Let 10 guilty men go free, lest one innocent man be convicted
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Bear in mind that of 1000 people without any diagnosed mental illness, about 30 will commit acts of violence. Out of 1000 with diagnosed mental illness, about 60 will commit acts of violence. More than 30 years ago, medical and legal researchers found that when Courts ordered inmates released from mental institutions, over the objections of psychiatrists who claimed they were too dangerous to be released, about 1/3 actually committed violent acts at a later date. So those predictions of dangerousness were wrong about two times out of three. But of those released as harmless, a much higher percentage was correctly predicted to be harmless. Let’s give the psychiatrists the benefit of the doubt and say that their predictions of harmlessness are right 9 times out of 10.
If out of 1000 people with mental illness evaluated at a State of Oklahoma mental health facility (like TCBH) 800 are retained as dangerous, and 200 let go, how many harmless people are incarcerated for every violent person let go? The number of harmless people incarcerated would be 0.67 times 800, or 536. The number of violent people let go would be 0.1 times 200, or 2. That means that TCBH would incarcerate 268 harmless people for every violent person let go.
But we don’t know the incarceration rates for places like TCBH. They don’t operate in the light of day. So let’s do the numbers for 800, 500 and 200 people out of each 1000 incarcerated.
800 kept → 536 harmless → 268 to 1 200 let go → 2 violent
500 kept → 335 harmless → 67 to 1 500 let go → 5 violent
200 kept → 134 harmless → 16 ¾ to 1 800 let go → 8 violent
I wonder how these numbers and punishments compare to driving while Black. If the government inflicted this kind of adverse “civil” action on newspaper and television reporters for mistakes in covering government scandals, or lawyers for raising frivolous suits, imagine the uproar. But then, these aren’t their oxes being gored.
Recently in China, where virtually no one is allowed to own a gun, a teenager killed 8 or 9 people with a knife. There have been increasing incidents of mass school killings with knives in China, By May 12th, 2012, there had been five violent school attacks in the previous two months. In 2008 in Japan, where they have a thing about swords, a man plowed into a crowd with a rental truck and started killing pedestrians with a knife. In December 2010, a man boarded a bus in Toride, Japan, and stabbed four people.
With evil intent, most things can be used to kill or maim. Decades ago, in one of the first Bic commercials, they loaded one into a rifle in front of a blank cartridge, shot it partway through a pine board, and demonstrated that it could still write. With or without guns, with or without knives, where there is a violent will, there’s a way. Just ask the House of Borgia.
President Obama, for example, seems to be utterly immune to a sense of irony. He personally orders the deaths of terrorists and “collaterally” kills innocents in the attacks. He sends young Americans overseas to do the same thing, and a portion of them either die or come back maimed in body or mind. But let some nut start shooting people in a theatre, and for President Obama, that buck stops with people who never had any participation or intent in the awful tragedy. He knows to and what to blame, the NRA and anyone with a mental illness.
Like a white woman fearing that every black man who winks at her might rape her, President Obama joins in with the calls to crack down on people with mental illnesses so that, in so many words, “this will not happen again”. Like many a bigot who once feared people just like him, he acts as if most in the minority of people with mental illnesses are devoid of human empathy or compassion, conscience, character or restraint. That such people are sub-human and do not deserve the same rights and consideration as him. Even while he, himself, adds to that minority by sending young men and women to fight overseas. For whom he has attempted to reduce their civil rights.
It’s like he forgot how the blues were born. And now with Black Man on Top, he’s going to make some better ones. Irony – the South rose again and it’s a Black President.
This may not be 1790, but Mr. McKnight may not be as psychic as he seems to think, and he does not have the right to make up other people's minds for them. He only has the right to speak his own. One can argue that a Kentucky long rifle in the hands of a sharpshooter was the assault weapon of its day, as those patriots so often proved on British officers. Which, given his sympathies, Mr. McKnight might well have been in those days, as he marched on Lexington and Concord.
And the question is: So, when two State mental health professionals get together and decide that someone is going to be dangerous and needs to be committed into their care, do they pool their psychic resources, or do they just call the hotline?
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Is Suspicious Black Man Syndrome in the DSM yet?
One of my neighbors suffers from suspicious black man syndrome. He has this old car with a broken driver’s side door and always gets in on the passenger side. So one day while he was getting in, one of his white neighbors had taken her dogs out to defecate next to it. She decided that he looked suspicious. So the next time he went out to his car, a TPD car was patrolling the parking lot, and she sent her boyfriend out to alert the officer.
The next thing my neighbor knows, three or four cop cars have him under a spotlight, with guns and tasers ready. They slap the cuffs on him and searched his car for the gun that this white lady claimed he had in his hands, and call in for any wants or warrants. No gun. He is a Viet Nam Vet, and has a carry permit and no criminal record. So they took the cuffs off and said, “Thank you for your service.” By backhanded way of apology, one might suppose.
