Correction: The Court pinned the nature of the disclosure on on the mere circumstances of the disclosure, instead of the consequences of the wrongdoing, dismissing it no matter how criminal or disastrous the wrongdoing.
In Huffman v. OPM, 2001, #00-3184, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit went to a dictionary to define the word “disclose” in the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). It ruled that telling a wrongdoer about his or her wrongdoing cannot be a “disclosure”’ because the wrongdoer already knows about it, and because the purpose of the WPA is:
“to encourage disclosures that are likely to remedy the wrong. … The wrongdoer is not such a person. Extending the WPA to cover reports to a supervisor of the supervisor’s own misconduct would also have drastic adverse consequences. As we stated in Willis, “[d]iscussion and even disagreement with supervisors over job-related duties is a normal part of most occupations.” Willis, 141 F.3d at 1143. If every complaint made to a supervisor concerning an employee’s disagreement with the supervisor’s actions were considered to be a disclosure protected under the WPA, virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim the protection of the Act. Although Congress intended that the WPA’s coverage be broad, we think it unlikely that Congress intended the Act to extend that far, and we hold that it did not.”
It seems more likely that the Court refers to “drastic” consequences to its own docket than to the employee. But it misses the point. Instead of pinning nature of the disclosure on the consequences of the wrongdoing, no matter how criminal or disastrous, the Court pinned it on the mere circumstances.
Its decision means that the WPA does not protect the innocent employee of a criminal enterprise who sees something he is not supposed to, and reports it to his supervisor, not knowing that his supervisor is in on it. Thus the supervisor could murder the employee and, under the Court’s interpretation, it could not be a WPA case.
In Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), in order to put a convicted murderer on death row, the Supreme Court of the United States held that no one could question whether psychiatry even had any validity in predicting future dangerous behavior; that the psychiatrist making the prediction did not even have to personally examine person about whom the prediction is made; and that merely answering of hypothetical questions about the person is good enough to admit as evidence in a court of law. Paraphrasing the decision, one might as well say:
“Don’t worry about a thing; even though your heart surgeon has not examined either you or your medical record, he has learned about you through hypothetical questions, and there is no evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable.”
In the Toyota v. Willams case, 2002, U.S. Supreme Court certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the sixth circuit, No. 00-1089, a woman who could not raise her arms above her head was fired because Toyota instituted a job rotation policy requiring every person on the line to be able to perform every job on the line. They called it a “business necessity”, which perhaps not coincidentally would eliminate anyone who couldn’t do it because of a disability. The Japanese have been notoriously intolerant of differences. The High Court unanimously ruled in Toyota’s favor, stringing out a long, involved rationale on the nature of disabilities which none on the Court apparently had.
Not even the U.S. Army requires every grunt and tech to do every job. If it did, it might send to the firing squad every helicopter tech who couldn’t bake a cake, and every cook who couldn’t maintain a helicopter. It would be a long list and a lot of bullets.
Wisdom and reasoning and decisions worthy of the highest Courts in the land should not be so easy to lampoon. But when they are specially constructed to reach a desired end, rather than as expressions of Constitutional justice, they quickly become so.
Does it occur to anyone that if mental institutions like This Can’t Be Happening detain and commit every warm body brought to them for evaluation, then inevitably they won’t have a bed available some time when someone who has a real crisis needs help? Besides, I think that case law demands that they let anyone go whom they cannot improve with treatment. Now, what treatment would that be? The coloring books, or the demands to accept guilt for merely being accused of being threatening? And what experimental and follow-up evidence do they have that they actually help anyone? Do they even bother to keep anonymous records of patients so that their treatments can be independently examined without violating HIPPA?
I’d guess not. Then they would actually have to demonstrate accountability for the tax money they spend and the lives they damage.
Houston Chronicle 1990s “Profitable Addictions” series
I’ve been searching the Houston Chronicle archives ( http://search.chron.com/chronicle/search.do search on: profitable addictions psychiatric hospital ) and finding the series to be even more extensive than I had realized. I’ve downloaded 40 “Profitable Addictions” and related articles and still not seen them all. They paint a chilling picture of patient abuses committed by private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals in Texas, that have some striking similarities to the practices of the State-operated and funded mental health system here and now. They include:
State laws that allowed abuses. A State mental health department contributing to the problems. The use of hearsay to justify Doctors’ orders for detention and commitment. Crisis lines run by hospitals that funneled callers into hospitals. Crisis teams that always recommend commitment. Lack of regulation on mental health recommendations made to courts. Courts depending upon hospital staff to make recommendations for commitment to their hospitals. Patients isolated from their doctors, lawyers and families.
In that system, children as young as one-year-old, whom we all know don’t have fully-developed brains, were put in psychiatric hospitals. Some teenagers were kept for years, robbing them of their childhoods. As noted here before, healthy adults and children were abducted from the street and their homes, even on the orders of psychiatrists who had not seen or examined them.
Even conservative Texans found this appalling, but not the Supreme Court of the United States, whose Decisions on the mental health evaluations of Texas prisoners preceded these abuses. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, for example, the Court ruled on the use of the testimony by Dr. James Grigson (otherwise known as Dr. Death or The Hanging Psychiatrist, later expelled in 1995 for malpractice in such cases by both the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians) to put convicted murderer Barefoot on death row. Dr. Grigson nearly always recommended the death penalty, even for prisoners he had never personally examined and for at least one who later turned out to be innocent. Among other things, the Court held that
a) Barefoot had no right to question the accuracy and reliability of any psychiatrist’s prediction of his future violent behavior, partly out of concern that not only would this resource for putting people on death row be lost, it would affect other expert witnesses.
b) “Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions.”
c) "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact.", citing the California Supreme Court to justify using psychiatric predictions of future violence, even though they were wrong two times out of three.
Thus the Supreme Court paved the way for psychiatric hospitals in Texas to order the detention and commitment of people they had never seen or examined, usually on the basis of hearsay. Doctors could even order this on their own authority, never bothering with the courts. What a pity we don’t seem to have investigative reporters here to take as good a look at our mental health system.
