You know what I think Christ would have done with Romney’s 47%? He would have fixed their lazy wagon, all right. He would have made em eat bread and fish! Now that’s what I call a True Conservative.
I’m not so pissed off at the fact that U.S. District and Court of Appeal decisions have gone against me, so much as their refusal to provide the necessary, honorable and ethical courtesy of full explanations of their reasoning. Take for example their rulings that I have failed to “make a claim”, or “state a case”. According to my 1988 Random House College Dictionary, the “claim” has ten very similar definitions, such as: 1. To demand by or as by a virtue of right; demand as a right or as due (to claim an estate by inheritance); 2. To assert and demand the recognition of (a right, title, possession, etc.); assert one’s right to (to claim a payment); 3. To assert or maintain as a fact (She claimed that he was telling the truth); 4. To require as due or fitting (to claim respect) 5. A demand for something as due; an assertion of a right or an alleged right (He made unreasonable demands on the Doctor’s time)
I did a lot of research and went into great detail. I cited laws, decisions and case law and explained how they applied to my case. I went over the actions of the defendants and explained how they violated the law, Supreme Court decisions, and the Constitution. I listed my civil rights, the damages done to me, and violations of my rights by the defendants. I laid claim to my rights as a human being and citizen of the United States. It stretches credulity beyond all belief to rule that in every single case I did not even make a claim.
If you read very many decisions, you find that when courts bother to perform their required functions, they go to considerable lengths to explain their reasoning. They explain what principles are involved, what elements are necessary to make a case, and how each party succeeded or failed to satisfy those elements. They do so because it is their ethical, fiduciary and Constitutional duty, and in everyone’s best interests, for them to be seen as places where justice can be fairly obtained.
In this case, the U.S. District court here in Tulsa, and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver did not bother to perform these necessary functions. Instead they behaved like a country club refusing to explain their rules, reasoning and decisions to a non-member.
The ruling from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver came in the mail today. It makes no sense to me at all. It seems that in every instance I have failed to “state a claim”. How is that possible? Obviously the professional jargon of lawyers and judges is so diametrically opposed to my understanding of the English language that there is no way for me to get justice in their courts, no matter what injustice others have done to me. From my point of view, it feels and smells like just another way to lie in my face and get away with it.
When I talk to ordinary people, and even some lawyers about this case, they usually get it. And often respond with that cynical laughter that comes from bitter experience with our justice system. Oh, I still believe in the law - mostly. Just not in our judges and courts. Lucky for them that like so many other ordinary people, it’s just not my style to take the law into my own hands. Or to respond with violence like some Hollywood-movie vigilante. Otherwise, parts of this country would look a whole lot more like parts of the Middle East. Lucky for them.
And no, U.S. Marshals, that’s just an observation, not a threat. After what I have been through, if I saw a Judge coming and knew it, I might just cross the street to avoid any such appearance, as well as a person I barely respect.
It hasn’t yet arrived in the mail, but I got word yesterday that a higher court has affirmed the right of Tulsa’s U.S. District Court to treat people with mental illnesses, like depression and PTSD, as second-rate citizens who have no right to protest that status. Among other things, it reminds me of the day I left TCBH, the Tulsa “Center for Behavioral Health”, or “This Can’t Be Happening”.
They gave back only one of two sets of keys on rings that I had when I went in. This particular set had been given to some movers I had to hire to get my things out of my apartment, so that the Manager of Glenwood Apartments wouldn’t just throw them into the street. As she reportedly threatened to the moving company, in violation of Oklahoma Landlord-Tenant law. The movers had assured me that they had given the keys back to TCBH.
I was getting frustrated and irritated because the woman behind the TCBH intake counter put on a Freddy Prince “Ees not my yob” attitude. In other words, she couldn’t do anything if they didn’t have them, because it must have been someone else’s mistake. And of course, I had keys on that ring that no one else should have. As soon as I let that show in my voice, she threatened to call a Tulsa Sheriff’s Deputy to deal with me.
She let me know in no uncertain terms that people like me don’t have the right to be angry or upset at any frustration. That her first proper assumption should be that it signals the threat and intention to do violence. If it weren’t for the similar pale color of our skins, you might think she was having a problem with my race. That I don’t have any right to speak up at indifference and incompetence, because my kind don’t deserve any better. No offense meant to people of color.
When many if not most Judges deal with people who have mental illnesses, they have no problem with anyone taking advantage of us, just because we are vulnerable, we have few resources to fight back with, and they can. This kind of prejudicial judicial treatment goes all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States; in the 1979 Addington v. Texas case, for example. So much for the Constitution; it doesn’t quite apply to the likes of us.
They act almost like the judicial equivalent of the white supremacists who want to euthanize all the kids with harelips. They behave as if they are wearing a second set of robes under their black ones – robes made up of white sheets.
“A lawyer should render public interest legal service” OSC 5-1, App3-A, Rule 6.1
Uh-huh. I’d say that works about as good as OSC 5-1, Appendix 4, Rule 1.1 in the Tulsa Mental Health Court. It all depends on lawyers having a sense of justice and shame. (So, what temperature was Hell when you were last there?) In my experience living on disability and Social Security and asking for such help and consideration, lawyers satisfy their obligation in the easiest manner possible, by taking only those simple cases that can be quickly settled. In all other cases, you usually get letter like the one I got from Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, Inc., dated September 25, 2012, stating that with so many cases and so few resources, they just can’t do anything.
I debated with myself whether to appeal to the Managing Attorney, as the fine print at the bottom suggested, or to publicize it here. I think it bears on the quality of whatever pro bono services they do give to the poor. The letter includes the line, “I have also included a Motion to Terminate Guardianship that you may file on your own if you so choose.” Not only was no such form enclosed, it had nothing to do with my issues regarding the Mental Health Court.