If Suspicious Black Man Syndrome ever shows up in the psychiatric DSM book, TPD Officers won’t need to check anything. Under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, they can just take him on down to the local loony bin on general principles. The South shall rise again. And State of Oklahoma licensed mental health professionals can identify themselves to each other with that hoary old code:
“Oh, when will the Dark Night ever end?”
“With the dawn of the White Jubilee!”
Why, if that ever comes to pass, there might even be a couple of Federal and Tulsa District Court Judges changing their dark robes over to white linen. And growing some Kentucky Colonel goatees. It would complement her mustache.
How can someone with a mental illness physically threaten an Oklahoma law enforcement or licensed mental health professional? With a look. And a thought, “What a jerk. Did you just crawl out from under a rock?”
The Oklahoma Mental Health Code makes sets no scientific or medical standards that can be proven by evidence or experiment to work. Nor, apparently, do the ruling bodies it sets up to oversee its administration. The only standard it has for deciding who is “dangerous”, besides being accused while mentally ill, is “two licensed mental health professionals”. As if this guarantees that the state of the art, or “standard of care”, is up to the task.
Those psychiatrists who presume to decide for society and the law which of us is “dangerous” seem to have no conception of the difference between temptation and intention. And since they have no direct access to our internal dialogues, they project that inability upon us. As far as they are concerned, mental illness is like a single drop of black blood in the Old South. According to many of them, the least bit of it, no matter what or how much [they aren’t very accurate in measuring that, either], deprives one of any military or religious or humanitarian discipline one ever obtained in growing up.
So they inflate every violent thought into a murderous plot, measured by the psychiatric buzzwords one is innocent or fool or ignorant enough to utter in their presence. Only angry or negative emotions or words count with them. The rest they discard as useless to their professional needs.
Under these biased and unscientific standards, just getting angry in a situation that would justifiably infuriate anyone else, marks the person with mental illness as a danger that needs their special control. Since they cannot really predict who will be violent when, except in a minority of cases involving histories of repeated violence, they just lock up all the usual suspects. Under the authority of a bigoted law, created largely to cater to ignorant fears and their continued livelihood, those psychiatrists steal from us the very right to have any negative or even assertive human emotions whatsoever.
Of course, the threat of losing civil rights and position in society, and dehumanizing and unjust incarceration drives many to hide any difficulties. And avoid seeking treatment, where they might arouse the notice of psychiatrists bent on this kind of “social improvement”. Making State mental health facilities and others self-defeating. It is better to heal one’s self or die in the attempt, than to endure that kind of “treatment”.
This, without any actual investigation on his part, is what one Federal Judge would dismiss, with prejudice, ironically, as irrational or unintelligible. Let us not ask the poor man to think too deeply upon such matters, as they seem to disturb his religiously fundamental and unshakable beliefs.
Abuse them for their own good; it’s fun and self-justifying.
White people at the time no doubt justified that orgy of ethnic cleansing called the Trail of Tears as the best thing for the Native Americans who had the land they wanted. White plantation owners who displaced them could be heard to say that their slaves were simple people who needed white guidance, religion and physical discipline. When Oklahoma was approaching statehood, white people debated whether the two-state option, with one white state and one Native American, would be economically viable for natives. The Cherokee noted that no one was asking them to vote on it.
Many believe that medication should be forced upon people with mental illnesses, “for their own good”. As someone who sought out medication for severe problems with depression and PTSD, I once thought that forced medication would be appropriate for many with schizophrenia and bipolar depression. Now, after reading more about the effects, I doubt it. The medications given for those conditions heal nothing and cause even worse physical problems. Many of them slowly destroy the nerve functions they allegedly improve, leaving their victims as trembling zombies who can’t hold a cup of coffee still, or show an engaged personality. They act mainly as a chemical cosh to suppress socially unpopular behavior.
Recent research has indicated that schizophrenics who get off their medication have better medical futures than those who stay on them. Take for example, Dr. John Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie which took extensive dramatic liberties with the Sylvia Nasar biography, “A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash”. Dr. Nash never saw visual hallucinations, and did not hear voices until five years after being diagnosed as schizophrenia and forced onto medication. Eventually, he learned how to avoid the notice of psychiatrists and after 1970 stopped taking medication. He healed himself, training himself to reject his delusions as a waste of effort, and returned to making contributions in his field. If he had stayed on medication, he could not have done that, and likely would have deteriorated into someone needing permanent physical care. Which Oklahoma policy and law allegedly seek to prevent.