Saw a guy interviewed on a news program last evening who seems to believe the recent lower fuel prices are caused by current administrations attempts to secure votes in the upcoming election. The same administration that is supposedly causing high fuel prices with too many regulations and not allowing drilling in certain areas. So why would the oil companies want to support their reelection? The level of ignorance and irrational hatred toward our government is now truly alarming.
Terry Simonson's posting on integrity and the failure of leadership! It is letting the dogs off the porch. He is a true expert at leadership failure. He resigned over his failed efffort to gain an unqualified advantage for his son to join the Tulsa Fire academy. He has lost all authority to preach integrity or ethics, no matter whom he quotes. He should do more reading and less talking and writing.
The Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any “consumer” inside its walls, citing HIPPA regulations. In its “Uncivil Rights” section, mentalillnesspolicy.org blames HIPPA regulations for keeping family members from finding out the status of loved ones who get scooped up by or shoved into mental institutions like TCBH. But what’s the truth?
When a friend of mine ended up in the hospital after a fall, I could call any hospital in town and find out whether or not he had been admitted, was there, or had been discharged. I could get his room number and telephone number. On one of those occasions, I went to visit him. HIPPA did not stop me.
Yet both kinds of institutions are covered by HIPPA. They both have to obey it. What’s the difference? Why in one case should even immediate family be deliberately kept in the dark about the status of their loved ones? Even the county jail has public information on who is there right up on the internet. Why is TCBH so special?
It’s not. The truth is that alternative incarceration in a mental facility was originally meant to apply only to those who had committed crimes while mentally ill. Under that system, they could be admitted to a place like TCBH, to be treated for mental health issues that gave rise to criminal behavior, only after (note this) publicly renouncing all claims to innocence.
Places like TCBH don’t adhere to such legal niceties. After being arrested in public by swarming police, whom apparently HIPPA does not restrict from publicly humiliating people, the inmates are “evaluated” by “mental health professionals” who have been shown by research to be wrong about two out of every three times. Even when they don’t put their thumbs on the scales in their own favor, to justify their own jobs.
Who is the so-called privacy for? By the time people get to TCBH, the public police swarm and handcuffing has already pulled the privacy cat out of its bag. If friends and neighbors who were never interviewed didn’t think there was anything wrong with an inmate before, they now have reason to wonder. If the inmates hadn’t been stressed out and emotionally troubled before, they are now.
HIPPA has nothing to do with it. Places like TCBH are not primarily involved in medical care. Places like TCBH function mainly as gulags for people who have annoyed someone with more social power with “inappropriate behavior”. Their “treatment” mainly consists of making the inmate feel guilty and responsible for whatever someone else didn’t like about them. For every person that might actually be having a mental health crisis, one can expect that TCBH houses at least two more who are there merely to have their attitudes adjusted to better suit those around them on the outside.
Instead, the “privacy” is for TCBH and the Mental Health Court, so that no one on the outside can see that they are not truly a health care facility or dedicated to Constitutional justice, or examine their “standard of care” or their standards of due process, and complain about them.
So the next time someone disappears into the gulag, and the gulag says, “We can neither confirm nor deny”, don’t take the gulag’s word. If you truly care about that person, get a lawyer and a judge and force the gulag to disclose your loved one’s status, and to allow in other Doctors whom you trust, to examine your loved one and produce a second opinions. You might just find that the so-called mental health crisis was produced and/or manufactured by publicly humiliating police action and the same people who claim to be “treating” it.
The Supreme Court of the United States has used extraordinarily specious logic to separate those with mental illnesses from civil rights and the standards of justice it would apply to everyone else. Which the lower courts have followed in lock step.
In the movie “Judgment at Nuremburg”, a movie well worth watching, Spencer Tracy’s character, a U.S. jurist, passes judgment on a German judge who worked under the Nazis. You can find his speech here: http://www.politicalspeeches.net/us-politics/spencer-tracy-delivers-final-verdict-from-judgement-at-nuremburg
In essence, if I remember correctly, the German judge had claimed the defense that he was just administering the laws as written. Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. It was in a Federal District courtroom – here in Tulsa. The judge told me that if I wanted a different result, then I should get the laws changed.
The thing is, he and all his colleagues have sworn an oath to the Constitution of the United States, which stands above the laws. The Supreme Court is not infallible. It occasionally makes stupidly egregious, unconstitutional decisions, based more upon the jerking of ideological knees than upon evidence. A lower court judge who administers them blindly, with no recourse to or consideration of constitutional values, absolves himself or herself with the same excuse as that German judge at Nuremburg.
Occasionally, rather than condemn the innocent to injustice, a lower court judge should stand up and be counted on the side of the Constitution, even if it means his or her career. The judge’s opinion should provide the Supreme Court with the evidence and reasoning necessary to see the error of its ways, even if the Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, then issues a reversal.
All it takes is courage and integrity, which people with unaccountable, lifetime appointments seem ill-inclined to exercise on behalf of those beneath them, whom they hold in judgment.
“Always tell the truth, even if it means your life.” - from the Knight’s Oath in the movie, The Kingdom of Heaven.
I once contacted NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, about getting some legal help. The local chapter, I think. No, they didn’t do that. Instead, they advocate for the families of those with mental illness to get treatment for them, like involuntary commitment. So does a place on the web called mentalillnesspolicy.org.
These organizations emphasize the damage that a minority of people with mental illness do to themselves and others in order to motivate and create public policy for so-called “progressive” involuntary treatment. They show no awareness of or concern for what license it gives governments and institutions to threaten, abuse and damage anyone they deem in need of their care, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
So it doesn’t matter what we want or need; they don’t need to ask us. They just want to do what they think is good for us, voluntary or not. Kind of like that toilet law in the movie, The Help. Of course, those white Southern women didn’t lock their help in their special toilets for weeks or months on end. They needed their help for dirty work.
Imagine if Oklahoma legislators thought they could catch mental illness from a toilet seat. Based on what we’ve seen the last few years, it’s not inconceivable, them thinking that. Then I bet we’d get special toilets, too.
It saves all that trouble of asking those with mental illness what we need and what works best for us. Of considering how to approach us without threats, and get us voluntarily involved with counseling, medication and meaningful, productive employment.
