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.
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.
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.
I am a family man with a beautiful wife and three wonderful children. Despite the repeated efforts of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 892, General Manager William (Bill) Cartwright and Director of Operations Mike Colbert have refused to dispense the 2% stipend that Mayor Dewey Bartlett handed out in July 2012. Also Cartwright and Colbert have refused to close contract negotiations with the union withholding much needed funds for tools and uniforms and employees. Citing the reasons that the Union will not accept a cut in the terms of reducing the amount of medical leave an employee can take before returning to work, only offering a 10 dollar increase in uniform/tool allowances. All the whole Tulsa Transit continues to hire new drivers and is in no shortage of funding for TV commercials or photo opportunities. Where is the money? Collecting interest in the company's account until such time General Manager Bill Cartwright and Director of Operations Mike Colbert deem fit to hand out money that has belonged to each employee since July 2012. The money is being withheld from us for no good reason except to look like a savior when it does FINALLY get dispensed. Also Colbert has been quoted saying "When the Union is hungry enough, they will come and sign."Who treats their employees like this? I am forced down this road of publicity as the Mayor's Office and City Council have offered no help. The poor business practices of not only William Cartwright but also Mike Colbert need to be made public. The employees’ interests and concerns are CLEARLY not on their priority list.
Back during the Christmas season of 2010, I called someone I knew inside TCBH (the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, or This Can’t Be Happening, the local loony bin), and asked how many people were confined there. For those of us with things like PTSD and depression, the holidays are particularly miserable. Many of our families have long ago made it clear that we just aren’t welcome. Some going all the way back to childhood, which is one reason why we have things like PTSD and depression.
We remember how it used to be, or how it should be from what we see in other families, and for us, it isn’t. Maybe some as they exclude us, hog a beloved parent’s time. Isn’t that just special; doesn’t that just put the angel on the top of the tree. So anger and depression are not far away.
And do you know what my friend inside said? There weren’t many inmates in TCBH for the holidays. Instead of filling up to capacity, the beds had been mostly emptied.
Small wonder to some of us who have known the place. A few who are seriously ill and need a place to stay can’t be released without serious liability to TCBH. And even for them, it’s just a warm-body warehouse, kept nearly full the rest of the year to keep the place running. So on the holidays, why keep the staff from their families for the sake of those inmates the staff has manipulated into filling beds. Head ‘em up, move ‘em out, rawhide.
It would be interesting to go back over the records of all the state mental institutions, individually and together, and see just how the inmate levels change with the holidays. And compare them to the county jails. Even better, to see if the inmates get shifted from one to the other. No doubt the State might wish to avoid that comparison. It might say something negative about its sincerity and commitment in treating mental illness.
*******
This morning the Diane Rehm show had a discussion about the mental health and employment needs of veterans coming back from our wars. A lot of them are coming back with things like PTSD and depression. I can attest to one statement, that employment is the best mental health treatment. Of course, in a very conservative state like this one, which has little or no tolerance for any kind of difference or deviance, that is a very long shot. And religion, in this most fundamentalist of states? One soldier who has spent more than a decade killing people said, “So what do I do on Sunday morning?”
The show made mention of the terrible need for “evidence-based treatment” and “cognitive behavior therapy”. Evidence-based treatment has actually been tested to see if it works. It means that someone has actually bothered to follow up with patients and find that out. The results in patients are important, not the philosophy or personal agenda of the psychiatrist. It can only work if the patient is not satisfied with being upset, and wants to find another way to think.
TCBH takes a stab at cognitive behavior therapy, paying it some lip service. But one can hardly expect it to work in a place where patients are upset because the staff has filled the beds by any means possible, including false accusations and evaluations. Where the staff itself behaves in ways guaranteed to trigger PTSD and depression, attempting to motivate the patients only with guilt and incarceration. And then claims cures and salvation when patients merely utter some formula statement that gets them out, about not being a danger to anyone.
That kind of phony, intrusive, involuntary, and even retaliatory approach subverts the whole process. But then, TCBH does not take much account of due process in either medicine or law. It might interfere with business.
All the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, I’d say that the judiciary is a fair representation of the electorate these days. Left wingnuts, right wingnuts, partisan bickering and divide. About as able to produce justice as Congress is to produce a workable budget. When we have no choice but to go to them without lawyers, asking for justice, and they tell us they are not obliged to make our cases for us, it’s not that much different from Congress refusing to govern. Only with judges, that attitude often comes with a lifetime appointment.
No sense of noblesse oblige there. Tell me again about term limits.
Having heard that cognitive behavioral therapy is evidence-based, I went looking to find out what it is. According to the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists, http://www.nacbt.org/whatiscbt.htm:
“1. CBT is based on the Cognitive Model of Emotional Response. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.”
Move over Pollyanna. Could it be that none of these therapists has ever been maimed, raped, threatened with death, or tortured, or has killed people in a war? Perhaps if one goes and slaps one in the face, one can tell the therapist if he or she feels angry or hurt, it’s their own fault for thinking that way. “Well, I’m just sorry that you feel like that.”
