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.
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.
Yes, I know. I seem to have been monopolizing this space. You might think that I’ve been overdosing on Powder Milk Biscuits, but I don’t eat biscuits anymore. My spare tire turned into a spare Volkswagen, and I don’t want to encourage it. I’m afraid it might turn into a spare Chevy. Besides, I can’t and wouldn’t keep other people from writing here.
I think that some figures in authority have a problem with me because they just aren’t cancer. In the time I have left, due to personal and immediate family history, I may at some time be plagued with or struck down by one or more of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, or some fatal infection, or something I don’t even know about yet. I’ve already had surgery looking for cancer. I got ready to die. When they didn’t find any and I lived, I was disappointed. My life sucked that bad.
If and when I get something like cancer, I hope I still have the wit and ability to make up ghastly jokes about it. Something along the lines of, “Oh look! Another bone exploded! Rover won’t have to chew his next toy so hard.”
Does a Federal Judge, or any other authority, want to put him or her self on that scale of intimidation and respect? Good luck with that. I’ve got one scar that if they had scooped out my intestines at the time, it would have accommodated a Federal Judge’s head. But maybe not his ego; I’m not nearly the size of a moose.
Some Judges, I’ve seen, will deny due process to anyone they don’t like or think is not giving them proper deference, regardless of what the Constitution says. They find ways to rationalize violating their Oath of Office in order to serve their egos and personal agendas. They even have a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure for it. They call it judicial discretion.
This betrays and subverts the Constitution, which is a choice they make, not something anyone forces them to do. One can hope that history will recall how well they served with honor.
If you wouldn’t let a surgeon who had not been proven to be entirely unreliable operate on you, leave your kids with a not entirely unreliable sitter, or take your dog to an NEU vet, why would you treat human beings that way? This must be one of those “let them eat cake” policies.
As NEU “expert witnesses”, psychiatrists are different from Doctors in other medical disciplines. First, the law effectively requires all the other doctors to use methods and treatments proven by scientific evidence to work. And second, they can be sued for malpractice if they don’t. That’s a critical difference that the Supreme Court should and might have recognized, perhaps if it had not been so blinded by its own fear and loathing of people with mental illnesses.
It’s like the difference between nutritional supplements and prescription drugs. Drug manufacturers are highly regulated and liable for their mistakes, as well as false and misleading claims. Makers of nutritional supplements, in large part, aren’t. Like the health food industry, psychiatry can claim almost anything about the benefits of its products, and doesn’t have to prove it. The Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, says so.
Of course, if anyone says that our NEU legislatures and courts treat people with mental illnesses like the Nazis treated Gypsy and Jews, they must be delusional. The Soviets were much more beneficent. They allowed Gypsies and Jews to serve in the Red Army, killing Germans and clearing land mines. Generally by marching into one and over the other. See now, that can be proven to work.
I submit that the Supreme Courts decisions effectively establishing the unquestionable infallibility of NEU psychiatry have led directly to horrific abuses against people both with and without mental illnesses. Go back, if you will, to my post in this series on about April 18th of this year, and use the links for the Houston Chronicle “profitable addiction” series. You will find that in the years following the Supreme Court decisions, psychiatric hospitals engaged in false and malicious practices that literally sent out bounty hunters to abduct even healthy people off the street, so that the hospitals could suck their insurance dry of psychiatric care benefits. About the same time, if I remember correctly, Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder held hearings looking into the matter, and found that military families were especially targeted, because of relatively rich benefits.
I contend that local organizations like the Tulsa Police Department, COPES, TCBH and the Mental Health Court have followed in this tradition, using flawed Oklahoma Mental Health Law to forcibly “treat” people, whether they need it or not, using methods that have not and cannot be proven with scientific experiment and evidence to be safe and effective. Perhaps the only difference is that they hit up taxpayers instead of insurance companies. Are you feeling grateful yet?
That begs the question: Would a U.S. Supreme Court Justice be satisfied always to fly in a plane, say one of the aging Soviet fleet, because it had not been proven to be entirely unreliable? Perhaps on the presumption that if something goes wrong, the pilot can always turn off the engines and glide it in for a landing. I’m sure if they wanted to prove the worth of that kind of argument, something could arranged to provide that kind of service for them.