Even my medications have a price. I can no longer do higher math or computer programming reliably, and I’m dizzy a lot. Together, they suppress white blood cells and platelets, leaving me more open to infections. I’ve been on and off antibiotics since before the State released me from its enforced hospitality, and to the ER twice with high fever and infection, the last time Christmas morning of last year. So I’ve had to start slowly and carefully weaning myself off them.
The Honorable Stephen V. Manley, who believes in court-directed medication, founded the Santa Clara County Mental Health Treatment Court when he got tired of cycling mentally ill people with criminal problems repeatedly through jail. He gave an interview to the Center for Court Innovation in 2005. Even he noted several things:
“There’s a stigma with the mentally ill that they are more dangerous, which is not true. Some are, some are not. They are, however, far more difficult to work with.”
“I think they have to be very separate courts. In a drug court we use incentives and sanctions to motivate clients. With the mentally ill it is totally different.”
“I do not believe that just any judge could walk in and preside over a mental health court. A judge has to be committed, very patient, and willing to accept criticism from clients. Because mentally ill people are very honest. They will tell you almost everything and they will tell you what is and isn’t working and what they want—if you ever bother to listen to them.”
If you ever bother to listen to them. Not in Oklahoma law enforcement or courts. As far as Oklahoma law enforcement is concerned, if anyone abusing someone with mental illness gets a negative reaction, the abuser is the threatened victim. It says so right there in the law, in the Definitions section of Title 43A. No need to investigate all the circumstances; like African and Native Americans before them, people with mental illness aren’t worth that much trouble. Getting angry while mentally ill merits only a trip to the local loony bin.
An Oklahoma Mental Health Court is even worse. Mental health professionals in the attached State mental facility, who benefit from commitments, decide the outcome for the Judge before the commitment hearing ever starts. To make their case, they construct (in its legal sense) evaluations and suppress existing medical and other information to the contrary. They are their own proof that everything they do, even falsifying medical information, is “for the good” of the accused.
The Public Defender leaves the accused in the dark about rights, like demanding a jury trial to ensure the right to cross-examine accusers. The Judge refuses to hear any defense and accepts any uninvestigated, unproven, unsworn hearsay that the mental health professionals have presented as fact. The Public Defender raises no objection to this, abandoning all pretense of zealous advocacy for the accused. No one explains the legal difference in rights between voluntary and involuntary commitment. If the accused does not volunteer, then involuntary commitment is a done deal. After all, isn’t it “for their own good”?
Which gives the State mental health professionals another barbi-doll to play with. They get to force medications and behavior modification on the “consumer”. No one gets out without acting in a “proper” manner and telling those professionals what they want to hear: that they saved another one from him or her self. No healing need apply.
As Dr. John Nash and Dr. Benjamin Gray noted, captive patients are often afraid of their captors and what they can do. In a time not long past, and maybe still present in some places, mental health professionals would cut or burn out a section of a captive patients’ brains to make them act right. Whatever most economically enforces social norms. Hitler just gassed them. Very few people get out of such places without scars in themselves and on their civil rights. Like some runaway slaves, some would even prefer not to be taken alive another time.
Who says Jim Crow is dead?
The Oklahoma (and U.S.) legal system should be ashamed of its double standards. But don’t hold your breath. There’s no NAACP to represent Crazy People in the Supreme Court and Congress. And if there were, the “normals” would jeer at it just like they did the first one. Just as they would call this little screed rambling and unintelligible.
Look for the damage from the Aurora shootings to spread way beyond its borders, affecting those who are vulnerable. I don’t know about other people, but when 9-11 happened, I hadn’t been able to feel for other people for years, due to other traumas, like getting maimed by a drinking driver and cut open looking for cancer. Nor had I been able to get any help for it. But every time those survivors told their stories on TV, I cried. I think those emotional changes probably contributed to losing the job I had at the time.
I can tell you that getting help for such things is chancy. Much of psychiatry is humiliating, coercive and punitive. No one wants to get automatically profiled and locked up for having god-awful thoughts about god-awful events. In a 2009 issue of Schizophrenic Bulletin (35:4(661-663)), Dr. Benjamin Gray relates experiences from inside schizophrenia about hearing voices and compulsory treatment. He points out that fear of misinterpretation out of context, followed by punishment and forced medication, keeps many from fully discussing their problems and experiences with anyone, much less the psychiatrists dishing out the pain. Nor can you get much help from a society that says, “You just can’t think like that! You’re only going to hurt yourself.”