Now I see where TCBH LPC Julie King got her spiel. “If you had trouble with all those people, who’s the common denominator? It’s you.” Tell that to your friend or wife who’s been raped and then has to go back to work with a bunch of sexist yahoos. See how long your relationship lasts.
Maybe it works for some people in some circumstances, but it seems to me that even then it has to be applied with some sensitivity or it just defeats itself. The counselor or psychiatrist who tries force it on someone, and then claim they are “just not self aware” if they don’t buy it, does more harm than good. Rather like the husband who berates his wife a month after she was raped, because she didn’t get over it and service him in the manner to which he was accustomed.
I use the example of rape because most people in this country have understood it better and longer than things like schizophrenia, PTSD and depression. Women, after all, form a majority of the electorate and have a better union than people with mental illnesses. If you go to PubMed.gov, the online journal abstracting service of the National Library of Medicine, and do some research, you will find that many if not most people with serious mental illnesses reported seeing or experiencing abuse or abandonment when they were children.
Now we are noticing that Veterans experience the same effects. Someone on the Diane Rehm show noted that when they lose control in the service and get a dishonorable discharge, they lose all the mental health benefits they would otherwise have had. The commentator recommended that (for the benefit of society as a whole) whatever else they lose, they should not lose this.
Now imagine if State of Oklahoma institutions like TCBH weren’t falsifying medical records and evaluations, just to lock people up involuntarily and keep themselves running. Imagine if they fired the corrupt staff and went back to the original model of Mental Health Courts; supplying an alternative for mentally ill people who had actually been charged with a crime due to mental illness, instead of just accused. Imagine if they provided proactive, but voluntary and non-coercive programs for the mentally ill, including Veterans dishonorably discharged due to mental health issues. Imagine how much more good they could do if they weren’t stuck on feeding their own importance, no matter what the cost to their inmate patients.
Now try to get that through our State Legislature during its annual silly season. If they are afraid of Sharia law in our courts, imagine their terror of people with mental illnesses who actually exist. It’s hard to get rational discussion on a difficult subject into or out of some men; the opening in a penis is very, very small. I’ve met women like that, too. Maybe they envy all the wrong penises.
An interesting thing about U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving mental health issues; even though one can develop a basic understanding of the consensus of knowledge about mental illnesses just by reading the abstracts on PubMed.gov, the Court absolves judges from knowing anything about them, as if they are the unquestionable mysteries of God, which only the psychiatrist-priest may interpret. Apparently with a psychic dowsing rod, when it comes to civil commitments.
Too bad the Court doesn't give the rest of us the same break on the byzantine Federal Rules of Procedure. The judges just pick out something they don't like about a case, and hang the dismissal on that, ignoring all other rational argument and violations of civil and constitutional rights. Imagine if teachers flunked students on that basis. “No, Billy Stillborn, this was a three page assignment and you handed in four. I have to throw it out.”
And the Constitution says nothing specific about the right to an education, much less a just and effective one.
According to one commentator on NPR, a huge majority of Pro Se petitioners (those who can’t afford lawyers and try to file their own lawsuits) get thrown out of the courts, not necessarily on the merits of their case, but on their technical construction. In Federal Courts, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require those judges to give Pro Se petitioners a break. Federal Judges then get around the rules by quoting them and stating that they are still not obliged to make the petitioner’s cases for them. This gives them the excuse to pick any one small technical error and pronounce that the petitioner has not “stated a case” or “made a claim”. And ninety times or more out of hundred, the petitioner doesn’t know enough either to correct the alleged error or to dispute the judge.
Problem solved. One more case the judge doesn’t have to deal with, especially one that will take more time because the petitioner is not particularly skilled in making legal arguments or sticking to rules and formats. Or perhaps even so traumatized by an experience that just dealing with abusive lawyers from the other side is nearly impossible. Did the petitioner suffer massive and unjust deprivations of civil liberties and rights? Not the judge’s problem.
Wait a minute here. We have got massively complicated computer software that helps people to figure taxes, make medical differential diagnoses, put icons on your computer screen and fight computer-graphic alien monsters. It can’t be that impossible to create software that would guide a Pro Se petitioner through all the laws, case laws, evidence and witnesses to fill out court documents that would comply with all the applicable rules and standards. Not to mention save the poor, beleaguered judges all their precious time deciding how to scotch a case.
Of course the lawyers will object. That’s what they do, and don’t we all love them for it. Just remember the last time you tried to find a lawyer who would fight for you when you had almost nothing, and write your Congressional Representative and Senators tomorrow. If someone can start a company like YouTube or Google with a few thousand dollars and a garage, imagine what could be done with just a few million in government money (chump change to agencies like NSA or DoJ or DARPA) to develop that kind of software. Even better, a modest continuing budget to make it supported freeware, like Linux, along with U.S. Government certification of its correctness and effectiveness.