Committing Psychiatrists – as infallible as Popes, as corruptible as slaveholders
The Supreme Court has put psychiatrists and their patients, voluntary or not, into a very special legal category, where in practice and despite all medical evidence to the contrary, the psychiatrists’ rights are supreme and the patients’ rights are almost zero. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, as well as others, the Supreme Court of the United States handed psychiatrists the dispensation of virtual infallibility. Knowing from research that psychiatric predictions of future dangerousness were wrong two out of three times, it stated, “There is no merit to petitioner's argument that psychiatrists, individually and as a group, are incompetent to predict with an acceptable degree of reliability that a particular criminal will commit other crimes in the future, and so represent a danger to the community.”
Why? Because “To accept such an argument would call into question predictions of future behavior that are constantly made in other contexts.” Resulting in, “psychiatric testimony predicting dangerousness may be countered not only as erroneous in a particular case but also as generally so unreliable that it should be ignored.” The High Court then held that there is no “convincing evidence that such testimony is almost entirely unreliable, and [convincing evidence] that the factfinder and the adversary system will not be competent to uncover, recognize, and take due account of its shortcomings.”
Further, “(b) Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions. Expert testimony, whether in the form of an opinion based on hypothetical questions or otherwise, is commonly admitted as evidence where it might help the factfinder do its job. Although this case involves the death penalty, there is no constitutional barrier to applying the ordinary rules of evidence governing the use of expert testimony.”
This gave psychiatrists the legal status of Rumpole of the Bailey’s “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. And justified it in terms like saying a dead clock should be used to tell time because the courts are paranoid about keeping appointments, it’s the only clock they have, and it’s right twice a day. Further, the sun doesn’t have to be present in order for the dead clock to claim extreme accuracy in predicting that it is up.
Of course, the entire decision and the dissent are more complicated than that. But the High Court’s extreme deference to psychiatry, and its baseless claim that jurors won’t be overly impressed with “expert testimony”, which they don’t know to be generally unreliable, raised to new legal heights any shaman impressed with his or her own opinion. And those psychiatrists didn’t even have to have a crystal ball, just their professional “spidey-sense”. The High Court offered no opinion as to whether this paranormal insight could be obtained from radioactive spider bites.
I’m being this sarcastic about it because unlike a scientific or engineering discipline, clinical psychiatry does not bother often, if at all, to justify its inflated opinion of itself with experimental proof that its methods work and its “insights” are true. And because this kind of High Court decision engendered the horrific consequences to patients abducted into psychiatric institutions under fraudulent and incompetent mental evaluations, often to scam insurance companies. As the Houston Chronicle reported in a long series of articles in the 1990s.
Even though the High Court held in its 1981 Estelle v. Smith case that a prisoner must be given a Miranda warning that anything he says in a psychiatric evaluation can be used against him in a court of law, it seems not to have granted any right to actually remain silent in such an evaluation. Indeed, in the Court’s 1990 Washington v. Harper case, it held a prisoner had no right to counsel at a hearing to determine forced psychiatric medication because, “[I]t is less than crystal clear why lawyers must be available to identify possible errors in medical judgment.”
The thing is, it ceased to be medical judgment when the High Court made it heresy to question its accuracy and value. Blind faith is the province of religion, the “evidence of things not seen”. In contrast, medicine is demonstrated with double-blind experiments and scientific evaluation.
There’s a very good article in the July 2009 issue of The Gauntlet, The Law Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, pp 57-71, by Dr. Shawn Roberson, the former director of Forensic Psychology at the Oklahoma Forensic Center, which I understand studies and evaluates criminal psychology. It’s “Interrogations and False Confessions – What Attorneys Should Know From the Social Sciences”, and cites 22 research authorities in legal and psychological issues. It shows how law-abiding, innocent, and even mentally stable, ordinary people are trapped into incriminating themselves or giving false confessions. It happens a lot. Perhaps because honest people will readily confess to minor sins which police, prosecutors, judges and lawyers will inflate and conflate into major wrongdoing.
