the high rate of violence in this country may well be the certitude that if we can't afford a lawyer, the Courts deny us any other path to justice.
If we can't pay for justice, we can't get any.
Not surprisingly, this falls hardest upon those with less income, opportunity and education, who make up the majority of the prison population - people of color. But not just them. It hits anyone who lives on the margins, like people with disabilities, mental illnesses and homelessness. The people that Judges care so much less about, perhaps because they think such people are parasites who don't contribute to society. And who generally aren't allowed to have proud and productive work, perhaps because those who can afford lawyers think such people don't have anything to contribute.
Thus, access to justice in this country suffers from segregation as fundamental as that addressed by the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education case. Separate and unequal.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
At the very bottom of this issue, we have ingrained bigotry against people with mental illnesses in society, in the legislatures and on the judicial bench. If a Court searches the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A, it will find that one type of penalty does not exist. There are penalties for such things as stealing from petty cash, operating a mental facility without a license, malfeasance with narcotics, physically assaulting patients, failing to report elder abuse, falsely accusing someone of elder abuse, falsely accusing someone of having a mental illness, and misrepresenting to police that someone has a mental illness. There are even perjury penalties for swearing in court documents that someone has a mental illness.
But there is not one single penalty either for falsely accusing someone with a mental illness of being a threat, or for falsely depriving a person with mental illness of liberty and due process. It comes closest to the latter in 43A-5-103, making it a mere misdemeanor to unlawfully or maliciously confine a person in a mental or drug treatment facility. But the language in 43A-1-103 that defines a person with a mental illness to be in need of treatment if anyone alleges a “reasonable fear” of threat, and the language in 43A-5-204 that gives immunity from civil suits for medication (and treatment) prescribed in “good faith”, virtually nullify that provision. Nor does Title 43A demand that the methods and means of “treatment” and the results of that treatment be tabulated and recorded to assure that they are safe, fair and effective.
If the U.S. Supreme Court searches its own record, it will easily find implicit and explicit references to the “dangerous tendencies” (Addington v. Texas, 1979) of people with mental illness, used to justify society’s need to protect itself from them, and the state’s parens patriae right to protect people with mental illness from themselves. It puts people with mental illnesses in a special category that allows the states to preventively detain them on the mere suspicion of "dangerousness", and then deny to them the full protections of law given to those who have actually committed violent crimes. We don’t have to go far in our history to see a striking parallel. All we have to do is to substitute the terms “Black” for “mentally ill” and “nigger” for “disturbed” to see that every concept of inferiority and threat involving people with mental illnesses has already be applied to people of color. It was and is called Jim Crow.
Justia columnist and Cornell law professor Sherry Colb (2011) notes for the purpose of argument that while the ratio of people committing violence is reportedly 2 to 1 mentally ill to not, the ratio of people committing homicide is 8 Black to 1 White, and 10 male to 1 female. Demonstrating that some forms of bigotry are, in the terms of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “more equal than others”. Parens partiae becomes Big White Brother only when the same principles are applied to people that Judges care about.
Colb, Sherry F., Aug 10, 2011, Armed and Crazy: Should Mentally Ill People Be Permitted to Own Firearms?, http://verdict.justia.com/2011/08/10/armed-and-crazy
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I stopped over at my brother's house last weekend to visit Mom, only to have him scream to get my attention and demand that I park out on the street because "your truck leaks a lot of oil". That's one of the important things in my family's life, and it brought back a few more.
About 15 years ago, as I recall, I was living at my parents' house again after surgery looking for cancer (not found, but still not forgotten) and the failure of hundreds of letters for employment to make use of my new Ph.D. I was tired, depressed, sitting on the couch, and laid my head back to rest. Only to have Dad scream at me to get it off the couch so I wouldn't leave an "grease" on it.
Not only did I not use anything in my hair because of asthma, I scrubbed and scraped it and my scalp every night with soap and my fingernails to keep from getting ugly wens. But there wasn't any point in telling him that. He knew for a fact that I was dirty.
Another time, when my uncle was visiting, Dad got infuriated about a toilet with a liberal spray pattern on the seat and the floor. This had not happened in the months preceding while I was there. But there wasn't any need for him to yell at his brother (a mostly nice guy) with a belly so big that he may not have seen his own equipment in many years, much less where it aimed. No, I was there. So he yelled at me. He knew for a fact that I had to be the dirty person who did that.