To my mind, that stupidity in the field of psychiatry, which enables psychiatrists to dominate patients like it’s a BDSM game, contributes to such shootings. The shooters aren’t people who suddenly went bad, just because they had access to firearms. Whatever brought them to that violence built up over time. BDSM psychiatry, like that practiced by the State of Oklahoma, cuts them off from alternatives and healing. And for vast majority of those with mental illnesses, who aren’t ever going to shoot anyone, both the lack of decent and compassionate psychiatry, and violent attacks that lack never touches, add to the ignorant and unreasoning fear and stigma in the rest of society that cuts such people off from valued and productive lives.
Perhaps for most of us with mental illnesses, BDSM is not an option. It would only make us relive horrors. But one has to wonder if for some, who might otherwise become violent, practicing BDSM with restraint in a controlled and safe setting, so as to defuse certain emotions, might be better than the law-backed and judicially-enabled BDSM humiliation and coercion that so often passes for psychiatry.
In most Federal and State venues, falsifying medical records is a felony. Nurses have lost their jobs for sins as small as post-dating a medication record, even if the medication, dosage and medication time written down were correct. But here in Oklahoma, the State Attorney General’s Office claims the actions of State employees in State mental facilities and courts are covered by “absolute immunity”.
Take for example the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH) and the Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court. In a Mental Health Court document, a Request for Pre-Hearing Detention, filed Aug 05 2010 in case MH-2010-0404, Dr. Lori C. Miller of TCBH swears under the oath of perjury that, “I am familiar with the Respondent’s condition, conduct and actions”, to justify an opinion that the Respondent was too dangerous to remain free.
That was a lie. Prior to Aug 3, 2010, Dr. Miller had never met that person. She gave no indication of having interviewed his family, friends, neighbors, or even received medical records covering the previous nearly seven years from his physicians and psychiatrists at O.U. Physicians. Later, in order to get more of his normal medications (not all), that person had to insist that his medical records be transferred from O.U. Family Medicine.
In a Mental Health Evaluation, filed that same day with the Mental Health Court, Dr. Miller and LPC Julie King depict that person’s statements about abiding by the Oklahoma Castle Doctrine in the case of a home invasion, and hearsay about unsworn accusations, as “threatening statements”, “threats to hurt others” and “unable to state that he would not harm anyone” with a firearm. Miller and King claimed, “unable to care for himself”.
Despite never having inspected his living conditions, his disability income, his OK Dept of Rehabilitative Services Ticket to Work Program, his balanced checkbook, his paid bills, his regularly laundered underwear, or his well-used toothbrush. Apparently on the basis of mere appearances on some very bad days, when that person had been suffering from a painful bad tooth, repeatedly dehydrated working in the worst heat of the year to get his possessions out of his apartment ahead of a threatened eviction, dressed in his grubbies to go work in the dirt and heat, handcuffed in front of his friends and neighbors, and deprived at TCBH of a hair tie, which made his nightly washed and very dry hair look wild. There is such a thing as shock and anger at outrageous treatment.
Miller checked off the part of the form stating that “Reasonable efforts have been made to provide for the mental health … needs of the person through the provision of less restrictive alternatives, and the alternatives have failed to meet the treatment needs of the person”. Yet, she made no reference to ongoing medication management with the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic, as required by OS §43A-5-417. Nor made any offer to simply help that person get his possessions out of his old apartment and into his new one, which would have ended a bad situation.
Indeed, OS §43A-5-415.E.1 states: “The court shall not order hospitalization without a thorough consideration of available treatment alternatives to hospitalization and may direct the submission of evidence as to the least restrictive treatment alternative or may order a mental health examination.” Thus the Court depends upon those who have the information to submit it, and typically relies upon the State facility. For it seems to have no judgment of its own.
In the “Petition for Mental Health Treatment and Application for Release of Confidential Records”, filed with the Court on Aug 05 2010, Dr. Miller took out of all context and intent a statement badgered out of that person by a TCBH Licensed Professional Counselor King to the effect that he had not decided on his ultimate course of action regarding his accusers (like this blog), and transformed it into “that he has not yet decided his plan of violence against the apartment staff, ‘I haven’t decided yet’”. The only “witnesses to the alleged facts” whom she cites come only from COPES and TCBH.
In the Court document filed Aug 06 2010, “Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records”, Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling claims, among other things:
“WHEREAS, it has been made to appear by clear and convincing evidence that there is probable cause to detain said Respondent until a hearing on said Petition and” …. And “WHEREAS, it appears further that the” (medical) “information sought is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility” (TCBH) “or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Services (sic)”
Note that most of these documents are fill-in-the-blanks forms, indicating that the State treats people with mental illnesses like this as a matter of course.