Don’t we all see it every day? When it comes to raising money for a cause, fear and loathing sells better.
If you install MSE, you may find that you can no longer 1) check your disk for errors, due to a “recently installed software package” 2) uninstall MSE, unless you institute a search for the installation files, because it will tell you that you don’t have access to a needed resource
If you have Windows 7, Do Not, repeat DO NOT, enable offline access to files on another computer on your network. Win7 will take up space on its own hard drive duplicating files on the network drive, which you might never get back. You may be unable to delete the folder containing those files, even if you are the only user/administrator on the computer, and the person who set up the mapped network drive. If you try to do so, you may get a message stating that you cannot do so until you get permission from yourself, which Win7 may not allow.
If you try to fix this by connecting to the network drive and re-enabling offline files, you may get errors that will not allow Windows to start, requiring you to do a Startup Repair. This problem may be connected with the installation of Microsoft Security Essentials, which admits in its license agreement that it might make changes that will keep programs or Windows from running. And limits the Microsoft’s responsibility for damages to $5.
Caveat Emptor
If only more packages ran on Linux easily, we could all dump Microsoft and its bugs.
When Judges mess up, law insulates from their own mistakes they who rule with something like divine and royal right in this country. Instead they compel the rest of us to have intimate relations with the canine pet in their place.
Some decades ago, I worked summers in more than one Arkansas chicken processing plant. Fortunately, I didn’t like chicken to begin with. Otherwise the flies, overflowing urinals and meat dropped on the floor at one of them (under the empty noses of in-plant USDA inspectors), might have put me off.
If you want to enjoy sausage, don’t watch it being made. If you want to believe in justice, don’t read the opinions.
********
In a previous post, I missed a few of things that can get a psychiatrist in trouble. These include demonstrably driving a patient to suicide, stealing from petty cash, violating HIPPA regulations by releasing medical files to the wrong people, and bilking the government for services not rendered. The last two are the only things that ever seem to cause Federal judges and prosecutors any concern, outrage or distress. Violating HIPPA regulations by falsifying, manufacturing or suppressing medical information doesn’t appear to be a Federal concern.
It’s the death of economic hope for those on the bottom. In the old Soviet system, for example, the food harvests were constantly behind targets and needs. Conservatives here rightly pointed out that it stemmed from the lack of incentive for farmers to profit in any way from the fruits of their labors. The State owned everything they did, and paid them all the same. So why work hard if it all pays the same?
Here, it’s a little different, but too often to the same effect. Here, people on the bottom tend to be those on the dole, and all get paid the same. Here, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, conservatives have a false narrative that says anyone can work their way out of their circumstances. Instead, if someone on the dole makes too much money, the State takes back more of the dole than the value of what the person made for him or her self. Sell a tee shirt, and the State can strip or claw back ten times as much or more.
To the people on the bottom living on State’s sufferance, the difference between communist and conservative systems is merely ideological, merely words. It still strips from them the practical ability to benefit from the fruits of their own ambition and labor. Many are living so close to the bone, losing the dole would mean homelessness. So those who would really like to work their way up, losing benefits as a fraction of their profits, have to stay where they are.
Economically, it all pays the same.
Communist or conservative, the politicians might as well be talking with the same forked tongue. Both are so blinded by the holy purity of their ideologies that they can’t address any of the real problems with solutions that work to everyone’s benefit. They aren’t really Saul on the road to Damascus, they just play him in the propaganda.
And no, I don’t think liberals are that much better. They have other intellect-blinding flaws. They certainly haven’t done any better in developing a path to independence.
Because I belong to a minority, people with mental illnesses, many if not most people are satisfied never to demand an accounting for what may happen to the likes of me in our justice system or a mental institution. So it doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court of the United States has elevated psychiatry up to a virtually unaccountable, allegedly medical discipline, which usually can be sued for malpractice only in the very rare instance that a psychiatric patient hurts someone. Sue a psychiatrist for a bad diagnosis that hurts a patient? Out of all the medical disciplines, unaccountable psychiatry has the right to define that as delusion. In order to be sued successfully, a psychiatrist literally has to beat or rape a patient. Otherwise, anything goes.
Many if not most people seem to think that this can never affect them, only those whom they fear and loath. That Psychiatrists Know Best. After all, the Supreme Court said so, emphasizing time and again that lawyers and judges have no business getting in the way of “medical decisions”. As if, despite all evidence to the contrary, such doctors could never, possibly, in a million years, make mistakes or put their personal benefit over the patient’s. And if such things should happen, the Supreme Court, which has stacked the deck by ruling in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom that judges and lawyers should stay out of the way, tells us that the adversarial process will fix surely them. As if there are no consequences to judicial hubris.
Life must look a bit different to people on a high mountaintop than it does to the rest of us down here. Down here, psychiatrists are just as human and venal as anyone else. Just as ready to take advantage of legislated unaccountability. Just as capable of damaging even people who think it can only happen to those they don’t like.
In the case of 14-year-old Jeramy Harrell and his grandmother, Marianne, http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808777/profitable-addictions-captured-and-held-against-wi.html bad psychiatry left lasting scars. I recall reading that either Jeramy or a similar young boy went into a psychiatric hospital scam a vivacious, talkative kid, and came out withdrawn and almost non-verbal, but I can’t find the reference for you. The one just above reports that Marianne Harrell, who had been a child in Nazi Germany, and had been [perhaps publicly] accused of abusing Jeramy, came out of it unable to see a patrol car without cringing. “She now never leaves her doors unlocked – even when she is at home.”
The same article details other psychiatric abductions and assaults. One 51-year-old woman, Beverly Williams, “was dragged out of her bathroom by two security guards [clad only in her bathrobe, it seems] and handcuffed on an emergency apprehension and detention warrant.” The same kind used by the Tulsa Mental Health Court. “Beverly Williams, considered a “model employee” by her employer, said she was so embarrassed and humiliated by the experience that she has tinted the windows of her car so neighbors can’t see her when she leaves home.”