It has taken me a long, long time to figure out how to express those issues calmly. They include matters of both State law and Constitutional rights, which the Mental Health Court Judge and a Federal Judge have dismissed as unnecessary, inconsequential and even “unintelligible”, due to the unpopular source of the complaint:
• Disparate and biased investigation by police and mental health authorities, on the basis of a disability; • Manufacture, suppression and falsification of medical evidence and records; • Denial of access to zealous counsel (replaced by potted plants); • Denial of access to outside medical evaluation, such as doctors and psychiatrists of long-standing; • Denial of consideration of the least restrictive alternative (such as simply helping one move one’s belongings and person out of a bad situation); • Transmutation of hearsay, as generated by habitual liars, into proven fact; • The actual and illegal use of “preponderance of the evidence”, instead of “clear and convincing evidence”; • Denial of the right of self-defense, including cross-examination of one’s accusers; • Limiting the “witnesses”, “evaluators” and “petitioners for commitment” to those “mental health professionals” who benefit from the incarceration; • Judicial rubber-stamping of the opinions of those same “professionals”; • Indefinite incarceration on the basis of a disability, for future acts that can’t be proven will occur, especially without a past history of such acts; • Retaliation for refusing to accept false hearsay as proven fact (incarceration for 66 days in my case); and • Psychological abuse, even of those with a history of trauma and abuse, resulting in physical and mental damage and deterioration.
Somehow, I don’t think that a motion to terminate guardianship would address those issues. It leads me to suspect that Legal Aid has the same motto as the Public Defender’s Office.
- e pluribus non sequitur plenarius
To which I say (in fractured Latin) – miseresco clientela.
I get the impression that when it comes to unpopular minorities, who can rarely if ever afford or become lawyers (like those in the NAACP), the ethics and pro bono concerns of the entire legal establishment are like one of those huge false fronts on a old Western store. Two stories high and a two-by-four deep. Where even the whorehouse had more substance. Ah, I guess that explains it; all their customers had to pay up by the hour.
They really sold us a bill of goods on HDTV, didn’t they? Analog TV may have had some occasional snow, but at least you could pick up all the stations over the air, and the pictures didn’t stutter, show pixilation from compression artifacts, and have areas where similar colors all blurred together. It’s a bit like those old black and white movies “saved” on DVD for us by TGG Direct, Echo Bridge and Universal in magnificent low resolution, often with the original film scratches and sprocket skips.
The very definition of HD seems suspect, especially when you try to use an HDTV as a computer monitor through an HDMI cable, as I did recently. Compared to the VGA display port on both my new HDTV and my older computer monitor, HDMI looks awful. The text is blurry and if you don’t get the right video card settings, it will even have color bands.
As it happens, I bought an nVidia video card for a new computer, with HDMI, VGA and DVI outputs. The monitor has VGA and DVI inputs. The HDTV has TV, AV, Component, VGA and two HDMI inputs. The new Windows 7 computer display looks just as sharp on VGA or DVI as Windows 2000 on two other computers. But when you put a DVI-to-HDMI adapter on the video card’s DVI output to feed into either HDMI port on the HDTV, you get the same crappy output as HDMI to HDMI. VGA is “analog” and both DVI and HDMI are “digital”. So, in case you along with many others on Internet discussion forums were wondering, the problem is HDMI on the HDTV.
HD - it’s like calling a box with 30% less cereal in it the High Value package. And forcing you to buy it if you want to eat cereal.
A Lawyer is the one in court who doesn't have to swear or answer to God for seeking or finding the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A Lawyer has a different agenda.
******************
A Public Defender in a mental health court is the person strictly trained never to utter the words, "objection" or "exception".
Attn Hillcrest: Lie down with psychiatric dogs, get up with legal fleas
On KWGS this morning came an announcement that Hillcrest Medical Center is entering into an agreement with the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health to use TCBH as a “psychiatric emergency center”. OMG, pity the poor patients. The TCBH standard of care for handling a psychiatric emergency is to make the patient believe that it was all his or her fault to begin with, and to get the patient to say the magic words, “I am not a danger to myself or others.” In other words, a magic cure with magical thinking.
Even worse, TCBH has acted in concert with the Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court to force an involuntary commitment through marsupial justice. And probably still does. In this standard of justice, uninvestigated and false hearsay accusations become proven fact, and medical records are falsified. The “witnesses” to alleged dangerous behavior might only come from TCBH and the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services. Original outside complainants need never appear to be cross-examined, or even to sign sworn statements. One suspects that they never saw a patient that they didn’t want to commit. A good way to dispose of people who can’t be accused of or prosecuted for actual crimes.
For example, on August 6, 2010, Judge of the District Court Theresa Dreiling filed a secret Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records in case MH-2010-0404 for patient 237771I. Part of the fill-in-the-blanks Order reads: “WHEREAS, there is good cause for disclosure of the Respondent’s {involuntary patient} mental health and substance abuse records pursuant to 42 C.F.R. Part 2 (section) 2.64 in only the above-entitled matter and; WHEREAS, it appears further that the information sought {medical and mental health records} is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services;”
In other words, the only such information to influence the Judge’s decisions would be limited to TCBH. The fill-in-the-blank nature of this and other TCBH and Mental Health Court forms indicates standard operation procedure. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malfeasance_in_office, and other sources regarding judicial prejudice and favoritism.
There’s just one little problem with that; seven previous years of medical records for that patient from the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic, going back to 2003, according to retained appointment cards. And a “DMHSAS Designation of Treatment Advocate”, dated three days earlier, naming “Dr Beaman OU Psych Dept”. Never mind that the patient told TCBH that he had been taking his medications “religiously” in all that time, or that the patient had no significant history of physical violence going back decades.
In TCBH practice, there are apparently no second or outside opinions. The O.U. Psychiatric Clinic refused to help its patient with a second opinion and certification of pacific behavior, and TCBH refused to allow it, stating that the Clinic’s doctors were not admitted to TCBH practice. This, despite the TCBH “Bill of Rights” which states: “4. Each individual retains the right of confidential communication with their attorney, personal physician or clergy”, and “19. Each individual has the right to request the opinion of an outside medical or psychiatric consultant at his or her own expense or a right to an internal consultation upon request at no expense.” --As supported by Oklahoma State Code Title 43A-1-104, 43A-3-424.B, 43A-4-107a.B, 43A-5-401.C.9, 43A-5-401.D.1, 43A-5-411.B, 43A-5-411.D.1, and 43A-5-412.B.7.
TCBH “mental health professionals” have written, on the least possible data, the worst possible mental health evaluations, and then some. It considers surface appearances very important. For example, getting admitted there while in one’s grubby work clothes on a bad hair day is considered proof one is incapable of “caring for himself”. Never mind the daily baths and clean underwear.