Mathematician John Nash and family advocate for mental health care, By Susan K. Livio/Statehouse Bureau (http://connect.nj.com/user/sklivio/index.html), New Jersey Messenger-Gazette, Published: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 10:00 PM
These are five references found on the Internet regarding mathematics Prof. John Nash, inaccurately portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. One portrays him as having been nasty almost to the point of psychopathy, and might or might not be a hatchet job. It’s the Internet, after all. Taken together, they depict a brilliant but deeply flawed man who became delusional in his adulthood with schizophrenia, starting about 1959.
Nash was forcibly committed several times, a practice he never enjoyed or appreciated. He was never again committed after 1970, and stopped taking medication. He cured himself of his delusions through his own determination and the love and support of his family and friends. He and his wife had a son with schizophrenia and have advocated for treatment in the community, instead of commitment, and the healing dignity of productive employment.
Just because people have mental difficulties doesn’t mean they don’t notice when they are being used and manipulated without just regard for their civil rights. Research at PubMed.gov shows that patients who are involuntarily committed in situations where, as here in Tulsa, due process is denied or manipulated, tend to become embittered with psychiatry, and are less likely to maintain any medication or contact with counseling agencies.
More and more research and counseling sources note that when something awful happens to a person, that person gets better a lot sooner if he or she can talk about it to family and friends. If not, then you find out who your family and friends really are, especially family. It takes a lot longer, if ever, to get over something traumatic, when they keep telling you to shut up when you try.
Whether it’s war, rape, fire, flood, assault, maiming injuries, tornado, torture, or whatever other violence man and nature can do to a person, if your family jeers at you when you try to get it out, they aren’t really your family. Not any more. They’re no better than the bully down the block. If just one of them calls you regularly to see how you are doing, then that person is your family. None of the rest matter.
There’s something basically and morally wrong about a family that has trained itself not to care about one of their own when the worst happens. And when they act like this is the godly thing to do, maybe your God dies, too. Along with all your religious holidays. You may find that whatever God is proud of that kind of caring, is not one you would want to spend an eternity with. From then on, you will have to find your own reasons for living. Nothing will ever be the same again, if it ever was.
That was one of the mortifications of high school, my father jeering that out when I came home and said that I had a date. Repeatedly. It wasn’t mortifying because I cared anything about skin color. We had lived in Hawaii with Asians and Polynesians. One of each had been my teachers in grade school. One of my best friends was half-Filipino. I was in love with Hawaiian mythology and religious legends, and read every book I could get my hands on.
In junior high, many of my classmates and some of my teachers were Hispanic. Some were Native American. We have a little Amerindian in our ancestry, which I thought was pretty cool. I didn’t have any Black friends or dates because I had never lived in a place where many of them did.
I don’t know why he picked that particular jeer, other than the fact that we were living in a place that had been segregated in both residence and school, and it was during the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. There were no Black kids in our high school. It hurt not because I cared anything about skin color. It hurt because I knew from long experience that he meant it to, because he was expressing his contempt and dislike, his disgust since early childhood that I was a member of his family. Something that he taught to my siblings.
It hurt to live with. A couple of times I almost didn’t, but failed to escape. So when someone lied and got me dragged off to the local loony bin, This Can’t Be Happening, where the keepers took any vile hearsay as justification for their actions, where they took that kind of childhood experience to claim that I am more dangerous than others, and made it their mission to make me believe so, for me it was just another set of bullies with another set of jeers.
Well, who wouldn’t find that state-sanctioned laying on of hands and psychiatric diagnoses to be healing? Maybe just those of us who don’t believe that Johnny-come-lately, fly-by-night witch doctors have any superior insight into long self-examined grief. The kind of white witch doctors who would take any mention or explanation of such grief, and convert it into psychopathy and deviance to justify their own existence and right-to-treat. Who would rub one’s nose into one’s misery just to create the kind of shock and pain that seem to fulfill the Oklahoma State Code Title 43A legal requirements for involuntary “treatment”.
Wow. Almost like family. Although I’m straight, I might have some understanding of the abandonment gay kids feel when their families kick them out onto the street. I wonder. Are they any happier or luckier if it didn’t start when they were five years old?
Of course, the way I hear it, anyone who tries to discuss this, even in private, is “just trying to bring down the family name”. The Favorite Son is not amused. As I’ve heard him say more than once, “It’s all about Me.” The right to all critical thinking is His alone, passed down from His Earthly Father. Happy Holidays.
When church people are sitting in church, pretending to be good Christians, they might possibly reflect that when they treat other people like crap, those other people remember. And if those other people don’t feel any need to pretend to be good Christians, they may not feel any obligation to forgive church people, whenever church people imagine they should. Bullies, after all, can dish it out. But they usually can’t take it.
Some might wonder why I bother to write so much. It’s not because I believe that I deserve or have any great following. That would be pretty conceited, and I’ve met too many, and grown up with a few, who are best men or women within the sounds of their own voices. No, it probably has more to do with the fact that for so many years, others enforced my silence with threats and jeers. It took me a long time and a lot of practice to find my own voice.