This is how the previous seven years of non-violent behavior, regular contact with physical and psychiatric doctors, and responsible adherence to taking medication can be made by State doctors and mental health courts to disappear, in order to obtain captive patients. Nor did TCBH and O.U. Physicians allow that person to consult with or get a second opinion from his regular Psychiatrists at O.U.. Which in this case I believe is a violation of OS §59-637.A.2.b, which gives “using intimidation, coercion or deception to obtain or retain a patient or discourage the use of a second opinion or consultation,” as reason to suspend the license of an Osteopath.
Oklahoma claims that perjury is a felony. For anyone else, that is. But the State’s Attorney (and a local Federal Judge) indicates that it is just peachy keen dandy for State employees to construct false medical documents in the cases of people with mental illnesses. The State’s Attorney demands “absolute immunity” for doing things the same old way. And State Boards of Examination are loath to “interfere”. Never mind that this may well be violations of multiple Federal laws, such as Title II of the ADA, HIPAA, 18 U.S.C. § 241, 18 U.S.C. § 242, 42 USC § 1320a–7b, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and 31 U.S.C. § 3729-3733.
But can we expect the U.S. Attorney to enforce those laws for people with mental illnesses? My, that is a good question. It would depend upon whether or not he’s a bigot.
Some of us, when we go looking on the Internet to find out what “BDSM” means, recognize the Dominant/submissive concept from childhood. Even without any history of sexual abuse, we immediately recognize the voice of humiliation. I doubt that any child who has had it applied repeatedly can ever forget it. It even drives some to suicide or murder or prostitution.
Just because someone with a State license gives it voice in a State institution, like a so-called mental hospital, it doesn’t suddenly become healing and therapeutic medical treatment. It’s still punishment dished out by those who deem themselves and their morality superior to anyone who isn’t them. Working in a State-authorized civil commitment system that allows them to make BDSM dolls out of real people, and play with them.
At least BDSM is consensual, and doesn’t require bending civil law into a pretzel to make it work for those playing Dominants.
Writing in the 1963 book, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, Szasz notes: “The ghost of the ‘dangerous mental patient’ will not be laid to rest until it is recognized that the institution to which the so-call mental patient is committed is not a hospital but a prison. Lawbreakers, regardless of their mental health, ought to be treated as offenders. This would afford possibilities for “therapy” in a context where personal liberties could be protected; whereas our present practices, which use civil law to deprive people of their liberties, make both therapy and protection of civil liberties impossible.”
Unfortunately, too many people with power do so enjoy playing with living dolls. And this is the kind of rational discussion that a local Federal Judge, who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution (against all enemies foreign and domestic, without any mental reservation) would dismiss as “irrational”, “unintelligible”, “rambling”, “frivolous” or “malicious”. It does not matter to this Judge that State employees can be shown to create biased and fictitious medical documents, and suppress real ones, to achieve their advantage and maintain their prerogatives. Or that they have suspended due process for those they abuse. Apparently, it only matters that any person making such objections would not be admitted to the Judge’s circle of elevated society.
In this election season, it’s time to write about this again. Did you realize that Medicaid has a built-in penalty for trying to get off it? Here we have conservatives trying to cut back or eliminate it, and liberals trying to expand it, and neither side willing to set it up so that people can work their way off it.
Can you say “stupid”?
Due to disability or age or both, some of us will never be hired again to do anything meaningful and rewarding. Felons have better job prospects than anyone with a serious disability, especially psychiatric disabilities. So what if I can write well? Most employers, prejudiced by fear, will not hire anyone who admits to a mental illness. From experience, I know that I would only have to get angry or upset about anything once, and my employer would fire me for fear of my going postal. Even though I have no significant history of physical violence, especially repeated offenses, and no drug or alcohol problems, the only medically and statistically reliable indicators of future behavior.
I think it’s easier for gays to come out and still work. Even vampires get better press. After all, the State doesn’t have any law making them dangerous when accused, until proven otherwise. Many people with disabilities, who want jobs and can’t work full time, have to start businesses for themselves that will accommodate them. Virtually no one else will.
A Benefits Analyst at the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitative Services was kind enough to send me a report on what would happen if I earn any money trying to start a business. I already know from DHS that if I make any income at all, I lose food stamps. Which would eliminate the LifeLine discount that keeps my phone bill down $30-$40 a month. I get special help from state Medicaid for premiums on Medicare Parts B and D, drug co-pays and the “donut hole”. At the time of the analysis, the Medicare premiums were $115.40/month.
Everyone who has looked into it knows that a startup business doesn’t turn a real profit for the first year, most often two. DHS has told me that if I start a business, they will count gross income, not net. So I would lose “special help” if I make just $1/month more. So that’s about a $150/month loss for a $1/month gain, never mind business expenses. If I start a business, it has to make at least $1800 profit, possibly as much as $3000, in the first sale to cover the losses in aid for that year.
What would you choose to do without? Rent? Food? Medicine? How many hungry, homeless people do you know that start businesses? There’s no real choice.