Fortunately, in another context but still related, Licensed Professional Counselor Julie King explained it all for me a couple years back at the local loony bin. "All that matters," she said, "is how people perceive you." And on that basis, they kept me there for 66 days until they were sure enough that I had gotten the point. Still dirty after all these years. Most illuminating, I'm sure.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
from one side to the other
looking for cancer
I've had witch doctors
and a kangaroo judge
keep me in the local loony bin
for their own special purposes
Better cancer - it's more dignified
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Banning large-capacity magazines and rifles with military appearances (but not the same full-auto function), is a bit like banning beer kegs and big cars with tail fins (like those on rockets and military jets) to cut down on drunk driving fatalities.
The whole thing was started by a gun control advocate named Josh Sugarman (of the Violence Policy Center and National Coalition to Ban Handguns) who deliberately styled military look-alikes as "assault weapons" to make people afraid of them and set a precedent for banning all firearms.
"Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons."
-Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Sugarmann
Now, who ever heard of anyone using this particular style of rifle to blow people away in mass killings, until Sugarman and the news media made a big issue of them, making people afraid that this is what would happen. It is quite possible that in creating the fear, they created the monsters, terrorists who want that kind of attention for whatever twisted reasons suit them. When teachers do this to children, making them fail in school by constantly telling them they will fail, it's called a "self-fulfilling prophecy". Create the monsters and they will come.
Ain't politics grand?
Some say these firearms have no use but to kill people. Wrong. In the vast majority of cases, decent people use them for target shooting competitions, including those which train civilians as marksmen before they ever volunteer for the military. The Congress created the Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship in 1903, run by the U.S. Army until 1996, which administered the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Now known as the non-profit Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice & Firearms Safety, according to wikipedia, it still sells military surplus bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles for training purposes to qualified law-abiding buyers. Which helps to make our military arguably the most effective in the world.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In researching Federal Fraud laws with regard to medical information, I found the following interesting items:
AMA information sheet, Federal Fraud and Abuse Laws, citing: Federal Civil Monetary Penalties (Section 1128A of the Social Security Act/42 USC 1320a-7aa), (Section 1128B of the Social Security Act/42 USC 1320a-7b), Federal Civil False Claims Act (31 USC 3829-3733), Health Care Fraud and Scheme (18 USC 1347), Theft or Embezzlement in Connection with Health Care Benefit Program (18 USC 669), and False Statements Relating to Health Care Matters (18 USC 1035).
Including the statement: "The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, Public Law 104-191 (HIPAA), clarified that the term "should know" includes, with respect to information set out in a claim, "acts in deliberate ignorance" or in "reckless disregard of the truth or falsity" and "no proof of specific intent to defraud is required.""
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001: with
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
U.S. DOJ Criminal Resource Manual 903, which states with regard to 18 USC 1001: An often-raised defense is the claim that because the alleged act or activity has no reasonable relation to the Federal government, no Federal jurisdiction exists. … In describing the situations in which the prohibited conduct must occur, the courts have construed the statute broadly and stressed that Section 1001 protects the government "from the perversion which might result from the deceptive practices described." Bryson v. United States, 396 U.S. 64 (1969).
I could be wrong, but wouldn't you think that applies to people exaggerating and falsifying medical information in order to assure an involuntary commitment in the State mental health system, which accepts money from both state and federal taxpayers? And that Federal laws about the deprivation of civil rights under the color of law, and conspiracies to commit such acts, would then apply. And then, if it is a violation of Federal law, you might even think that a Federal District Court would be willing to hear about it. Well, unless there's some bigotry involved.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
What do the two states, one ranking near the bottom in education and health care, have in common? Apparently, it's the acceptance of "negative charting" in health care as "good faith" performance of state employee duties in the first case, and "proper" in the second. "Negative charting" has at least two different definitions in health care. It can be a) not recording ordinary or normal conditions on a patient's chart, or b) doing exactly the opposite, and recording normal results which would be "negative" indications of illness, or c) emphasizing only negative aspects of the patient's condition in order to ensure insurance payments. Depends on who you ask.
Since at least 1995, both Congress and the U.S. Government Accounting Office have recognized definition (c) as health care fraud. See GAO Reports 95-17, Medicare: Allegations Against ABC Home Health Care, and Waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare program : joint hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and Environment and the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, May 16, 1995 (1995)
The State of Florida thinks so, too, in it's training on the Florida Baker Act, it's own mental health and commitment law. See www.bakeracttraining.org/files/faq/ba-receiving_facilities.pdf, page 29: "Since negative charting for the purpose of obtaining insurance payments would be inappropriate, one would assume that the insurers aren't aware of Florida law."