Everything that one says is interpreted in the worst possible light. Nothing that one says that is exculpatory in defense of one’s self will be reported to the Mental Health Court, which denies one even the defense of telling one’s own side of the story. Because the TCBH “mental health professionals” have already written it.
Further, if one objects to one’s indictment with hearsay as proven fact, TCBH “professionals” claim one is “not self aware”. That mental crime rates confinement for up to two months. If you weren’t sick when you went it, you will be. Enough has been written about TCBH that any outside Doctor who commits a patient there has reason to know better, and can be liable for a malpractice suit.
Putting all that money offshore and leaving it there? Is he running for American President or African Dictator? He should just admit he made a mistake and repatriate it yesterday. Then make up for it by putting his Republican money where his trickle-down mouth is. Invest it in small businesses. For example, a blind angel trust, or kickstarter.com, small business loans, some incubators. Make up for the Medicaid losses of 5000 people in poverty who start small businesses. Show up at a gun show, an arts and crafts fair, and a farmer's market, buy a bunch of stuff, look around and ask, "Has anyone seen President Obama?" Surely as a businessman, he can think of many more.
Romney should release all of his tax returns back through his involvement with Bain Capital, and Obama should release all internal BATFE and related Executive Branch documents in the period of his administration. Then we would learn what we should know about both Bain Capital and the BATFE’s Operation Fast and Furious. Of course, that might cut down on voter turnout on both sides, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.
Witnessing a crime while mentally ill Or, the other kind of don’t-snitch mentality, A legacy of State “help”
Getting involved with the State of Oklahoma’s mental health system teaches you several things. First, as far as police are concerned, you are automatically prejudged to be unable either to tell the truth or report reality. So no one has any obligation or incentive to investigate your story. That conveniently saves the police a lot of foot and paperwork.
Second, the State has predefined you as likely to be “dangerous” in any violent or threatening situation. That is how it trains police. Third, any mental health professionals upon whom the police and prosecutor depend are trained to emphasize that you are likely to be dangerous, just to be on the conservative side of “public safety”. You found that out in Mental Health Court, where mental health evaluators prostitute their opinions to justify committing you to their care, and even your public defender won’t bother to vigorously represent you.
So if you happen to be in the vicinity of a violent crime and report it, guess who gets to be the prime suspect. Especially if someone with a malicious bone to pick denounces you as the one likely to have done it. How handy that is for the police, and the criminal, who can easily be the one accusing you. It’s a win-win for them. The police don’t have to work so hard clearing the case, and the criminal gets away with it.
And even if you aren’t the one charged with the crime, you automatically have no credibility in court. You found that out in Mental Health Court, too. A lawyer whose opinions are paid for by the hour, with a client who has the most to gain from it, will tear you to shreds on the stand. “But aren’t you taking medication for a mental illness?”, or “But weren’t you committed to a mental institution on this date?” If you are telling the truth and accurately reporting what you heard and saw, it won’t matter to anyone. Maybe not even to the victim, who might easily be led to believe you did it.
So if you witness a violent crime while mentally ill, what, besides your sense of civic duty, is your incentive to report it or give witness about it in court? When you stand a good chance of suffering as badly as, if not worse than, the victim of the crime. Are you willing to pay that price to do the right thing, when the guilty will likely go free, and you may be crucified in their place?
Who is going to stand up and dispute that reality? The state and local authorities who have predefined and judged you as “dangerous to self or others”, upon any mere or false allegation of threatening behavior? Fan-tastic.
When they treat white people with mental illness this way, it’s not hard to imagine how they have treated black people, now and in the past. Do police and prosecutors really wonder where don’t-snitch distrust comes from without ever bothering to look at themselves, or are they just satisfied with their own superior attitudes and assumptions? Too lazy and conceited to go back and investigate what they wouldn’t before.
Deprivation of civil liberties under the health food model
In what other “medical” discipline besides psychiatry are patients are afraid to be completely honest, for fear of being “diagnosed” as less deserving of human rights than those around them, who are often just as screwed up?
How do such “mental health professionals” figure that’s going to work? Aside from milking insurance and tax money? Is knowing that someone can yank you back into the local loony bin, at any time for nearly any reason, supposed to be liberating and healing? Or just as depressing, punitive and repressive as it feels?
A tormented state of mind may bring on occasional lapses in judgment, but it is not the same as stupid. It is merely one part of the human condition. Forcing someone from a bad situation into a worse one doesn’t improve it. It’s like kicking a dog for having diarrhea. It may get the dog out of your house or off your lawn, but from the dog’s point of view, it only adds to its misery and makes it afraid of you.
And if some “mental health professional” claims that it the State mental health system does help people, where is the scientific and medical evidence? Where are the links to such evidence and statistics on its web sites? Where has it done and published any study with the same scope as the MacArthur Study on violence risk assessment, freely available on the net? How and where has it demonstrated that its rules and methods for committing “dangerous” people are just, helpful and effective?
Blustering doesn’t count. You actually have to run long-term experiments using real data on evaluations, treatments and outcomes, which any outside expert can freely examine and interpret. Which means that you actually have to collect and keep aggregate and de-personalized data, and make publicly available that data and the rules under which it was collected. The same as any real doctor and scientist does when publishing in a journal. To truly demonstrate its fairness and usefulness, the State mental health system must to be open to investigation and professional criticism.
The empty-suited shamans in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services are rightly afraid of doing this. It would expose them as having very little if any evidence-based treatment. Their “standard of care” is a bunch of people concurring that what they are doing is right, with no more evidence of medical efficacy than many health foods sold on the Internet. It they were medical pills instead of the kind they are, they couldn’t get past the stringent FDA requirements. They might as well be scientologists, because any cult or fringe group can make the same claims of saving and improving lives with secret methods that the uninitiated cannot fathom.
If we have freedom of religion in this country, why does State law favor them? The continuous silly season in the Legislature, perhaps? And if I’m wrong, let’s see the State mental health system demonstrate it with something besides forcibly detaining and medicating me like a Soviet “mental patient” in Lubyanka.
"Whether it is adults or children, or seniors, for that matter, is it moral to give people dubious, harmful psychiatric diagnoses in order to get paid?"