These people were nominally sane and without any criminal conviction, and they suffered lasting damage. How much self-absorbed stupidity does it take to presume that police, district attorneys, courts, mental institutions and government employees and contractors can do the same thing to those who already have lasting damage and not make it worse? My, how they justify and absolve themselves in their conceit and bigotry.
In the movie Gothika, actress Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist in an institution. At the end of the movie, Berry’s character apologizes to a patient for not believing that the patient was being raped in her cell, for dismissing it as delusion. She even lets the patient go.
Oh yeah! Now I get it! That’s what you mean by fiction.
It only took near murder by the rapist to turn Berry’s character around. If the world as we know it really does end in 2012, maybe we can get the same deal.
In its 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, the Supreme Court justified the virtual infallibility of psychiatric predictions of “dangerousness” in part by quoting the California Supreme Court in People v. Murtishaw, 1981:
“The court distinguished cases, however, where "the trier of fact is required by statute to determine whether a person is dangerous,'" in which event, "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact." ”
Oh. You mean like the old test to determine if a woman was a witch. They tied her up and threw her into a deep enough body of water. If she floated, it meant that the water rejected her as unholy, and they could burn her. If she sank and drowned, well then, she was innocent and her soul was going to God. No harm, no foul.
Yup, the Court knows that the old justice is best.
On the Diane Rehm show today, discussing the current whistleblower protection legislation in Congress, one of the commentators stated that most cases are dismissed because they are Pro Se. In other words, brought by people who cannot afford lawyers to present them according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. If you are not a lawyer, have you ever tried to read and understand the FRCP? It might be as easy as a lawyer or judge trying to read an advanced engineering text.
Denying justice to people who cannot afford a lawyer, because they don’t know how to “state a case”, demonstrates jurisprudence at the same moral and Constitutional level as upholding a poll tax.
I think someone should hold a contest to name all the things that are, in the words of the Supreme Court of the United States, not “almost entirely unreliable”, and thus should be allowed to stand as standards of evidence, or safe and effective procedure, under that standard of jurisprudence.
I’ll start – the o-rings on the solid rocket booster that blew up on launch and brought a Space Shuttle down out of the sky.
You see, the engineers responsible for certifying that the launch could proceed as safe didn’t want to, because they saw potentially serious problems with the o-rings, having witnessed excessive erosion by hot gasses in the ones recovered from previous launches and tests. But because the o-rings hadn’t failed yet, the managers of their employer and NASA contractor, Morton Thiokol, demanded that if they couldn’t prove the o-rings would fail, then they had to certify the launch. The engineers who gave in, and watched as seven or so astronauts died, including one who would have been the first schoolteacher in space, have borne the guilt of that ever since.
One can only speculate if that same Supreme Court standard of reliability set in the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle case in any way influenced the Challenger disaster of 1986. Only such things as diet fads, health food claims, and witch-hunts allow such low standards of proof. If something went wrong, not only would any licensed professional engineer be sued with considerable justification for deviating to use them, any self-respecting engineer would be ashamed even to try.
On the other hand, politicians, legislators, judges and Morton Thiokol managers don’t seem to have that problem. Perhaps they lack a gene for a sense of shame that troubles us at times.
I don’t approve of racism. But lawyerism … look cavalierly how they treat the rest of us.
Fear and Loathing is not a Constitutional Principle
But there are lots of people who seem to think so, no few of them in the Oklahoma Legislature and the Courts of the land. They include those people, whom I find mutually despicable, who beat their teenagers and kick them into the street because they come out gay, who see every Muslim as a potential terrorist, see every person with mental illness as a potential mass murderer, and then justify themselves with something along the lines of, “God wills it!” There’s at least one movie including that theme, starring Orlando Bloom and titled “Kingdom of Heaven”.
The Supreme Court of the United States has at times allowed this non-existent principle to guide some of its worst rulings. For example, those regarding prisoners and mental illnesses, like the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle and 1990 Washington v. Harper cases. In its zeal to limit the legal rights of prisoners, it has again proven that old democratic principle that what you can do to people you don’t like, you can do to anyone. Since people with mental illnesses are such an unpopular minority, few worry about any injustice done to them. But the High Court’s decisions have not only affected prisoners, but damaged those with mental illnesses who have committed no crime, and even those who have had neither mental illness or a criminal record.
If you don’t thinks so then please read this article from the Houston Chronicle’s series on insurance scams by psychiatric hospitals, “Profitable Addictions”:
It relates how (after the Barefoot decision declared that psychiatric examinations were virtually infallible, or “not entirely unreliable”) “CHAMPUS mental health claims … more than doubled between 1985 and 1989”. A U.S. General Accounting Office report “found nearly two-thirds of the mental health claims … were for treatment considered medically questionable”.
It states, “Texas became the focus of a state and federal probe last year after a 14-year-old San Antonio youth, covered by CHAMPUS, was picked up by a private security firm and taken to a private psychiatric hospital. His admission to the facility was based on the diagnosis of a doctor the youth never saw. It took a court order to gain his release.”
The links below describe this incident and others in greater detail:
In the case of 14-year-old Jeramy Harrell, a doctor who had never seen him had him apprehended by a private security firm, calling itself “Sector One, Mobile Crisis Unit”, handcuffed, hospitalized and forcibly drugged. All on the false claims of Jeramy’s 12-year-old brother. Here in Tulsa, that function is performed by the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services, which exists to find reasons to have people committed to “treatment”, and the Tulsa Police Department, which does the public handcuffing, humiliating and transporting to a place of incarceration and drugging.
If you think this can’t happen to you or anyone you love, think again. You don’t even have to have a mental illness, just a hard time in your life, a bad day, or the allegation of one. Someone only needs to denounce you as mentally ill, and COPES will show up with a quick-on-the-trigger sworn certification that you need treatment. The State defines mental illness as whatever two “mental health professionals” say it is. According to one Dept of Mental Health Patient Advocate, their only standard is “state law”.
They only have to say that you are mentally ill, even if that’s how they benefit their own jobs, and you have virtually no recourse. Their opinions are not only infallible, but if they work for the State, they are protected from any lawsuit in State court regarding the “good faith” performance of their duties. If you try to dispute that, you have to go up against the State Attorney General, who absolves the State and its employees of any law they break. Violate your due process and civil liberties? Tough titties. And don’t expect a Federal Judge to give a damn, either.