I wrote about this to Senator Coburn’s office. The guy that called back said that they wanted to help people like me. But mostly I just got the speech about how being afraid that working would cost one Medicaid was a “myth”. I sent them a copy of my OKDRS Benefits Summary & Analysis Report, suggesting that they should not give out semi-legal advice without checking their facts. Somebody might get hurt.
And never heard back. It seems that I would already have to have a business, and be a potential campaign contributor, to get any real help with changing Medicaid in a humane and business-friendly way.
It might even shake my faith in the sincerity of politicians.
No, Virginia, we’re not talking about homosexual insects. That’s a topic for another time, to make conservative heads explode. “Those perverts are walking on my food!”
Start with a vacuum cleaner, some yogurt cups and good old-fashioned flypaper. The vacuum cleaner works best with a long extension in the evening, when flies start circling the lights. You can have only limited success trying to chase them down with it. They dodge. But they do tend to follow fix circuits around a light. So you just hold the end of the extension in its path and let it fly right into the suction.
Flypaper works on both, but it needs a little help, something to concentrate them in that area. The web pages that say fruit flies can’t find their way out of homemade traps are wrong. I’ve seen it. But fruit flies like to sit on edges. Maybe so they can watch for danger in more directions. Like the edges of a long, narrow roll of flypaper that pulls out of one of those little tubes. They’re cheap and may even last a season.
Here’s where the yogurt cups comes in. When you’ve finished eating the yogurt, you drop some pieces of peeled fruit into the bottom to rot and attract flies. Then cover it with a piece of plastic wrap held in place by a rubber band. Use a toothpick or barbeque skewer to punch two holes in the middle of the plastic, a bit less and no more than 1/16 inch across. Not the edges – the flies try to get out by circling the edges and can find holes there a lot easier. Don’t pile the fruit up too close to the hole, either. You don’t need that much. Then put several close under the flypaper roll hanging down. It couldn’t hurt to put one or two in the garbage can, too.
You won’t smell them much, but the flies can. The get into the holes and either die there, or get tired from trying to get out, and tend to land on the flypaper when they do. After a while, you won’t see so many around any more. If a yogurt cup does start to smell enough to notice, just toss it and have another.
What kind of psychiatrist would pretend to heal a suicide by sending that person on a guilt trip? Despite promises to provide “trauma informed” care and treatment, you can find them in the mental facilities of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. Like the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health.
Some people seem to think that suicide is always an easy way out, or a “plea to get attention”, a self-absorbed act by people who blame everyone else for their problems. I suspect that those people, in their ignorance, have never been affected by physical and emotional abuse as children. Or have never been stripped of all pride and self-confidence and made to feel as if they don’t really deserve to live or belong in their own families.
There’s nothing easy about suicide. You have to go through hell to get there. And if you go to a private place to do it and fail, who are you going to tell? It would only invite more abuse. Maybe even some horrible psychiatric treatment that involves burning or cutting out a part of your self and brain. On the approval of an adult who has ever been eager to say, “I’ll fix you!” If you thought getting the belt and the red-faced, spitting, screaming, paranoid rages were bad, what could be better about something even more extreme. You could go four years after hiding an attempt and never say a word about it to anyone else. Until the next time.
What moron would think that suicidal children always blame it all on everyone else? When they have always been told the their abuse is instigated and justified by their own sins and faults, to the point of destroying all pride, self-confidence, hope for the future and full ability to function effectively in society. It’s not unheard that such children never have a permanent relationship or found a family, because they believe so strongly in their own failings. What kind of sadistic psychiatrist or counselor would then say, “Well if you’ve had all these problems with other people, what’s the common denominator? It’s you!” You need look no farther than TCBH.
Some people think it’s impossible for such children to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, and how to fix it. Or that it’s their own fault if they can’t do it in some socially approved time period. “You should just get over it and get on with your life!” Another reason to hide it.
Like the psychiatrist or counselor or nurse who has probably never been there, but can’t stand to be contradicted by anyone who’s been dealing with and surviving this kind of pain for decades. They have a whip they use on anyone who disagrees with them. It’s, “You don’t have any insight!”, or “You’re just not self aware!” The last refuge of a quack, someone who cares less about doing further damage, than for his or her own ego.
Or how about the COPES agents who construct “Third Party Statements” for the Police, using only those things you might do or say that can be presented as damning, in order to justify a commitment at TCBH. Or using unproven and uninvestigated malicious hearsay, for which they never even bother to collect any sworn statement, which might later be challenged in the cross-examinations that the Mental Health Court won’t allow. So that TCBH can demand that you “accept responsibility for being here”.