-Jim Gottstein, in http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/diagnosing-dangers/
Right after the Martin Luther King assassination, an Iowa teacher named Jane Elliot (http://www.janeelliott.com/) asked her class of white 8 year olds what they knew about black people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott). According to Wikipedia, she stated, “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” So with the agreement of the students, she divided her class up into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students. In WWII, Jews had been sent to the gas chambers that way.
She gave the blue-eyed students special privileges, and in general had them treat the brown-eyed children to the same discrimination as Blacks in the South, even to the point of dispensing pseudo-scientific clap trap to support it. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed minority was behaving like true bigots, and the brown-eyed majority like a beaten people. The next day, Ms. Elliot reversed the situation. Then the brown-eyed children behaved like bigots, but not quite as bad as the first bunch.
See also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
When most people discuss mental illness, they mostly share ignorance and stereotypes. Like many states, Oklahoma’s mental health code and legal system is a huge blue-eyes/brown-eyes experiment, let run to ghastly lengths. Without a shred of scientific or medical standards or proof about who can be predicted to be “dangerous”, it puts the onus on those who are feared, to prove that they are not. It literally defines a person to be “in need of treatment” if that person is merely accused of threatening another person while mentally ill. The people in charge of that system then take that license to transform mere accusation into proven “fact”, against which no defense is allowed. Under those conditions, it is almost impossible not to be committed.
Oh, really? You think if they hadn’t done something wrong, they wouldn’t be there? So if this kind of marsupial justice were applied to you, how would you define “ghastly”? For, according to reasonable estimates from medical research, if one were to impose the standard that ten dangerous people be let free for every harmless person committed, the State mental courts and facilities could only commit about 15 out of every 1000 people brought before them, of which 10 would be harmless.
Certainly the State Council on Judicial Complaints doesn’t worry about it much. If a mental health court judge accepts hearsay as proven fact, makes utterly no attempt to find any “less restrictive alternative”, files a false claim about available medical information, and refuses to allow a defendant to plead his or her situation at the commitment hearing, the Council will dismiss any complaint. It claims to be “limited by the constitution and statutes of Oklahoma to matters concerning misconduct and physical and mental ability of persons occupying judicial positions.”
One might reasonably suspect that the Council consists entirely of blue-eyed 2nd graders.
In comparing the number of harmless people committed to the number of violent people let go in a system that is wrong 2 out of 3 times in designating people “dangerous”, and wrong 1 out of 10 times in designating people “harmless”, I missed a decimal point in the second calculation. I’ve redone the numbers and get the following:
let go commit harmless violent Harmless Violent committed let go Committed Let go
990 10 6.7 99 1 to 14.85 985 15 10 98.5 1 to 9.85 960 40 26.7 96 1 to 3.6 900 100 66.7 90 1 to 1.35 869 131 87.3 86.9 1.005 to 1 800 200 133.3 80 1.667 to 1 500 500 333.3 50 6.667 to 1 200 800 533.3 20 26.67 to 1 100 900 600 10 60 to 1 30 970 646. 7 3 215. 6 to 1 10 990 660 1 660 to 1
Compare this to “Let ten guilty men go free lest one innocent man be convicted.” Federal Judges have more than turned that around for people with mental illness, as if such people are 10 to 100 times more dangerous than violent predators, and getting committed doesn’t destroy lives. If Federal Judges had to face this kind of justice in their confirmation hearings, with the added penalty that if not confirmed they lose forever the right to practice, they would be squealing about a lot worse than “high-tech lynchings”.
Well, this is frustrating. It seems that the Urban Tulsa editor program does not allow this to be put into nice, readable columns. If you wish to reconstruct this, the column headings are "let go", "committed", "harmless committed" one word over the other, "violent (over) let go", "Harmless (over) Committed", and "Violent (over) Let go".
There’s an overwhelming potential for abuse in psychiatry, especially in psychiatric hospitals, and state institutions and entities, where it is almost guaranteed. One can see this from the second hour’s topic on the Diane Rhem show this morning, introducing the author of “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves”, Dan Ariely. See http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-13/dan-ariely-honest-truth-about-dishonesty-how-we-lie-everyone-especially-ourselves And http://danariely.com/
In psychiatric hospitals, institutions, courts and agencies, those with power legitimize each other, and thus feel entitled to it. There is a vast separation between them and their patients, or “consumers” as the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health would have it, which makes it psychologically easier to be dishonest with them. If you have ever been in one of those places, you will hear at least some of the “care providers” talk about how great the job would be if they just didn’t have to deal with patients. A wall of secrecy surrounds all of their dealings, which keeps the outside world from ever checking on their methods. Further, there is a tacit mutual agreement that their patients are inferior and “need” their help, so that whatever they do is “for the good of the patient”. So if one of them cuts ethical corners, the rest find it easy both to accept and to duplicate. The monitoring cameras in Oklahoma state institutions can only see actual physical or sexual abuses, not psychological, medical, legal and civil rights abuses.
Then there is the question of whether or not what is being done in those places has any medical or scientific validity. Science will not generally accept any result or claim until a number of others can do the same experiment and repeat the reported results. Compared to psychiatry, most other medical care is conducted much more openly, with records that can be obtained to validate standards of care, with open access to the patients by relatives and legal advisors, and with patients allowed to seek other opinions, and even to refuse care. The medical tests used there have physical meaning that can be validated. A patient either has a fever or doesn’t, either has a suspicious mass on an x-ray or doesn’t, either has an infection that can be cultured or doesn’t, either has blood pressure over a certain value or doesn’t.
Religion on the other hand, is “the evidence of things not seen”. A bunch of people get together and agree to believe the same things about what is true or not, about what is right and wrong. And a cult is where they do it all in secret and don’t let people leave. Much like psychiatric practice and institutions.
Most if not all of the “medical tests” in psychiatry involve asking the patients questions and then deciding from a philosophical standpoint what the psychiatrist or counselor believes about the answers and the patient. The “standard of care” consists entirely of what a group of people in that profession agree with each other to say it is. It is almost entirely subjective, in the eyes of the beholder.
Psychiatrists don’t have any physical voltmeters or thermometers, and very few chemical or genetic tests, to say “this one is bipolar” and “that one is schizophrenic”. What few brain scans could be used are so expensive that they are rarely used. So shading the truth in order to force someone into their “care”, “for their own good” of course, not to mention the income of the psychiatrist or institution, becomes very, very easy. Especially to deal with a socially unwelcome and disliked minority in secret.