Sets a fine example of being responsible for their own actions, doesn’t it? Not to mention a parallel to the secret police in a communist dictatorship. All this from the extra-legal, extra-constitutional Right to Fear and Loathing, so thoughtfully upheld by the not-entirely-unreliable infinite wisdom of the Supreme Court.
The Diane Rehm show discussed something not-entirely-unreliable this morning; a steroid shot for back pain contaminated with fungus.
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In Huffman v. OPM, 2001, #00-3184, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit went to a dictionary to define the word “disclose” in the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). It ruled that telling a wrongdoer about his or her wrongdoing cannot be a “disclosure”’ because the wrongdoer already knows about it, and because the purpose of the WPA is:
“to encourage disclosures that are likely to remedy the wrong. … The wrongdoer is not such a person. Extending the WPA to cover reports to a supervisor of the supervisor’s own misconduct would also have drastic adverse consequences. As we stated in Willis, “[d]iscussion and even disagreement with supervisors over job-related duties is a normal part of most occupations.” Willis, 141 F.3d at 1143. If every complaint made to a supervisor concerning an employee’s disagreement with the supervisor’s actions were considered to be a disclosure protected under the WPA, virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim the protection of the Act. Although Congress intended that the WPA’s coverage be broad, we think it unlikely that Congress intended the Act to extend that far, and we hold that it did not.”
It seems more likely that the Court refers to “drastic” consequences to its own docket than to the employee. But it misses the point. Instead of pinning nature of the disclosure on the consequences of the wrongdoing, no matter how criminal or disastrous, the Court pinned it on the mere circumstances.
Its decision means that the WPA does not protect the innocent employee of a criminal enterprise who sees something he is not supposed to, and reports it to his supervisor, not knowing that his supervisor is in on it. Thus the supervisor could murder the employee and, under the Court’s interpretation, it could not be a WPA case.
In Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), in order to put a convicted murderer on death row, the Supreme Court of the United States held that no one could question whether psychiatry even had any validity in predicting future dangerous behavior; that the psychiatrist making the prediction did not even have to personally examine person about whom the prediction is made; and that merely answering of hypothetical questions about the person is good enough to admit as evidence in a court of law. Paraphrasing the decision, one might as well say:
“Don’t worry about a thing; even though your heart surgeon has not examined either you or your medical record, he has learned about you through hypothetical questions, and there is no evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable.”
In the Toyota v. Willams case, 2002, U.S. Supreme Court certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the sixth circuit, No. 00-1089, a woman who could not raise her arms above her head was fired because Toyota instituted a job rotation policy requiring every person on the line to be able to perform every job on the line. They called it a “business necessity”, which perhaps not coincidentally would eliminate anyone who couldn’t do it because of a disability. The Japanese have been notoriously intolerant of differences. The High Court unanimously ruled in Toyota’s favor, stringing out a long, involved rationale on the nature of disabilities which none on the Court apparently had.
Not even the U.S. Army requires every grunt and tech to do every job. If it did, it might send to the firing squad every helicopter tech who couldn’t bake a cake, and every cook who couldn’t maintain a helicopter. It would be a long list and a lot of bullets.
Wisdom and reasoning and decisions worthy of the highest Courts in the land should not be so easy to lampoon. But when they are specially constructed to reach a desired end, rather than as expressions of Constitutional justice, they quickly become so.
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I’d guess not. Then they would actually have to demonstrate accountability for the tax money they spend and the lives they damage.
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I’ve been searching the Houston Chronicle archives
( http://search.chron.com/chronicle/search.do search on: profitable addictions psychiatric hospital )
and finding the series to be even more extensive than I had realized. I’ve downloaded 40 “Profitable Addictions” and related articles and still not seen them all. They paint a chilling picture of patient abuses committed by private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals in Texas, that have some striking similarities to the practices of the State-operated and funded mental health system here and now. They include:
State laws that allowed abuses.
A State mental health department contributing to the problems.
The use of hearsay to justify Doctors’ orders for detention and commitment.
Crisis lines run by hospitals that funneled callers into hospitals.
Crisis teams that always recommend commitment.
Lack of regulation on mental health recommendations made to courts.
Courts depending upon hospital staff to make recommendations for commitment to their hospitals.
Patients isolated from their doctors, lawyers and families.
In that system, children as young as one-year-old, whom we all know don’t have fully-developed brains, were put in psychiatric hospitals. Some teenagers were kept for years, robbing them of their childhoods. As noted here before, healthy adults and children were abducted from the street and their homes, even on the orders of psychiatrists who had not seen or examined them.
Even conservative Texans found this appalling, but not the Supreme Court of the United States, whose Decisions on the mental health evaluations of Texas prisoners preceded these abuses. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, for example, the Court ruled on the use of the testimony by Dr. James Grigson (otherwise known as Dr. Death or The Hanging Psychiatrist, later expelled in 1995 for malpractice in such cases by both the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians) to put convicted murderer Barefoot on death row. Dr. Grigson nearly always recommended the death penalty, even for prisoners he had never personally examined and for at least one who later turned out to be innocent. Among other things, the Court held that
a) Barefoot had no right to question the accuracy and reliability of any psychiatrist’s prediction of his future violent behavior, partly out of concern that not only would this resource for putting people on death row be lost, it would affect other expert witnesses.
b) “Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions.”
c) "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact.", citing the California Supreme Court to justify using psychiatric predictions of future violence, even though they were wrong two times out of three.
Thus the Supreme Court paved the way for psychiatric hospitals in Texas to order the detention and commitment of people they had never seen or examined, usually on the basis of hearsay. Doctors could even order this on their own authority, never bothering with the courts. What a pity we don’t seem to have investigative reporters here to take as good a look at our mental health system.
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The level of ignorance and irrational hatred toward our government is now truly alarming.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any “consumer” inside its walls, citing HIPPA regulations. In its “Uncivil Rights” section, mentalillnesspolicy.org blames HIPPA regulations for keeping family members from finding out the status of loved ones who get scooped up by or shoved into mental institutions like TCBH. But what’s the truth?