If this can happen to an ordinary, innocent person, what chance does a harmless person with a mental illness have, when faced with interrogation by a mental inquisitor whose opinion that person may not legally dispute? Especially under the duress of being abducted into a mental institution, without any right to counsel. We have seen this kind of thing before. Just ask any Black historian. Or Dred Scott.
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COMMENTS
Posted by: Don B
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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.
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.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about 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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
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.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Yes, I know. I seem to have been monopolizing this space. You might think that I’ve been overdosing on Powder Milk Biscuits, but I don’t eat biscuits anymore. My spare tire turned into a spare Volkswagen, and I don’t want to encourage it. I’m afraid it might turn into a spare Chevy. Besides, I can’t and wouldn’t keep other people from writing here.
I think that some figures in authority have a problem with me because they just aren’t cancer. In the time I have left, due to personal and immediate family history, I may at some time be plagued with or struck down by one or more of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, or some fatal infection, or something I don’t even know about yet. I’ve already had surgery looking for cancer. I got ready to die. When they didn’t find any and I lived, I was disappointed. My life sucked that bad.
If and when I get something like cancer, I hope I still have the wit and ability to make up ghastly jokes about it. Something along the lines of, “Oh look! Another bone exploded! Rover won’t have to chew his next toy so hard.”
Does a Federal Judge, or any other authority, want to put him or her self on that scale of intimidation and respect? Good luck with that. I’ve got one scar that if they had scooped out my intestines at the time, it would have accommodated a Federal Judge’s head. But maybe not his ego; I’m not nearly the size of a moose.
Some Judges, I’ve seen, will deny due process to anyone they don’t like or think is not giving them proper deference, regardless of what the Constitution says. They find ways to rationalize violating their Oath of Office in order to serve their egos and personal agendas. They even have a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure for it. They call it judicial discretion.
This betrays and subverts the Constitution, which is a choice they make, not something anyone forces them to do. One can hope that history will recall how well they served with honor.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
As NEU “expert witnesses”, psychiatrists are different from Doctors in other medical disciplines. First, the law effectively requires all the other doctors to use methods and treatments proven by scientific evidence to work. And second, they can be sued for malpractice if they don’t. That’s a critical difference that the Supreme Court should and might have recognized, perhaps if it had not been so blinded by its own fear and loathing of people with mental illnesses.
It’s like the difference between nutritional supplements and prescription drugs. Drug manufacturers are highly regulated and liable for their mistakes, as well as false and misleading claims. Makers of nutritional supplements, in large part, aren’t. Like the health food industry, psychiatry can claim almost anything about the benefits of its products, and doesn’t have to prove it. The Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, says so.
Of course, if anyone says that our NEU legislatures and courts treat people with mental illnesses like the Nazis treated Gypsy and Jews, they must be delusional. The Soviets were much more beneficent. They allowed Gypsies and Jews to serve in the Red Army, killing Germans and clearing land mines. Generally by marching into one and over the other. See now, that can be proven to work.
I submit that the Supreme Courts decisions effectively establishing the unquestionable infallibility of NEU psychiatry have led directly to horrific abuses against people both with and without mental illnesses. Go back, if you will, to my post in this series on about April 18th of this year, and use the links for the Houston Chronicle “profitable addiction” series. You will find that in the years following the Supreme Court decisions, psychiatric hospitals engaged in false and malicious practices that literally sent out bounty hunters to abduct even healthy people off the street, so that the hospitals could suck their insurance dry of psychiatric care benefits. About the same time, if I remember correctly, Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder held hearings looking into the matter, and found that military families were especially targeted, because of relatively rich benefits.
I contend that local organizations like the Tulsa Police Department, COPES, TCBH and the Mental Health Court have followed in this tradition, using flawed Oklahoma Mental Health Law to forcibly “treat” people, whether they need it or not, using methods that have not and cannot be proven with scientific experiment and evidence to be safe and effective. Perhaps the only difference is that they hit up taxpayers instead of insurance companies. Are you feeling grateful yet?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Supreme Court has put psychiatrists and their patients, voluntary or not, into a very special legal category, where in practice and despite all medical evidence to the contrary, the psychiatrists’ rights are supreme and the patients’ rights are almost zero. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, as well as others, the Supreme Court of the United States handed psychiatrists the dispensation of virtual infallibility. Knowing from research that psychiatric predictions of future dangerousness were wrong two out of three times, it stated, “There is no merit to petitioner's argument that psychiatrists, individually and as a group, are incompetent to predict with an acceptable degree of reliability that a particular criminal will commit other crimes in the future, and so represent a danger to the community.”