If you think that is paranoid, it may well depend upon your “religion”. I know of a certain Federal Judge who belongs to that church.
Double check me on those numbers of people committing violence; it could be a factor of ten less. I neglected to look that up first. You can find it online in the MacArthur Foundation Violence Risk Assessment study.
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Posted by: Don B
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I’m not so pissed off at the fact that U.S. District and Court of Appeal decisions have gone against me, so much as their refusal to provide the necessary, honorable and ethical courtesy of full explanations of their reasoning. Take for example their rulings that I have failed to “make a claim”, or “state a case”. According to my 1988 Random House College Dictionary, the “claim” has ten very similar definitions, such as:
1. To demand by or as by a virtue of right; demand as a right or as due (to claim an estate by inheritance);
2. To assert and demand the recognition of (a right, title, possession, etc.); assert one’s right to (to claim a payment);
3. To assert or maintain as a fact (She claimed that he was telling the truth);
4. To require as due or fitting (to claim respect)
5. A demand for something as due; an assertion of a right or an alleged right (He made unreasonable demands on the Doctor’s time)
I did a lot of research and went into great detail. I cited laws, decisions and case law and explained how they applied to my case. I went over the actions of the defendants and explained how they violated the law, Supreme Court decisions, and the Constitution. I listed my civil rights, the damages done to me, and violations of my rights by the defendants. I laid claim to my rights as a human being and citizen of the United States. It stretches credulity beyond all belief to rule that in every single case I did not even make a claim.
If you read very many decisions, you find that when courts bother to perform their required functions, they go to considerable lengths to explain their reasoning. They explain what principles are involved, what elements are necessary to make a case, and how each party succeeded or failed to satisfy those elements. They do so because it is their ethical, fiduciary and Constitutional duty, and in everyone’s best interests, for them to be seen as places where justice can be fairly obtained.
In this case, the U.S. District court here in Tulsa, and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver did not bother to perform these necessary functions. Instead they behaved like a country club refusing to explain their rules, reasoning and decisions to a non-member.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The ruling from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver came in the mail today. It makes no sense to me at all. It seems that in every instance I have failed to “state a claim”. How is that possible? Obviously the professional jargon of lawyers and judges is so diametrically opposed to my understanding of the English language that there is no way for me to get justice in their courts, no matter what injustice others have done to me. From my point of view, it feels and smells like just another way to lie in my face and get away with it.
When I talk to ordinary people, and even some lawyers about this case, they usually get it. And often respond with that cynical laughter that comes from bitter experience with our justice system. Oh, I still believe in the law - mostly. Just not in our judges and courts. Lucky for them that like so many other ordinary people, it’s just not my style to take the law into my own hands. Or to respond with violence like some Hollywood-movie vigilante. Otherwise, parts of this country would look a whole lot more like parts of the Middle East. Lucky for them.
And no, U.S. Marshals, that’s just an observation, not a threat. After what I have been through, if I saw a Judge coming and knew it, I might just cross the street to avoid any such appearance, as well as a person I barely respect.
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It hasn’t yet arrived in the mail, but I got word yesterday that a higher court has affirmed the right of Tulsa’s U.S. District Court to treat people with mental illnesses, like depression and PTSD, as second-rate citizens who have no right to protest that status. Among other things, it reminds me of the day I left TCBH, the Tulsa “Center for Behavioral Health”, or “This Can’t Be Happening”.
They gave back only one of two sets of keys on rings that I had when I went in. This particular set had been given to some movers I had to hire to get my things out of my apartment, so that the Manager of Glenwood Apartments wouldn’t just throw them into the street. As she reportedly threatened to the moving company, in violation of Oklahoma Landlord-Tenant law. The movers had assured me that they had given the keys back to TCBH.
I was getting frustrated and irritated because the woman behind the TCBH intake counter put on a Freddy Prince “Ees not my yob” attitude. In other words, she couldn’t do anything if they didn’t have them, because it must have been someone else’s mistake. And of course, I had keys on that ring that no one else should have. As soon as I let that show in my voice, she threatened to call a Tulsa Sheriff’s Deputy to deal with me.
She let me know in no uncertain terms that people like me don’t have the right to be angry or upset at any frustration. That her first proper assumption should be that it signals the threat and intention to do violence. If it weren’t for the similar pale color of our skins, you might think she was having a problem with my race. That I don’t have any right to speak up at indifference and incompetence, because my kind don’t deserve any better. No offense meant to people of color.
When many if not most Judges deal with people who have mental illnesses, they have no problem with anyone taking advantage of us, just because we are vulnerable, we have few resources to fight back with, and they can. This kind of prejudicial judicial treatment goes all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States; in the 1979 Addington v. Texas case, for example. So much for the Constitution; it doesn’t quite apply to the likes of us.
They act almost like the judicial equivalent of the white supremacists who want to euthanize all the kids with harelips. They behave as if they are wearing a second set of robes under their black ones – robes made up of white sheets.
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Uh-huh. I’d say that works about as good as OSC 5-1, Appendix 4, Rule 1.1 in the Tulsa Mental Health Court. It all depends on lawyers having a sense of justice and shame. (So, what temperature was Hell when you were last there?) In my experience living on disability and Social Security and asking for such help and consideration, lawyers satisfy their obligation in the easiest manner possible, by taking only those simple cases that can be quickly settled. In all other cases, you usually get letter like the one I got from Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, Inc., dated September 25, 2012, stating that with so many cases and so few resources, they just can’t do anything.
I debated with myself whether to appeal to the Managing Attorney, as the fine print at the bottom suggested, or to publicize it here. I think it bears on the quality of whatever pro bono services they do give to the poor. The letter includes the line, “I have also included a Motion to Terminate Guardianship that you may file on your own if you so choose.” Not only was no such form enclosed, it had nothing to do with my issues regarding the Mental Health Court.