When a friend of mine ended up in the hospital after a fall, I could call any hospital in town and find out whether or not he had been admitted, was there, or had been discharged. I could get his room number and telephone number. On one of those occasions, I went to visit him. HIPPA did not stop me.
Yet both kinds of institutions are covered by HIPPA. They both have to obey it. What’s the difference? Why in one case should even immediate family be deliberately kept in the dark about the status of their loved ones? Even the county jail has public information on who is there right up on the internet. Why is TCBH so special?
It’s not. The truth is that alternative incarceration in a mental facility was originally meant to apply only to those who had committed crimes while mentally ill. Under that system, they could be admitted to a place like TCBH, to be treated for mental health issues that gave rise to criminal behavior, only after (note this) publicly renouncing all claims to innocence.
Places like TCBH don’t adhere to such legal niceties. After being arrested in public by swarming police, whom apparently HIPPA does not restrict from publicly humiliating people, the inmates are “evaluated” by “mental health professionals” who have been shown by research to be wrong about two out of every three times. Even when they don’t put their thumbs on the scales in their own favor, to justify their own jobs.
Who is the so-called privacy for? By the time people get to TCBH, the public police swarm and handcuffing has already pulled the privacy cat out of its bag. If friends and neighbors who were never interviewed didn’t think there was anything wrong with an inmate before, they now have reason to wonder. If the inmates hadn’t been stressed out and emotionally troubled before, they are now.
HIPPA has nothing to do with it. Places like TCBH are not primarily involved in medical care. Places like TCBH function mainly as gulags for people who have annoyed someone with more social power with “inappropriate behavior”. Their “treatment” mainly consists of making the inmate feel guilty and responsible for whatever someone else didn’t like about them. For every person that might actually be having a mental health crisis, one can expect that TCBH houses at least two more who are there merely to have their attitudes adjusted to better suit those around them on the outside.
Instead, the “privacy” is for TCBH and the Mental Health Court, so that no one on the outside can see that they are not truly a health care facility or dedicated to Constitutional justice, or examine their “standard of care” or their standards of due process, and complain about them.
So the next time someone disappears into the gulag, and the gulag says, “We can neither confirm nor deny”, don’t take the gulag’s word. If you truly care about that person, get a lawyer and a judge and force the gulag to disclose your loved one’s status, and to allow in other Doctors whom you trust, to examine your loved one and produce a second opinions. You might just find that the so-called mental health crisis was produced and/or manufactured by publicly humiliating police action and the same people who claim to be “treating” it.
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The Supreme Court of the United States has used extraordinarily specious logic to separate those with mental illnesses from civil rights and the standards of justice it would apply to everyone else. Which the lower courts have followed in lock step.
In the movie “Judgment at Nuremburg”, a movie well worth watching, Spencer Tracy’s character, a U.S. jurist, passes judgment on a German judge who worked under the Nazis. You can find his speech here:
http://www.politicalspeeches.net/us-politics/spencer-tracy-delivers-final-verdict-from-judgement-at-nuremburg
In essence, if I remember correctly, the German judge had claimed the defense that he was just administering the laws as written. Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. It was in a Federal District courtroom – here in Tulsa. The judge told me that if I wanted a different result, then I should get the laws changed.
The thing is, he and all his colleagues have sworn an oath to the Constitution of the United States, which stands above the laws. The Supreme Court is not infallible. It occasionally makes stupidly egregious, unconstitutional decisions, based more upon the jerking of ideological knees than upon evidence. A lower court judge who administers them blindly, with no recourse to or consideration of constitutional values, absolves himself or herself with the same excuse as that German judge at Nuremburg.
Occasionally, rather than condemn the innocent to injustice, a lower court judge should stand up and be counted on the side of the Constitution, even if it means his or her career. The judge’s opinion should provide the Supreme Court with the evidence and reasoning necessary to see the error of its ways, even if the Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, then issues a reversal.
All it takes is courage and integrity, which people with unaccountable, lifetime appointments seem ill-inclined to exercise on behalf of those beneath them, whom they hold in judgment.
“Always tell the truth, even if it means your life.” - from the Knight’s Oath in the movie, The Kingdom of Heaven.
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I once contacted NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, about getting some legal help. The local chapter, I think. No, they didn’t do that. Instead, they advocate for the families of those with mental illness to get treatment for them, like involuntary commitment. So does a place on the web called mentalillnesspolicy.org.
These organizations emphasize the damage that a minority of people with mental illness do to themselves and others in order to motivate and create public policy for so-called “progressive” involuntary treatment. They show no awareness of or concern for what license it gives governments and institutions to threaten, abuse and damage anyone they deem in need of their care, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
So it doesn’t matter what we want or need; they don’t need to ask us. They just want to do what they think is good for us, voluntary or not. Kind of like that toilet law in the movie, The Help. Of course, those white Southern women didn’t lock their help in their special toilets for weeks or months on end. They needed their help for dirty work.
Imagine if Oklahoma legislators thought they could catch mental illness from a toilet seat. Based on what we’ve seen the last few years, it’s not inconceivable, them thinking that. Then I bet we’d get special toilets, too.
It saves all that trouble of asking those with mental illness what we need and what works best for us. Of considering how to approach us without threats, and get us voluntarily involved with counseling, medication and meaningful, productive employment.
Don’t we all see it every day? When it comes to raising money for a cause, fear and loathing sells better.
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If you install MSE, you may find that you can no longer
1) check your disk for errors, due to a “recently installed software package”
2) uninstall MSE, unless you institute a search for the installation files, because it will tell you that you don’t have access to a needed resource
Get something like Avast free antivirus instead.
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If you have Windows 7, Do Not, repeat DO NOT, enable offline access to files on another computer on your network. Win7 will take up space on its own hard drive duplicating files on the network drive, which you might never get back. You may be unable to delete the folder containing those files, even if you are the only user/administrator on the computer, and the person who set up the mapped network drive. If you try to do so, you may get a message stating that you cannot do so until you get permission from yourself, which Win7 may not allow.