Now I intend to use it. If I do any good with this, it may be in helping others to find their voices, or at least give them some words and ideas when they, like I once was, are unable to find how to say what they feel.
The Christ I used to believe in was not afraid or ashamed to associate with the lowest classes of his day, the prostitutes and publicans, those who had little or no voice in their own society. From what I’ve read, he treated them with decency and respect, listening to what they had to say. He spoke up for them. Try getting that from most lawyers or judges or church people, many of those who claim to live in His image.
I’m not that good or charitable, and won’t even admit to being a Christian, much less a good one. Perhaps that comes from some, or one, who pretended or claimed to be the best kind of Christian, convincing me with jeers and contempt that I had no place in any heaven, back when I was a child. Unlike some I have known, I merely resist passing those jeers and contempt on to those who have done nothing to hurt me. For one thing, it’s a huge waste of emotion and productive energy, with which overly righteous people seem to be overly endowed.
So if anyone is actually reading this, who’s holding a gun to your head to make you? Not me. If you don’t like it, I figure your conscience has a mute button with a lot of wear on it. And if you like that line, feel free to use it. Of course, I may not wish to be implicated in your personal heresy. I’m having enough trouble with my own.
Draft of Questions for the Supreme Court of the United States
1. Given the subsequent horrific scams, scandals, deprivations of civil rights, and miscarriages of justice detailed in such articles as the Houston Chronicle “Profitable Addictions” series (App D, 5 of more than 40), as well as Congressional hearings and reports of the Government Accounting Office, and given the propensity for even innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves under interrogation (App E), and this Court’s dependence upon a long-since discredited psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, aka “Dr. Death” (App F), among other situations presented here, has this Court made ill-considered decisions involving mental illness, which should be thoroughly overturned and thoughtfully reconsidered, according to some of the arguments contained herein.
2. And, given the vast array of medical and legal literature contrary to this Court’s thinking, going back to before the 1979 Addington v. Texas decision, have this Court’s decisions regarding mental illness been overly influenced by common fears and biases against people with mental illnesses, resulting in an unconstitutional legal double standard, much like that in the time of the Dred Scott decision.
3. Whether, considering the awful and widespread damage done by such things as psychiatric hospital scams and scandals, when civil commitment is done, especially when those involved in the commitment should have had the knowledge or skill to recognize the difference and/or violations of civil liberties, does this commitment consist of a criminal and/or false imprisonment and trigger the Sixth and/or Eighth Amendments when done: without adequate due process; and/or for corrupt or malicious purposes other than “treatment”; and/or without any means to treat the patient; and/or without intention to treat the patient; and/or without medically effective treatment for the patient’s real or alleged condition. In other words, if the standards for due process and commitment and review and damages set by this Court have been so wise and just, why have there been so many knowing and/or incompetent abductions and/or false commitments of innocent people without any mental illness, including children as young as one year old?
4. May this petitioner be allowed to present a petition for a writ of certiorari, delayed until after these reconsiderations are made, with sufficient and competent legal help to do the job right, so as not to be dismissed out of hand on any mere technicality or judicial dislike, disregarding all other violations of this petitioner’s civil liberties, due process and other Constitutional rights, as lower courts have done.
Public water fluoridation makes me mad. It costs big bucks and the water rates we pay keep going up. People need to go to the Fluoride Action Network's website, fluoridealert.org, to get educated about this obsolete practice, and get the city to stop it. It may not stop the rising cost of water altogether, but maybe it will help, and no one will ever notice the difference. Except, maybe the grass will get greener - most of the water goes there or down the drain anyway.
I was standing in line at a bank today and overheard a conversation between a teller and a customer, "There was a $32.50 overdraft fee and then after 5 days it is an additional $6.50 fee per day." Holy bank robbery, Batman; $6.50 per day? The original overdraft was only about $23.00.
I had to stop and change my transaction-- I was going to deposit everything but now I kept out $75.00 as the $23.00 overdraft of the poor victim in the next lane had blossomed to over $70.00. I was more than willing to pay it for her just so the fees would stop accumulating. Sister to sister you know what I mean.
Ironically, I was there with the day late rent payment from one of my renters. In the lease it says, and they initialed it, "Late fee of 2% for everyday upto five days." I have never collected that. I will if they are late every month (this was the first month they lived there-- think about it-- utility deposits, needed a couch, they were already struggling...)
Kicking people when they are already down makes no sense to me. I refuse to participate unless absolutely necessary. I just saw a TV show on "A" people -- the list included Scrooge, Steve Jobs, K. West... granted they are all rich like I wish I was...
But I think the first step I will take toward becoming rich will be to do more of my banking at Arvest. There they have a $17.50 overdraft and you had better get it back in there before they close your account.
I will let that big bank who, by there name, seems to wish to represent Oklahomans go on without me.--- Rich Oklahoma Bank customers can bank there, and the other 94% of us who cannot afford to pay that for mistakes should bank else where. (Roughly less than 6% of the US population makes more than $75,000 a year. I have always wanted to be part of the 6% club; but not by stealing from other people.)