It has taken me a long, long time to figure out how to express those issues calmly. They include matters of both State law and Constitutional rights, which the Mental Health Court Judge and a Federal Judge have dismissed as unnecessary, inconsequential and even “unintelligible”, due to the unpopular source of the complaint:
• Disparate and biased investigation by police and mental health authorities, on the basis of a disability;
• Manufacture, suppression and falsification of medical evidence and records;
• Denial of access to zealous counsel (replaced by potted plants);
• Denial of access to outside medical evaluation, such as doctors and psychiatrists of long-standing;
• Denial of consideration of the least restrictive alternative (such as simply helping one move one’s belongings and person out of a bad situation);
• Transmutation of hearsay, as generated by habitual liars, into proven fact;
• The actual and illegal use of “preponderance of the evidence”, instead of “clear and convincing evidence”;
• Denial of the right of self-defense, including cross-examination of one’s accusers;
• Limiting the “witnesses”, “evaluators” and “petitioners for commitment” to those “mental health professionals” who benefit from the incarceration;
• Judicial rubber-stamping of the opinions of those same “professionals”;
• Indefinite incarceration on the basis of a disability, for future acts that can’t be proven will occur, especially without a past history of such acts;
• Retaliation for refusing to accept false hearsay as proven fact (incarceration for 66 days in my case); and
• Psychological abuse, even of those with a history of trauma and abuse, resulting in physical and mental damage and deterioration.
Somehow, I don’t think that a motion to terminate guardianship would address those issues. It leads me to suspect that Legal Aid has the same motto as the Public Defender’s Office.
- e pluribus non sequitur plenarius
To which I say (in fractured Latin) – miseresco clientela.
I get the impression that when it comes to unpopular minorities, who can rarely if ever afford or become lawyers (like those in the NAACP), the ethics and pro bono concerns of the entire legal establishment are like one of those huge false fronts on a old Western store. Two stories high and a two-by-four deep. Where even the whorehouse had more substance. Ah, I guess that explains it; all their customers had to pay up by the hour.
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They really sold us a bill of goods on HDTV, didn’t they? Analog TV may have had some occasional snow, but at least you could pick up all the stations over the air, and the pictures didn’t stutter, show pixilation from compression artifacts, and have areas where similar colors all blurred together. It’s a bit like those old black and white movies “saved” on DVD for us by TGG Direct, Echo Bridge and Universal in magnificent low resolution, often with the original film scratches and sprocket skips.
The very definition of HD seems suspect, especially when you try to use an HDTV as a computer monitor through an HDMI cable, as I did recently. Compared to the VGA display port on both my new HDTV and my older computer monitor, HDMI looks awful. The text is blurry and if you don’t get the right video card settings, it will even have color bands.
As it happens, I bought an nVidia video card for a new computer, with HDMI, VGA and DVI outputs. The monitor has VGA and DVI inputs. The HDTV has TV, AV, Component, VGA and two HDMI inputs. The new Windows 7 computer display looks just as sharp on VGA or DVI as Windows 2000 on two other computers. But when you put a DVI-to-HDMI adapter on the video card’s DVI output to feed into either HDMI port on the HDTV, you get the same crappy output as HDMI to HDMI. VGA is “analog” and both DVI and HDMI are “digital”. So, in case you along with many others on Internet discussion forums were wondering, the problem is HDMI on the HDTV.
HD - it’s like calling a box with 30% less cereal in it the High Value package. And forcing you to buy it if you want to eat cereal.
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******************
A Public Defender in a mental health court is the person strictly trained never to utter the words, "objection" or "exception".
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
On KWGS this morning came an announcement that Hillcrest Medical Center is entering into an agreement with the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health to use TCBH as a “psychiatric emergency center”. OMG, pity the poor patients. The TCBH standard of care for handling a psychiatric emergency is to make the patient believe that it was all his or her fault to begin with, and to get the patient to say the magic words, “I am not a danger to myself or others.” In other words, a magic cure with magical thinking.
Even worse, TCBH has acted in concert with the Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court to force an involuntary commitment through marsupial justice. And probably still does. In this standard of justice, uninvestigated and false hearsay accusations become proven fact, and medical records are falsified. The “witnesses” to alleged dangerous behavior might only come from TCBH and the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services. Original outside complainants need never appear to be cross-examined, or even to sign sworn statements. One suspects that they never saw a patient that they didn’t want to commit. A good way to dispose of people who can’t be accused of or prosecuted for actual crimes.
For example, on August 6, 2010, Judge of the District Court Theresa Dreiling filed a secret Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records in case MH-2010-0404 for patient 237771I. Part of the fill-in-the-blanks Order reads:
“WHEREAS, there is good cause for disclosure of the Respondent’s {involuntary patient} mental health and substance abuse records pursuant to 42 C.F.R. Part 2 (section) 2.64 in only the above-entitled matter and;
WHEREAS, it appears further that the information sought {medical and mental health records} is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services;”
In other words, the only such information to influence the Judge’s decisions would be limited to TCBH. The fill-in-the-blank nature of this and other TCBH and Mental Health Court forms indicates standard operation procedure. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malfeasance_in_office, and other sources regarding judicial prejudice and favoritism.
There’s just one little problem with that; seven previous years of medical records for that patient from the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic, going back to 2003, according to retained appointment cards. And a “DMHSAS Designation of Treatment Advocate”, dated three days earlier, naming “Dr Beaman OU Psych Dept”. Never mind that the patient told TCBH that he had been taking his medications “religiously” in all that time, or that the patient had no significant history of physical violence going back decades.
In TCBH practice, there are apparently no second or outside opinions. The O.U. Psychiatric Clinic refused to help its patient with a second opinion and certification of pacific behavior, and TCBH refused to allow it, stating that the Clinic’s doctors were not admitted to TCBH practice. This, despite the TCBH “Bill of Rights” which states:
“4. Each individual retains the right of confidential communication with their attorney, personal physician or clergy”, and
“19. Each individual has the right to request the opinion of an outside medical or psychiatric consultant at his or her own expense or a right to an internal consultation upon request at no expense.”
--As supported by Oklahoma State Code Title 43A-1-104, 43A-3-424.B, 43A-4-107a.B, 43A-5-401.C.9, 43A-5-401.D.1, 43A-5-411.B, 43A-5-411.D.1, and 43A-5-412.B.7.
TCBH “mental health professionals” have written, on the least possible data, the worst possible mental health evaluations, and then some. It considers surface appearances very important. For example, getting admitted there while in one’s grubby work clothes on a bad hair day is considered proof one is incapable of “caring for himself”. Never mind the daily baths and clean underwear.