As Gollum in Lord of the Rings said, “Always tries to be helpful.” Never mind if that kind of self-righteous stupidity might make one lose hope and consider suicide just to escape the barrage of degrading, humiliating, dehumanizing demonization. Well, at least you’re no stranger to that kind of “adult” behavior, the kind that religious zealots often inflict on their own children. You’d think that it might be kinder and more honest for their parents (or “licensed mental health professionals”) just to kill and eat them.
Good God, here's the perfect case justifying the Oklahoma Mental Health Code - a clear case of threat to another person by a repeat offender. But instead the Tulsa PD, DA Harris, the Mental Health Court, and the Oklahoma Dept of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services fill the beds at the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health with people guilty only of annoying another person while having a mental illness or drug problem.
Imagine the media uproar if the Bush Administration had been secretly running guns to Canada to further a political agenda. But in the service of a Black Democrat, we instead see a wondrous blind spot to the deaths of many Mexicans and a Border Patrol Agent, in a program meant to stir up public sentiment with those same deaths against U.S. gun stores and freedoms. In Watergate, nobody died. But that operation targeted Democrats. So now we see Terrence Smith and company on the Diane Rehm show dismissing the “Fast and Furious” operation the same way that Nixon dismissed the CREEP Watergate operation.
Is our public defender system as broken as Michigan’s?
This morning, NPR Morning Edition ran a piece discussing the abject failure of the Michigan public defender system in representing the poor.
See http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154849477/michigan-finally-eyeing-changes-to-lawyers-for-poor
In Michigan, public defenders are often the lowest bidders, paid by the case, not the workload. So they have reason to urge their poor clients to plead guilty as fast as possible, doing as little work as possible, so they can run as many through the system as fast as possible, and thus make a decent living. Individual case loads can run as high as 400 per year, leaving no time to investigate or prepare a case.
As a result, an innocent person like Mr. Edward Carter can spend as much as 35 years in jail for a crime of violence committed while he was in custody on other charges. An ACLU lawyer suing the State calls it “assembly line justice”, just another way of saying “railroad”. Even the Republican Governor and a County Prosecutor acknowledge that the system is broken.
Can you see DA Tim Harris acknowledging the same thing about the railroad running through the Tulsa County Mental Health Court? I think that a certain warm place would freeze over and warm back up again first. It’s much too handy for disposing of people he can’t successfully prosecute in a criminal court.
So how do public defenders get paid here? Obviously not enough to inform their captive clients of all their rights. Or to mount a zealous defense, or to demand a rigorous and even-handed investigation by police,. Or to object to hearsay, to patently false statements filed by the Court, to bogus evidentiary standards, to the lack of cross examination of accusers, and to the corrupt practice of allowing the jailers and their effective subcontractors to be the only “witnesses”.
No, in order to support such things, they would first have to have a sense of shame about their failure to uphold the Constitution. In this neck of the woods, you can’t even depend on getting that from a Federal Judge or District Attorney.
A good description of the Tulsa Public Defender’s Office and Mental Health Court.
Abstract from: Gottstein, James B., INVOLUNTARY COMMITMENT AND FORCED PSYCHIATRIC DRUGGING IN THE TRIAL COURTS: RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, Alaska Law Review, 2008, Vol 25:51-105, available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/alr/vol25/iss1/3
"A commonly-held belief is that locking up and forcibly drugging people diagnosed with mental illness is in their best interests as well as society’s as a whole. The truth is far different. Rather than protecting the public from harm, public safety is decreased. Rather than helping psychiatric respondents, many are greatly harmed. The evidence on this is clear. Constitutional, statutory, and judge-made law, if followed, would protect psychiatric respondents from being erroneously deprived of their freedom and right to decline psychiatric drugs. However, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents, and judges hearing these cases uncritically reflect society’s beliefs and do not engage in legitimate legal processes when conducting involuntarily commitment and forced drugging proceedings. By abandoning their core principle of zealous advocacy, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents interpose little, if any, defense and are not discovering and presenting to judges the evidence of the harm to their clients. By abandoning their core principle of being faithful to the law, judges have become instruments of oppression, rather than protectors of the rights of the downtrodden. While this Article focuses on Alaska, similar processes may be found in other United States’ jurisdictions, with only the details differing."
This is an example of the kind of in-depth article challenging bigotry that not a few local judges and lawyers would rather feed to their dogs than read for homework. Perhaps after barbecuing it and posting the video on YouTube.