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I’d guess not. Then they would actually have to demonstrate accountability for the tax money they spend and the lives they damage.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I am a family man with a beautiful wife and three wonderful children. Despite the repeated efforts
of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 892, General Manager William (Bill) Cartwright and Director of Operations Mike Colbert have refused to dispense the 2% stipend that Mayor Dewey Bartlett handed out in July 2012. Also Cartwright and Colbert have refused to close contract negotiations with the union withholding much needed funds for tools and uniforms and employees. Citing the reasons that the Union will not accept a cut in the terms of reducing the amount of medical leave an employee can take before returning to work, only offering a 10 dollar increase in uniform/tool allowances. All the whole Tulsa Transit continues to hire new drivers and is in no shortage of funding for TV commercials or photo opportunities. Where is the money? Collecting interest in the company's account until such time General Manager Bill Cartwright and Director of Operations Mike Colbert deem fit to hand out money that has belonged to each employee since July 2012. The money is being withheld from us for no good reason except to look like a savior when it does FINALLY get dispensed. Also Colbert has been quoted saying "When the Union is hungry enough, they will come and sign."Who treats their employees like this? I am forced down this road of publicity as the Mayor's Office and City Council have offered no help. The poor business practices of not only William Cartwright but also Mike Colbert need to be made public. The employees’ interests and concerns are CLEARLY not on their priority list.
Very Sincerely,
Tulsa Transit Employee
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Back during the Christmas season of 2010, I called someone I knew inside TCBH (the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, or This Can’t Be Happening, the local loony bin), and asked how many people were confined there. For those of us with things like PTSD and depression, the holidays are particularly miserable. Many of our families have long ago made it clear that we just aren’t welcome. Some going all the way back to childhood, which is one reason why we have things like PTSD and depression.
We remember how it used to be, or how it should be from what we see in other families, and for us, it isn’t. Maybe some as they exclude us, hog a beloved parent’s time. Isn’t that just special; doesn’t that just put the angel on the top of the tree. So anger and depression are not far away.
And do you know what my friend inside said? There weren’t many inmates in TCBH for the holidays. Instead of filling up to capacity, the beds had been mostly emptied.
Small wonder to some of us who have known the place. A few who are seriously ill and need a place to stay can’t be released without serious liability to TCBH. And even for them, it’s just a warm-body warehouse, kept nearly full the rest of the year to keep the place running. So on the holidays, why keep the staff from their families for the sake of those inmates the staff has manipulated into filling beds. Head ‘em up, move ‘em out, rawhide.
It would be interesting to go back over the records of all the state mental institutions, individually and together, and see just how the inmate levels change with the holidays. And compare them to the county jails. Even better, to see if the inmates get shifted from one to the other. No doubt the State might wish to avoid that comparison. It might say something negative about its sincerity and commitment in treating mental illness.
*******
This morning the Diane Rehm show had a discussion about the mental health and employment needs of veterans coming back from our wars. A lot of them are coming back with things like PTSD and depression. I can attest to one statement, that employment is the best mental health treatment. Of course, in a very conservative state like this one, which has little or no tolerance for any kind of difference or deviance, that is a very long shot. And religion, in this most fundamentalist of states? One soldier who has spent more than a decade killing people said, “So what do I do on Sunday morning?”
The show made mention of the terrible need for “evidence-based treatment” and “cognitive behavior therapy”. Evidence-based treatment has actually been tested to see if it works. It means that someone has actually bothered to follow up with patients and find that out. The results in patients are important, not the philosophy or personal agenda of the psychiatrist. It can only work if the patient is not satisfied with being upset, and wants to find another way to think.
TCBH takes a stab at cognitive behavior therapy, paying it some lip service. But one can hardly expect it to work in a place where patients are upset because the staff has filled the beds by any means possible, including false accusations and evaluations. Where the staff itself behaves in ways guaranteed to trigger PTSD and depression, attempting to motivate the patients only with guilt and incarceration. And then claims cures and salvation when patients merely utter some formula statement that gets them out, about not being a danger to anyone.
That kind of phony, intrusive, involuntary, and even retaliatory approach subverts the whole process. But then, TCBH does not take much account of due process in either medicine or law. It might interfere with business.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
All the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, I’d say that the judiciary is a fair representation of the electorate these days. Left wingnuts, right wingnuts, partisan bickering and divide. About as able to produce justice as Congress is to produce a workable budget. When we have no choice but to go to them without lawyers, asking for justice, and they tell us they are not obliged to make our cases for us, it’s not that much different from Congress refusing to govern. Only with judges, that attitude often comes with a lifetime appointment.
No sense of noblesse oblige there. Tell me again about term limits.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Having heard that cognitive behavioral therapy is evidence-based, I went looking to find out what it is. According to the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists,
http://www.nacbt.org/whatiscbt.htm:
“1. CBT is based on the Cognitive Model of Emotional Response.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.”