As does the Journal of Financial Crime. See Brian K. Payne, (2006) "Problems controlling fraud and abuse in the home health care field: Voices of fraud control unit directors", Journal of Financial Crime, Vol. 13 Iss: 1, pp.77 - 91. At least, one would suppose so from Mr. Payne's other publications, such as White-Collar Crime: The Essentials, Brian K. Payne, Sage Publ, Los Angeles, London, etc.; Chap IV Crimes in the Health Care System, p 83: "Types of home health care fraud include providing unnecessary services, billing the system for services that were not provided to the client, overcharging, forgery, negative charting, substitute workers, double billing and kickbacks." Which Mr. Payne held earlier in "Crime in the Home Health Care Field - Workplace Violence, Fraud, and Abuse", Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd., Springfield, IL; 2003.
But not the State of Mississippi, which in its Court of Appeals in Whitt v. MMRC, Case No. 95-CA-00946 COA, 8/12/97, it held that, "The difference between negative charting and false charting is that false charting is lying; whereas, negative charting is a form of documentation used by home health care nurses which focuses on the problems of the patient, and not the positive aspects of the patient's health. By focusing on the negative, Medicare payments are assured. ... Negative charting is a widely accepted practice within the profession [home health care]. ... Whitt has not shown that she was asked to falsify records, but merely asked to change the records to reflect proper negative charting, a procedure widely recognized in the home health care industry."
It seems that the Oklahoma Attorney General and the Executive Branch do not even make that distinction. When presented with evidence that not only was medical evidence exaggerated in an involuntary commitment to the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, but that it was also falsified, the A.G. has responded that no state employee can be sued for the "good faith" performance of their duties. Following complaints sent to the State Department of Health and Board of Osteopathic Examiners, those worthy bodies could find no cause for action.
Ain't politics and bigotry grand? I wonder how much it costs the taxpayers.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
If you are like me, you never heard of him before today, or knew that he was an internet prodigy who helped to develop technologies that millions use. He also had trouble with depression. The news says that he believed in an open and free internet, and that the U.S. Justice Department was prosecuting him to the limit for downloading millions of pages from the online journal library, JSTOR, without paying for them.
I don't agree with Swartz's action, but I think I know how he felt. Some say that genius and madness are close. Witness the painter Vincent van Gogh, his missing ear and his reported suicide. More like, it's because anyone with depression who wants to feel good about something has to try harder. Whether it is art, science, engineering or some other challenge, sometimes, if not often, only the satisfaction of accomplishment can ease the pain. Otherwise, it's like Prometheus, with his liver growing back time after time just so the eagle can tear it out and eat it again, bit by agonizing little bit.
The loss of all hope of accomplishment is worse than death. In its zeal to prosecute and make an example of him, this is what the U.S. Department of Justice took from Aaron Swartz. Almost like it did when the FBI went to prove its manhood on the Branch Davidians. But this time, they took out someone who arguably had a lot more to contribute to the world. Someone whose future work might conceivably have helped with the battle against terrorists. All over a philosophical difference that JSTOR reportedly didn't want to prosecute, and already-published academic information that had no apparent national security implications.
Oddly enough, some people never seem to realize that when they start a peter-matching contest, the only peters anyone else can see are the ones sticking up above their shirt collars. Something the Justice Department has a hard time learning. So if yahoos are cheering or jeering about this death, the hell with them.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I came across this in Google, searching on the term: mental illness zealous counsel
[PDF] Working with Clients - Indigent Defense Services
www.ncids.org/other%20manuals/.../Appendix%20C_new.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
Even though we are trained to zealously advocate for our clients, we are only ... procedures, is designed to require that the prosecuting attorney must make the .... evidence and conclusions regarding mental illness and danger, thereby
For some reason, Google now makes it hard to extract a clean URL.
It was a little sickening to download and read, because it shows what we don't get here in Oklahoma.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
My family didn't abandon me physically after the car wreck. My parents gave me a place to stay while I was on the walker and not released to go back to work. And when I came back to Tulsa, she came with me to help out, because I couldn't drive. I couldn't even walk down stairs at Pelican's Wharf. I had to bump down on my butt. Carefully.
The way PTSD works, if you can't talk it out, then according to medical research, it stands a good chance of becoming permanent. Every time I tried to, my family refused to hear about it, often claiming that by doing so I was only hurting myself. Some even jeered.
I forgave Mom because she's given me so much other love and support. But it hurt. And the others ... I don't have the kind of family that necessarily demonstrates the love and values I've read that Christ asked of his followers.