If you try to fix this by connecting to the network drive and re-enabling offline files, you may get errors that will not allow Windows to start, requiring you to do a Startup Repair. This problem may be connected with the installation of Microsoft Security Essentials, which admits in its license agreement that it might make changes that will keep programs or Windows from running. And limits the Microsoft’s responsibility for damages to $5.
Caveat Emptor
If only more packages ran on Linux easily, we could all dump Microsoft and its bugs.
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When Judges mess up, law insulates from their own mistakes they who rule with something like divine and royal right in this country. Instead they compel the rest of us to have intimate relations with the canine pet in their place.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Some decades ago, I worked summers in more than one Arkansas chicken processing plant. Fortunately, I didn’t like chicken to begin with. Otherwise the flies, overflowing urinals and meat dropped on the floor at one of them (under the empty noses of in-plant USDA inspectors), might have put me off.
If you want to enjoy sausage, don’t watch it being made.
If you want to believe in justice, don’t read the opinions.
********
In a previous post, I missed a few of things that can get a psychiatrist in trouble. These include demonstrably driving a patient to suicide, stealing from petty cash, violating HIPPA regulations by releasing medical files to the wrong people, and bilking the government for services not rendered. The last two are the only things that ever seem to cause Federal judges and prosecutors any concern, outrage or distress. Violating HIPPA regulations by falsifying, manufacturing or suppressing medical information doesn’t appear to be a Federal concern.
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It’s the death of economic hope for those on the bottom. In the old Soviet system, for example, the food harvests were constantly behind targets and needs. Conservatives here rightly pointed out that it stemmed from the lack of incentive for farmers to profit in any way from the fruits of their labors. The State owned everything they did, and paid them all the same. So why work hard if it all pays the same?
Here, it’s a little different, but too often to the same effect. Here, people on the bottom tend to be those on the dole, and all get paid the same. Here, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, conservatives have a false narrative that says anyone can work their way out of their circumstances. Instead, if someone on the dole makes too much money, the State takes back more of the dole than the value of what the person made for him or her self. Sell a tee shirt, and the State can strip or claw back ten times as much or more.
To the people on the bottom living on State’s sufferance, the difference between communist and conservative systems is merely ideological, merely words. It still strips from them the practical ability to benefit from the fruits of their own ambition and labor. Many are living so close to the bone, losing the dole would mean homelessness. So those who would really like to work their way up, losing benefits as a fraction of their profits, have to stay where they are.
Economically, it all pays the same.
Communist or conservative, the politicians might as well be talking with the same forked tongue. Both are so blinded by the holy purity of their ideologies that they can’t address any of the real problems with solutions that work to everyone’s benefit. They aren’t really Saul on the road to Damascus, they just play him in the propaganda.
And no, I don’t think liberals are that much better. They have other intellect-blinding flaws. They certainly haven’t done any better in developing a path to independence.
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Because I belong to a minority, people with mental illnesses, many if not most people are satisfied never to demand an accounting for what may happen to the likes of me in our justice system or a mental institution. So it doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court of the United States has elevated psychiatry up to a virtually unaccountable, allegedly medical discipline, which usually can be sued for malpractice only in the very rare instance that a psychiatric patient hurts someone. Sue a psychiatrist for a bad diagnosis that hurts a patient? Out of all the medical disciplines, unaccountable psychiatry has the right to define that as delusion. In order to be sued successfully, a psychiatrist literally has to beat or rape a patient. Otherwise, anything goes.
Many if not most people seem to think that this can never affect them, only those whom they fear and loath. That Psychiatrists Know Best. After all, the Supreme Court said so, emphasizing time and again that lawyers and judges have no business getting in the way of “medical decisions”. As if, despite all evidence to the contrary, such doctors could never, possibly, in a million years, make mistakes or put their personal benefit over the patient’s. And if such things should happen, the Supreme Court, which has stacked the deck by ruling in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom that judges and lawyers should stay out of the way, tells us that the adversarial process will fix surely them. As if there are no consequences to judicial hubris.
Life must look a bit different to people on a high mountaintop than it does to the rest of us down here. Down here, psychiatrists are just as human and venal as anyone else. Just as ready to take advantage of legislated unaccountability. Just as capable of damaging even people who think it can only happen to those they don’t like.
In the case of 14-year-old Jeramy Harrell and his grandmother, Marianne,
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808777/profitable-addictions-captured-and-held-against-wi.html
bad psychiatry left lasting scars. I recall reading that either Jeramy or a similar young boy went into a psychiatric hospital scam a vivacious, talkative kid, and came out withdrawn and almost non-verbal, but I can’t find the reference for you. The one just above reports that Marianne Harrell, who had been a child in Nazi Germany, and had been [perhaps publicly] accused of abusing Jeramy, came out of it unable to see a patrol car without cringing. “She now never leaves her doors unlocked – even when she is at home.”
The same article details other psychiatric abductions and assaults. One 51-year-old woman, Beverly Williams, “was dragged out of her bathroom by two security guards [clad only in her bathrobe, it seems] and handcuffed on an emergency apprehension and detention warrant.” The same kind used by the Tulsa Mental Health Court. “Beverly Williams, considered a “model employee” by her employer, said she was so embarrassed and humiliated by the experience that she has tinted the windows of her car so neighbors can’t see her when she leaves home.”
These people were nominally sane and without any criminal conviction, and they suffered lasting damage. How much self-absorbed stupidity does it take to presume that police, district attorneys, courts, mental institutions and government employees and contractors can do the same thing to those who already have lasting damage and not make it worse? My, how they justify and absolve themselves in their conceit and bigotry.
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Oh yeah! Now I get it! That’s what you mean by fiction.
It only took near murder by the rapist to turn Berry’s character around. If the world as we know it really does end in 2012, maybe we can get the same deal.
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In its 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, the Supreme Court justified the virtual infallibility of psychiatric predictions of “dangerousness” in part by quoting the California Supreme Court in People v. Murtishaw, 1981:
“The court distinguished cases, however, where "the trier of fact is required by statute to determine whether a person is dangerous,'" in which event, "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact." ”
Oh. You mean like the old test to determine if a woman was a witch. They tied her up and threw her into a deep enough body of water. If she floated, it meant that the water rejected her as unholy, and they could burn her. If she sank and drowned, well then, she was innocent and her soul was going to God. No harm, no foul.