Move over Pollyanna. Could it be that none of these therapists has ever been maimed, raped, threatened with death, or tortured, or has killed people in a war? Perhaps if one goes and slaps one in the face, one can tell the therapist if he or she feels angry or hurt, it’s their own fault for thinking that way. “Well, I’m just sorry that you feel like that.”
Now I see where TCBH LPC Julie King got her spiel. “If you had trouble with all those people, who’s the common denominator? It’s you.” Tell that to your friend or wife who’s been raped and then has to go back to work with a bunch of sexist yahoos. See how long your relationship lasts.
Maybe it works for some people in some circumstances, but it seems to me that even then it has to be applied with some sensitivity or it just defeats itself. The counselor or psychiatrist who tries force it on someone, and then claim they are “just not self aware” if they don’t buy it, does more harm than good. Rather like the husband who berates his wife a month after she was raped, because she didn’t get over it and service him in the manner to which he was accustomed.
I use the example of rape because most people in this country have understood it better and longer than things like schizophrenia, PTSD and depression. Women, after all, form a majority of the electorate and have a better union than people with mental illnesses. If you go to PubMed.gov, the online journal abstracting service of the National Library of Medicine, and do some research, you will find that many if not most people with serious mental illnesses reported seeing or experiencing abuse or abandonment when they were children.
Now we are noticing that Veterans experience the same effects. Someone on the Diane Rehm show noted that when they lose control in the service and get a dishonorable discharge, they lose all the mental health benefits they would otherwise have had. The commentator recommended that (for the benefit of society as a whole) whatever else they lose, they should not lose this.
Now imagine if State of Oklahoma institutions like TCBH weren’t falsifying medical records and evaluations, just to lock people up involuntarily and keep themselves running. Imagine if they fired the corrupt staff and went back to the original model of Mental Health Courts; supplying an alternative for mentally ill people who had actually been charged with a crime due to mental illness, instead of just accused. Imagine if they provided proactive, but voluntary and non-coercive programs for the mentally ill, including Veterans dishonorably discharged due to mental health issues. Imagine how much more good they could do if they weren’t stuck on feeding their own importance, no matter what the cost to their inmate patients.
Now try to get that through our State Legislature during its annual silly season. If they are afraid of Sharia law in our courts, imagine their terror of people with mental illnesses who actually exist. It’s hard to get rational discussion on a difficult subject into or out of some men; the opening in a penis is very, very small. I’ve met women like that, too. Maybe they envy all the wrong penises.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
An interesting thing about U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving mental health issues; even though one can develop a basic understanding of the consensus of knowledge about mental illnesses just by reading the abstracts on PubMed.gov, the Court absolves judges from knowing anything about them, as if they are the unquestionable mysteries of God, which only the psychiatrist-priest may interpret. Apparently with a psychic dowsing rod, when it comes to civil commitments.
Too bad the Court doesn't give the rest of us the same break on the byzantine Federal Rules of Procedure. The judges just pick out something they don't like about a case, and hang the dismissal on that, ignoring all other rational argument and violations of civil and constitutional rights. Imagine if teachers flunked students on that basis. “No, Billy Stillborn, this was a three page assignment and you handed in four. I have to throw it out.”
And the Constitution says nothing specific about the right to an education, much less a just and effective one.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
According to one commentator on NPR, a huge majority of Pro Se petitioners (those who can’t afford lawyers and try to file their own lawsuits) get thrown out of the courts, not necessarily on the merits of their case, but on their technical construction. In Federal Courts, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require those judges to give Pro Se petitioners a break. Federal Judges then get around the rules by quoting them and stating that they are still not obliged to make the petitioner’s cases for them. This gives them the excuse to pick any one small technical error and pronounce that the petitioner has not “stated a case” or “made a claim”. And ninety times or more out of hundred, the petitioner doesn’t know enough either to correct the alleged error or to dispute the judge.
Problem solved. One more case the judge doesn’t have to deal with, especially one that will take more time because the petitioner is not particularly skilled in making legal arguments or sticking to rules and formats. Or perhaps even so traumatized by an experience that just dealing with abusive lawyers from the other side is nearly impossible. Did the petitioner suffer massive and unjust deprivations of civil liberties and rights? Not the judge’s problem.
Wait a minute here. We have got massively complicated computer software that helps people to figure taxes, make medical differential diagnoses, put icons on your computer screen and fight computer-graphic alien monsters. It can’t be that impossible to create software that would guide a Pro Se petitioner through all the laws, case laws, evidence and witnesses to fill out court documents that would comply with all the applicable rules and standards. Not to mention save the poor, beleaguered judges all their precious time deciding how to scotch a case.
Of course the lawyers will object. That’s what they do, and don’t we all love them for it. Just remember the last time you tried to find a lawyer who would fight for you when you had almost nothing, and write your Congressional Representative and Senators tomorrow. If someone can start a company like YouTube or Google with a few thousand dollars and a garage, imagine what could be done with just a few million in government money (chump change to agencies like NSA or DoJ or DARPA) to develop that kind of software. Even better, a modest continuing budget to make it supported freeware, like Linux, along with U.S. Government certification of its correctness and effectiveness.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
References:
Nash: Genius with Schizophrenia or Vice Versa?, By: Tevita Funaki, PACIFIC HEALTH DIALOG 2009, VOL. 15, NO. 2, p 129-37.