Everything that one says is interpreted in the worst possible light. Nothing that one says that is exculpatory in defense of one’s self will be reported to the Mental Health Court, which denies one even the defense of telling one’s own side of the story. Because the TCBH “mental health professionals” have already written it.
Further, if one objects to one’s indictment with hearsay as proven fact, TCBH “professionals” claim one is “not self aware”. That mental crime rates confinement for up to two months. If you weren’t sick when you went it, you will be. Enough has been written about TCBH that any outside Doctor who commits a patient there has reason to know better, and can be liable for a malpractice suit.
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Putting all that money offshore and leaving it there? Is he running for American President or African Dictator? He should just admit he made a mistake and repatriate it yesterday. Then make up for it by putting his Republican money where his trickle-down mouth is. Invest it in small businesses. For example, a blind angel trust, or kickstarter.com, small business loans, some incubators. Make up for the Medicaid losses of 5000 people in poverty who start small businesses. Show up at a gun show, an arts and crafts fair, and a farmer's market, buy a bunch of stuff, look around and ask, "Has anyone seen President Obama?" Surely as a businessman, he can think of many more.
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Romney should release all of his tax returns back through his involvement with Bain Capital, and Obama should release all internal BATFE and related Executive Branch documents in the period of his administration. Then we would learn what we should know about both Bain Capital and the BATFE’s Operation Fast and Furious. Of course, that might cut down on voter turnout on both sides, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.
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Or, the other kind of don’t-snitch mentality,
A legacy of State “help”
Getting involved with the State of Oklahoma’s mental health system teaches you several things. First, as far as police are concerned, you are automatically prejudged to be unable either to tell the truth or report reality. So no one has any obligation or incentive to investigate your story. That conveniently saves the police a lot of foot and paperwork.
Second, the State has predefined you as likely to be “dangerous” in any violent or threatening situation. That is how it trains police. Third, any mental health professionals upon whom the police and prosecutor depend are trained to emphasize that you are likely to be dangerous, just to be on the conservative side of “public safety”. You found that out in Mental Health Court, where mental health evaluators prostitute their opinions to justify committing you to their care, and even your public defender won’t bother to vigorously represent you.
So if you happen to be in the vicinity of a violent crime and report it, guess who gets to be the prime suspect. Especially if someone with a malicious bone to pick denounces you as the one likely to have done it. How handy that is for the police, and the criminal, who can easily be the one accusing you. It’s a win-win for them. The police don’t have to work so hard clearing the case, and the criminal gets away with it.
And even if you aren’t the one charged with the crime, you automatically have no credibility in court. You found that out in Mental Health Court, too. A lawyer whose opinions are paid for by the hour, with a client who has the most to gain from it, will tear you to shreds on the stand. “But aren’t you taking medication for a mental illness?”, or “But weren’t you committed to a mental institution on this date?” If you are telling the truth and accurately reporting what you heard and saw, it won’t matter to anyone. Maybe not even to the victim, who might easily be led to believe you did it.
So if you witness a violent crime while mentally ill, what, besides your sense of civic duty, is your incentive to report it or give witness about it in court? When you stand a good chance of suffering as badly as, if not worse than, the victim of the crime. Are you willing to pay that price to do the right thing, when the guilty will likely go free, and you may be crucified in their place?
Who is going to stand up and dispute that reality? The state and local authorities who have predefined and judged you as “dangerous to self or others”, upon any mere or false allegation of threatening behavior? Fan-tastic.
When they treat white people with mental illness this way, it’s not hard to imagine how they have treated black people, now and in the past. Do police and prosecutors really wonder where don’t-snitch distrust comes from without ever bothering to look at themselves, or are they just satisfied with their own superior attitudes and assumptions? Too lazy and conceited to go back and investigate what they wouldn’t before.
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In what other “medical” discipline besides psychiatry are patients are afraid to be completely honest, for fear of being “diagnosed” as less deserving of human rights than those around them, who are often just as screwed up?
How do such “mental health professionals” figure that’s going to work? Aside from milking insurance and tax money? Is knowing that someone can yank you back into the local loony bin, at any time for nearly any reason, supposed to be liberating and healing? Or just as depressing, punitive and repressive as it feels?
A tormented state of mind may bring on occasional lapses in judgment, but it is not the same as stupid. It is merely one part of the human condition. Forcing someone from a bad situation into a worse one doesn’t improve it. It’s like kicking a dog for having diarrhea. It may get the dog out of your house or off your lawn, but from the dog’s point of view, it only adds to its misery and makes it afraid of you.
And if some “mental health professional” claims that it the State mental health system does help people, where is the scientific and medical evidence? Where are the links to such evidence and statistics on its web sites? Where has it done and published any study with the same scope as the MacArthur Study on violence risk assessment, freely available on the net? How and where has it demonstrated that its rules and methods for committing “dangerous” people are just, helpful and effective?
Blustering doesn’t count. You actually have to run long-term experiments using real data on evaluations, treatments and outcomes, which any outside expert can freely examine and interpret. Which means that you actually have to collect and keep aggregate and de-personalized data, and make publicly available that data and the rules under which it was collected. The same as any real doctor and scientist does when publishing in a journal. To truly demonstrate its fairness and usefulness, the State mental health system must to be open to investigation and professional criticism.
The empty-suited shamans in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services are rightly afraid of doing this. It would expose them as having very little if any evidence-based treatment. Their “standard of care” is a bunch of people concurring that what they are doing is right, with no more evidence of medical efficacy than many health foods sold on the Internet. It they were medical pills instead of the kind they are, they couldn’t get past the stringent FDA requirements. They might as well be scientologists, because any cult or fringe group can make the same claims of saving and improving lives with secret methods that the uninitiated cannot fathom.
If we have freedom of religion in this country, why does State law favor them? The continuous silly season in the Legislature, perhaps? And if I’m wrong, let’s see the State mental health system demonstrate it with something besides forcibly detaining and medicating me like a Soviet “mental patient” in Lubyanka.
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-Jim Gottstein, in http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/diagnosing-dangers/
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Right after the Martin Luther King assassination, an Iowa teacher named Jane Elliot (http://www.janeelliott.com/) asked her class of white 8 year olds what they knew about black people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott). According to Wikipedia, she stated, “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” So with the agreement of the students, she divided her class up into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students. In WWII, Jews had been sent to the gas chambers that way.