Yup, the Court knows that the old justice is best.
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On the Diane Rehm show today, discussing the current whistleblower protection legislation in Congress, one of the commentators stated that most cases are dismissed because they are Pro Se. In other words, brought by people who cannot afford lawyers to present them according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. If you are not a lawyer, have you ever tried to read and understand the FRCP? It might be as easy as a lawyer or judge trying to read an advanced engineering text.
Denying justice to people who cannot afford a lawyer, because they don’t know how to “state a case”, demonstrates jurisprudence at the same moral and Constitutional level as upholding a poll tax.
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I think someone should hold a contest to name all the things that are, in the words of the Supreme Court of the United States, not “almost entirely unreliable”, and thus should be allowed to stand as standards of evidence, or safe and effective procedure, under that standard of jurisprudence.
I’ll start – the o-rings on the solid rocket booster that blew up on launch and brought a Space Shuttle down out of the sky.
You see, the engineers responsible for certifying that the launch could proceed as safe didn’t want to, because they saw potentially serious problems with the o-rings, having witnessed excessive erosion by hot gasses in the ones recovered from previous launches and tests. But because the o-rings hadn’t failed yet, the managers of their employer and NASA contractor, Morton Thiokol, demanded that if they couldn’t prove the o-rings would fail, then they had to certify the launch. The engineers who gave in, and watched as seven or so astronauts died, including one who would have been the first schoolteacher in space, have borne the guilt of that ever since.
One can only speculate if that same Supreme Court standard of reliability set in the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle case in any way influenced the Challenger disaster of 1986. Only such things as diet fads, health food claims, and witch-hunts allow such low standards of proof. If something went wrong, not only would any licensed professional engineer be sued with considerable justification for deviating to use them, any self-respecting engineer would be ashamed even to try.
On the other hand, politicians, legislators, judges and Morton Thiokol managers don’t seem to have that problem. Perhaps they lack a gene for a sense of shame that troubles us at times.
I don’t approve of racism. But lawyerism … look cavalierly how they treat the rest of us.
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But there are lots of people who seem to think so, no few of them in the Oklahoma Legislature and the Courts of the land. They include those people, whom I find mutually despicable, who beat their teenagers and kick them into the street because they come out gay, who see every Muslim as a potential terrorist, see every person with mental illness as a potential mass murderer, and then justify themselves with something along the lines of, “God wills it!” There’s at least one movie including that theme, starring Orlando Bloom and titled “Kingdom of Heaven”.
The Supreme Court of the United States has at times allowed this non-existent principle to guide some of its worst rulings. For example, those regarding prisoners and mental illnesses, like the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle and 1990 Washington v. Harper cases. In its zeal to limit the legal rights of prisoners, it has again proven that old democratic principle that what you can do to people you don’t like, you can do to anyone. Since people with mental illnesses are such an unpopular minority, few worry about any injustice done to them. But the High Court’s decisions have not only affected prisoners, but damaged those with mental illnesses who have committed no crime, and even those who have had neither mental illness or a criminal record.
If you don’t thinks so then please read this article from the Houston Chronicle’s series on insurance scams by psychiatric hospitals, “Profitable Addictions”:
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1992_1052024/profitable-addictions-abuses-in-mental-health-prog.html
It relates how (after the Barefoot decision declared that psychiatric examinations were virtually infallible, or “not entirely unreliable”) “CHAMPUS mental health claims … more than doubled between 1985 and 1989”. A U.S. General Accounting Office report “found nearly two-thirds of the mental health claims … were for treatment considered medically questionable”.
It states, “Texas became the focus of a state and federal probe last year after a 14-year-old San Antonio youth, covered by CHAMPUS, was picked up by a private security firm and taken to a private psychiatric hospital. His admission to the facility was based on the diagnosis of a doctor the youth never saw. It took a court order to gain his release.”
The links below describe this incident and others in greater detail:
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808777/profitable-addictions-captured-and-held-against-wi.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1993_1141866/profitable-addictions-doctor-who-triggered-probe-c.html
http://www.cchr.org/sites/default/files/CCHR_Pamphlet_Massive_Fraud_1.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Coronary-True-Story-Medicine-Gone/dp/product-description/0743267540
http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-14800954/rip-offs-depress-mental-health-care
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/jan/24/several-claim-theyve-been-institutionalized-agains/
In the case of 14-year-old Jeramy Harrell, a doctor who had never seen him had him apprehended by a private security firm, calling itself “Sector One, Mobile Crisis Unit”, handcuffed, hospitalized and forcibly drugged. All on the false claims of Jeramy’s 12-year-old brother. Here in Tulsa, that function is performed by the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services, which exists to find reasons to have people committed to “treatment”, and the Tulsa Police Department, which does the public handcuffing, humiliating and transporting to a place of incarceration and drugging.
If you think this can’t happen to you or anyone you love, think again. You don’t even have to have a mental illness, just a hard time in your life, a bad day, or the allegation of one. Someone only needs to denounce you as mentally ill, and COPES will show up with a quick-on-the-trigger sworn certification that you need treatment. The State defines mental illness as whatever two “mental health professionals” say it is. According to one Dept of Mental Health Patient Advocate, their only standard is “state law”.
They only have to say that you are mentally ill, even if that’s how they benefit their own jobs, and you have virtually no recourse. Their opinions are not only infallible, but if they work for the State, they are protected from any lawsuit in State court regarding the “good faith” performance of their duties. If you try to dispute that, you have to go up against the State Attorney General, who absolves the State and its employees of any law they break. Violate your due process and civil liberties? Tough titties. And don’t expect a Federal Judge to give a damn, either.
Sets a fine example of being responsible for their own actions, doesn’t it? Not to mention a parallel to the secret police in a communist dictatorship. All this from the extra-legal, extra-constitutional Right to Fear and Loathing, so thoughtfully upheld by the not-entirely-unreliable infinite wisdom of the Supreme Court.
The Diane Rehm show discussed something not-entirely-unreliable this morning; a steroid shot for back pain contaminated with fungus.