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash.html
Mathematician John Nash and family advocate for mental health care, By Susan K. Livio/Statehouse Bureau (http://connect.nj.com/user/sklivio/index.html), New Jersey Messenger-Gazette, Published: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 10:00 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/peopleevents/p_jnash.html
These are five references found on the Internet regarding mathematics Prof. John Nash, inaccurately portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. One portrays him as having been nasty almost to the point of psychopathy, and might or might not be a hatchet job. It’s the Internet, after all. Taken together, they depict a brilliant but deeply flawed man who became delusional in his adulthood with schizophrenia, starting about 1959.
Nash was forcibly committed several times, a practice he never enjoyed or appreciated. He was never again committed after 1970, and stopped taking medication. He cured himself of his delusions through his own determination and the love and support of his family and friends. He and his wife had a son with schizophrenia and have advocated for treatment in the community, instead of commitment, and the healing dignity of productive employment.
Just because people have mental difficulties doesn’t mean they don’t notice when they are being used and manipulated without just regard for their civil rights. Research at PubMed.gov shows that patients who are involuntarily committed in situations where, as here in Tulsa, due process is denied or manipulated, tend to become embittered with psychiatry, and are less likely to maintain any medication or contact with counseling agencies.
The flawed process defeats the purpose.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Judges see to it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
More and more research and counseling sources note that when something awful happens to a person, that person gets better a lot sooner if he or she can talk about it to family and friends. If not, then you find out who your family and friends really are, especially family. It takes a lot longer, if ever, to get over something traumatic, when they keep telling you to shut up when you try.
Whether it’s war, rape, fire, flood, assault, maiming injuries, tornado, torture, or whatever other violence man and nature can do to a person, if your family jeers at you when you try to get it out, they aren’t really your family. Not any more. They’re no better than the bully down the block. If just one of them calls you regularly to see how you are doing, then that person is your family. None of the rest matter.
There’s something basically and morally wrong about a family that has trained itself not to care about one of their own when the worst happens. And when they act like this is the godly thing to do, maybe your God dies, too. Along with all your religious holidays. You may find that whatever God is proud of that kind of caring, is not one you would want to spend an eternity with. From then on, you will have to find your own reasons for living. Nothing will ever be the same again, if it ever was.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
That was one of the mortifications of high school, my father jeering that out when I came home and said that I had a date. Repeatedly. It wasn’t mortifying because I cared anything about skin color. We had lived in Hawaii with Asians and Polynesians. One of each had been my teachers in grade school. One of my best friends was half-Filipino. I was in love with Hawaiian mythology and religious legends, and read every book I could get my hands on.
In junior high, many of my classmates and some of my teachers were Hispanic. Some were Native American. We have a little Amerindian in our ancestry, which I thought was pretty cool. I didn’t have any Black friends or dates because I had never lived in a place where many of them did.
I don’t know why he picked that particular jeer, other than the fact that we were living in a place that had been segregated in both residence and school, and it was during the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. There were no Black kids in our high school. It hurt not because I cared anything about skin color. It hurt because I knew from long experience that he meant it to, because he was expressing his contempt and dislike, his disgust since early childhood that I was a member of his family. Something that he taught to my siblings.
It hurt to live with. A couple of times I almost didn’t, but failed to escape. So when someone lied and got me dragged off to the local loony bin, This Can’t Be Happening, where the keepers took any vile hearsay as justification for their actions, where they took that kind of childhood experience to claim that I am more dangerous than others, and made it their mission to make me believe so, for me it was just another set of bullies with another set of jeers.
Well, who wouldn’t find that state-sanctioned laying on of hands and psychiatric diagnoses to be healing? Maybe just those of us who don’t believe that Johnny-come-lately, fly-by-night witch doctors have any superior insight into long self-examined grief. The kind of white witch doctors who would take any mention or explanation of such grief, and convert it into psychopathy and deviance to justify their own existence and right-to-treat. Who would rub one’s nose into one’s misery just to create the kind of shock and pain that seem to fulfill the Oklahoma State Code Title 43A legal requirements for involuntary “treatment”.
Wow. Almost like family. Although I’m straight, I might have some understanding of the abandonment gay kids feel when their families kick them out onto the street. I wonder. Are they any happier or luckier if it didn’t start when they were five years old?
Of course, the way I hear it, anyone who tries to discuss this, even in private, is “just trying to bring down the family name”. The Favorite Son is not amused. As I’ve heard him say more than once, “It’s all about Me.” The right to all critical thinking is His alone, passed down from His Earthly Father. Happy Holidays.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
When church people are sitting in church, pretending to be good Christians, they might possibly reflect that when they treat other people like crap, those other people remember. And if those other people don’t feel any need to pretend to be good Christians, they may not feel any obligation to forgive church people, whenever church people imagine they should. Bullies, after all, can dish it out. But they usually can’t take it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Some might wonder why I bother to write so much. It’s not because I believe that I deserve or have any great following. That would be pretty conceited, and I’ve met too many, and grown up with a few, who are best men or women within the sounds of their own voices. No, it probably has more to do with the fact that for so many years, others enforced my silence with threats and jeers. It took me a long time and a lot of practice to find my own voice.