Why? Because “To accept such an argument would call into question predictions of future behavior that are constantly made in other contexts.” Resulting in, “psychiatric testimony predicting dangerousness may be countered not only as erroneous in a particular case but also as generally so unreliable that it should be ignored.” The High Court then held that there is no “convincing evidence that such testimony is almost entirely unreliable, and [convincing evidence] that the factfinder and the adversary system will not be competent to uncover, recognize, and take due account of its shortcomings.”
Further, “(b) Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions. Expert testimony, whether in the form of an opinion based on hypothetical questions or otherwise, is commonly admitted as evidence where it might help the factfinder do its job. Although this case involves the death penalty, there is no constitutional barrier to applying the ordinary rules of evidence governing the use of expert testimony.”
This gave psychiatrists the legal status of Rumpole of the Bailey’s “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. And justified it in terms like saying a dead clock should be used to tell time because the courts are paranoid about keeping appointments, it’s the only clock they have, and it’s right twice a day. Further, the sun doesn’t have to be present in order for the dead clock to claim extreme accuracy in predicting that it is up.
Of course, the entire decision and the dissent are more complicated than that. But the High Court’s extreme deference to psychiatry, and its baseless claim that jurors won’t be overly impressed with “expert testimony”, which they don’t know to be generally unreliable, raised to new legal heights any shaman impressed with his or her own opinion. And those psychiatrists didn’t even have to have a crystal ball, just their professional “spidey-sense”. The High Court offered no opinion as to whether this paranormal insight could be obtained from radioactive spider bites.
I’m being this sarcastic about it because unlike a scientific or engineering discipline, clinical psychiatry does not bother often, if at all, to justify its inflated opinion of itself with experimental proof that its methods work and its “insights” are true. And because this kind of High Court decision engendered the horrific consequences to patients abducted into psychiatric institutions under fraudulent and incompetent mental evaluations, often to scam insurance companies. As the Houston Chronicle reported in a long series of articles in the 1990s.
Even though the High Court held in its 1981 Estelle v. Smith case that a prisoner must be given a Miranda warning that anything he says in a psychiatric evaluation can be used against him in a court of law, it seems not to have granted any right to actually remain silent in such an evaluation. Indeed, in the Court’s 1990 Washington v. Harper case, it held a prisoner had no right to counsel at a hearing to determine forced psychiatric medication because, “[I]t is less than crystal clear why lawyers must be available to identify possible errors in medical judgment.”
The thing is, it ceased to be medical judgment when the High Court made it heresy to question its accuracy and value. Blind faith is the province of religion, the “evidence of things not seen”. In contrast, medicine is demonstrated with double-blind experiments and scientific evaluation.
There’s a very good article in the July 2009 issue of The Gauntlet, The Law Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, pp 57-71, by Dr. Shawn Roberson, the former director of Forensic Psychology at the Oklahoma Forensic Center, which I understand studies and evaluates criminal psychology. It’s “Interrogations and False Confessions – What Attorneys Should Know From the Social Sciences”, and cites 22 research authorities in legal and psychological issues. It shows how law-abiding, innocent, and even mentally stable, ordinary people are trapped into incriminating themselves or giving false confessions. It happens a lot. Perhaps because honest people will readily confess to minor sins which police, prosecutors, judges and lawyers will inflate and conflate into major wrongdoing.
If this can happen to an ordinary, innocent person, what chance does a harmless person with a mental illness have, when faced with interrogation by a mental inquisitor whose opinion that person may not legally dispute? Especially under the duress of being abducted into a mental institution, without any right to counsel. We have seen this kind of thing before. Just ask any Black historian. Or Dred Scott.