She gave the blue-eyed students special privileges, and in general had them treat the brown-eyed children to the same discrimination as Blacks in the South, even to the point of dispensing pseudo-scientific clap trap to support it. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed minority was behaving like true bigots, and the brown-eyed majority like a beaten people. The next day, Ms. Elliot reversed the situation. Then the brown-eyed children behaved like bigots, but not quite as bad as the first bunch.
See also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
When most people discuss mental illness, they mostly share ignorance and stereotypes. Like many states, Oklahoma’s mental health code and legal system is a huge blue-eyes/brown-eyes experiment, let run to ghastly lengths. Without a shred of scientific or medical standards or proof about who can be predicted to be “dangerous”, it puts the onus on those who are feared, to prove that they are not. It literally defines a person to be “in need of treatment” if that person is merely accused of threatening another person while mentally ill. The people in charge of that system then take that license to transform mere accusation into proven “fact”, against which no defense is allowed. Under those conditions, it is almost impossible not to be committed.
Oh, really? You think if they hadn’t done something wrong, they wouldn’t be there? So if this kind of marsupial justice were applied to you, how would you define “ghastly”? For, according to reasonable estimates from medical research, if one were to impose the standard that ten dangerous people be let free for every harmless person committed, the State mental courts and facilities could only commit about 15 out of every 1000 people brought before them, of which 10 would be harmless.
Certainly the State Council on Judicial Complaints doesn’t worry about it much. If a mental health court judge accepts hearsay as proven fact, makes utterly no attempt to find any “less restrictive alternative”, files a false claim about available medical information, and refuses to allow a defendant to plead his or her situation at the commitment hearing, the Council will dismiss any complaint. It claims to be “limited by the constitution and statutes of Oklahoma to matters concerning misconduct and physical and mental ability of persons occupying judicial positions.”
One might reasonably suspect that the Council consists entirely of blue-eyed 2nd graders.
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In comparing the number of harmless people committed to the number of violent people let go in a system that is wrong 2 out of 3 times in designating people “dangerous”, and wrong 1 out of 10 times in designating people “harmless”, I missed a decimal point in the second calculation. I’ve redone the numbers and get the following:
let go commit harmless violent Harmless Violent
committed let go Committed Let go
990 10 6.7 99 1 to 14.85
985 15 10 98.5 1 to 9.85
960 40 26.7 96 1 to 3.6
900 100 66.7 90 1 to 1.35
869 131 87.3 86.9 1.005 to 1
800 200 133.3 80 1.667 to 1
500 500 333.3 50 6.667 to 1
200 800 533.3 20 26.67 to 1
100 900 600 10 60 to 1
30 970 646. 7 3 215. 6 to 1
10 990 660 1 660 to 1
Compare this to “Let ten guilty men go free lest one innocent man be convicted.” Federal Judges have more than turned that around for people with mental illness, as if such people are 10 to 100 times more dangerous than violent predators, and getting committed doesn’t destroy lives. If Federal Judges had to face this kind of justice in their confirmation hearings, with the added penalty that if not confirmed they lose forever the right to practice, they would be squealing about a lot worse than “high-tech lynchings”.
Well, this is frustrating. It seems that the Urban Tulsa editor program does not allow this to be put into nice, readable columns. If you wish to reconstruct this, the column headings are "let go", "committed", "harmless committed" one word over the other, "violent (over) let go", "Harmless (over) Committed", and "Violent (over) Let go".
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Liberals and conservatives have at least one thing in common.
Their knees jerk on the Richter scale.
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There’s an overwhelming potential for abuse in psychiatry, especially in psychiatric hospitals, and state institutions and entities, where it is almost guaranteed. One can see this from the second hour’s topic on the Diane Rhem show this morning, introducing the author of “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves”, Dan Ariely.
See http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-13/dan-ariely-honest-truth-about-dishonesty-how-we-lie-everyone-especially-ourselves
And http://danariely.com/
In psychiatric hospitals, institutions, courts and agencies, those with power legitimize each other, and thus feel entitled to it. There is a vast separation between them and their patients, or “consumers” as the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health would have it, which makes it psychologically easier to be dishonest with them. If you have ever been in one of those places, you will hear at least some of the “care providers” talk about how great the job would be if they just didn’t have to deal with patients. A wall of secrecy surrounds all of their dealings, which keeps the outside world from ever checking on their methods. Further, there is a tacit mutual agreement that their patients are inferior and “need” their help, so that whatever they do is “for the good of the patient”. So if one of them cuts ethical corners, the rest find it easy both to accept and to duplicate. The monitoring cameras in Oklahoma state institutions can only see actual physical or sexual abuses, not psychological, medical, legal and civil rights abuses.
Then there is the question of whether or not what is being done in those places has any medical or scientific validity. Science will not generally accept any result or claim until a number of others can do the same experiment and repeat the reported results. Compared to psychiatry, most other medical care is conducted much more openly, with records that can be obtained to validate standards of care, with open access to the patients by relatives and legal advisors, and with patients allowed to seek other opinions, and even to refuse care. The medical tests used there have physical meaning that can be validated. A patient either has a fever or doesn’t, either has a suspicious mass on an x-ray or doesn’t, either has an infection that can be cultured or doesn’t, either has blood pressure over a certain value or doesn’t.
Religion on the other hand, is “the evidence of things not seen”. A bunch of people get together and agree to believe the same things about what is true or not, about what is right and wrong. And a cult is where they do it all in secret and don’t let people leave. Much like psychiatric practice and institutions.
Most if not all of the “medical tests” in psychiatry involve asking the patients questions and then deciding from a philosophical standpoint what the psychiatrist or counselor believes about the answers and the patient. The “standard of care” consists entirely of what a group of people in that profession agree with each other to say it is.
It is almost entirely subjective, in the eyes of the beholder.
Psychiatrists don’t have any physical voltmeters or thermometers, and very few chemical or genetic tests, to say “this one is bipolar” and “that one is schizophrenic”. What few brain scans could be used are so expensive that they are rarely used. So shading the truth in order to force someone into their “care”, “for their own good” of course, not to mention the income of the psychiatrist or institution, becomes very, very easy. Especially to deal with a socially unwelcome and disliked minority in secret.
If you think that is paranoid, it may well depend upon your “religion”. I know of a certain Federal Judge who belongs to that church.
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