Now I intend to use it. If I do any good with this, it may be in helping others to find their voices, or at least give them some words and ideas when they, like I once was, are unable to find how to say what they feel.
The Christ I used to believe in was not afraid or ashamed to associate with the lowest classes of his day, the prostitutes and publicans, those who had little or no voice in their own society. From what I’ve read, he treated them with decency and respect, listening to what they had to say. He spoke up for them. Try getting that from most lawyers or judges or church people, many of those who claim to live in His image.
I’m not that good or charitable, and won’t even admit to being a Christian, much less a good one. Perhaps that comes from some, or one, who pretended or claimed to be the best kind of Christian, convincing me with jeers and contempt that I had no place in any heaven, back when I was a child. Unlike some I have known, I merely resist passing those jeers and contempt on to those who have done nothing to hurt me. For one thing, it’s a huge waste of emotion and productive energy, with which overly righteous people seem to be overly endowed.
So if anyone is actually reading this, who’s holding a gun to your head to make you? Not me. If you don’t like it, I figure your conscience has a mute button with a lot of wear on it. And if you like that line, feel free to use it. Of course, I may not wish to be implicated in your personal heresy. I’m having enough trouble with my own.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
1. Given the subsequent horrific scams, scandals, deprivations of civil rights, and miscarriages of justice detailed in such articles as the Houston Chronicle “Profitable Addictions” series (App D, 5 of more than 40), as well as Congressional hearings and reports of the Government Accounting Office, and given the propensity for even innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves under interrogation (App E), and this Court’s dependence upon a long-since discredited psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, aka “Dr. Death” (App F), among other situations presented here, has this Court made ill-considered decisions involving mental illness, which should be thoroughly overturned and thoughtfully reconsidered, according to some of the arguments contained herein.
2. And, given the vast array of medical and legal literature contrary to this Court’s thinking, going back to before the 1979 Addington v. Texas decision, have this Court’s decisions regarding mental illness been overly influenced by common fears and biases against people with mental illnesses, resulting in an unconstitutional legal double standard, much like that in the time of the Dred Scott decision.
3. Whether, considering the awful and widespread damage done by such things as psychiatric hospital scams and scandals, when civil commitment is done, especially when those involved in the commitment should have had the knowledge or skill to recognize the difference and/or violations of civil liberties, does this commitment consist of a criminal and/or false imprisonment and trigger the Sixth and/or Eighth Amendments when done: without adequate due process; and/or for corrupt or malicious purposes other than “treatment”; and/or without any means to treat the patient; and/or without intention to treat the patient; and/or without medically effective treatment for the patient’s real or alleged condition. In other words, if the standards for due process and commitment and review and damages set by this Court have been so wise and just, why have there been so many knowing and/or incompetent abductions and/or false commitments of innocent people without any mental illness, including children as young as one year old?
4. May this petitioner be allowed to present a petition for a writ of certiorari, delayed until after these reconsiderations are made, with sufficient and competent legal help to do the job right, so as not to be dismissed out of hand on any mere technicality or judicial dislike, disregarding all other violations of this petitioner’s civil liberties, due process and other Constitutional rights, as lower courts have done.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I was standing in line at a bank today and overheard a conversation between a teller and a customer, "There was a $32.50 overdraft fee and then after 5 days it is an additional $6.50 fee per day." Holy bank robbery, Batman; $6.50 per day? The original overdraft was only about $23.00.
I had to stop and change my transaction-- I was going to deposit everything but now I kept out $75.00 as the $23.00 overdraft of the poor victim in the next lane had blossomed to over $70.00. I was more than willing to pay it for her just so the fees would stop accumulating. Sister to sister you know what I mean.
Ironically, I was there with the day late rent payment from one of my renters. In the lease it says, and they initialed it, "Late fee of 2% for everyday upto five days." I have never collected that. I will if they are late every month (this was the first month they lived there-- think about it-- utility deposits, needed a couch, they were already struggling...)
Kicking people when they are already down makes no sense to me. I refuse to participate unless absolutely necessary. I just saw a TV show on "A" people -- the list included Scrooge, Steve Jobs, K. West... granted they are all rich like I wish I was...
But I think the first step I will take toward becoming rich will be to do more of my banking at Arvest. There they have a $17.50 overdraft and you had better get it back in there before they close your account.
I will let that big bank who, by there name, seems to wish to represent Oklahomans go on without me.--- Rich Oklahoma Bank customers can bank there, and the other 94% of us who cannot afford to pay that for mistakes should bank else where. (Roughly less than 6% of the US population makes more than $75,000 a year. I have always wanted to be part of the 6% club; but not by stealing from other people.)