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Posted by: Don B
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Bear in mind that of 1000 people without any diagnosed mental illness, about 30 will commit acts of violence. Out of 1000 with diagnosed mental illness, about 60 will commit acts of violence. More than 30 years ago, medical and legal researchers found that when Courts ordered inmates released from mental institutions, over the objections of psychiatrists who claimed they were too dangerous to be released, about 1/3 actually committed violent acts at a later date. So those predictions of dangerousness were wrong about two times out of three. But of those released as harmless, a much higher percentage was correctly predicted to be harmless. Let’s give the psychiatrists the benefit of the doubt and say that their predictions of harmlessness are right 9 times out of 10.
If out of 1000 people with mental illness evaluated at a State of Oklahoma mental health facility (like TCBH) 800 are retained as dangerous, and 200 let go, how many harmless people are incarcerated for every violent person let go? The number of harmless people incarcerated would be 0.67 times 800, or 536. The number of violent people let go would be 0.1 times 200, or 2. That means that TCBH would incarcerate 268 harmless people for every violent person let go.
But we don’t know the incarceration rates for places like TCBH. They don’t operate in the light of day. So let’s do the numbers for 800, 500 and 200 people out of each 1000 incarcerated.
800 kept → 536 harmless → 268 to 1
200 let go → 2 violent
500 kept → 335 harmless → 67 to 1
500 let go → 5 violent
200 kept → 134 harmless → 16 ¾ to 1
800 let go → 8 violent
I wonder how these numbers and punishments compare to driving while Black. If the government inflicted this kind of adverse “civil” action on newspaper and television reporters for mistakes in covering government scandals, or lawyers for raising frivolous suits, imagine the uproar. But then, these aren’t their oxes being gored.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Recently in China, where virtually no one is allowed to own a gun, a teenager killed 8 or 9 people with a knife. There have been increasing incidents of mass school killings with knives in China, By May 12th, 2012, there had been five violent school attacks in the previous two months. In 2008 in Japan, where they have a thing about swords, a man plowed into a crowd with a rental truck and started killing pedestrians with a knife. In December 2010, a man boarded a bus in Toride, Japan, and stabbed four people.
With evil intent, most things can be used to kill or maim. Decades ago, in one of the first Bic commercials, they loaded one into a rifle in front of a blank cartridge, shot it partway through a pine board, and demonstrated that it could still write. With or without guns, with or without knives, where there is a violent will, there’s a way. Just ask the House of Borgia.
President Obama, for example, seems to be utterly immune to a sense of irony. He personally orders the deaths of terrorists and “collaterally” kills innocents in the attacks. He sends young Americans overseas to do the same thing, and a portion of them either die or come back maimed in body or mind. But let some nut start shooting people in a theatre, and for President Obama, that buck stops with people who never had any participation or intent in the awful tragedy. He knows to and what to blame, the NRA and anyone with a mental illness.
Like a white woman fearing that every black man who winks at her might rape her, President Obama joins in with the calls to crack down on people with mental illnesses so that, in so many words, “this will not happen again”. Like many a bigot who once feared people just like him, he acts as if most in the minority of people with mental illnesses are devoid of human empathy or compassion, conscience, character or restraint. That such people are sub-human and do not deserve the same rights and consideration as him. Even while he, himself, adds to that minority by sending young men and women to fight overseas. For whom he has attempted to reduce their civil rights.
It’s like he forgot how the blues were born. And now with Black Man on Top, he’s going to make some better ones. Irony – the South rose again and it’s a Black President.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAj9W0ntUMI – Footage of the JRC torturing a person (aired in court)
Re: Love Letters, hate mail
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
And the question is:
So, when two State mental health professionals get together and decide that someone is going to be dangerous and needs to be committed into their care, do they pool their psychic resources, or do they just call the hotline?
***************
Is Suspicious Black Man Syndrome in the DSM yet?
One of my neighbors suffers from suspicious black man syndrome. He has this old car with a broken driver’s side door and always gets in on the passenger side. So one day while he was getting in, one of his white neighbors had taken her dogs out to defecate next to it. She decided that he looked suspicious. So the next time he went out to his car, a TPD car was patrolling the parking lot, and she sent her boyfriend out to alert the officer.
The next thing my neighbor knows, three or four cop cars have him under a spotlight, with guns and tasers ready. They slap the cuffs on him and searched his car for the gun that this white lady claimed he had in his hands, and call in for any wants or warrants. No gun. He is a Viet Nam Vet, and has a carry permit and no criminal record. So they took the cuffs off and said, “Thank you for your service.” By backhanded way of apology, one might suppose.
If Suspicious Black Man Syndrome ever shows up in the psychiatric DSM book, TPD Officers won’t need to check anything. Under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, they can just take him on down to the local loony bin on general principles. The South shall rise again. And State of Oklahoma licensed mental health professionals can identify themselves to each other with that hoary old code:
“Oh, when will the Dark Night ever end?”
“With the dawn of the White Jubilee!”
Why, if that ever comes to pass, there might even be a couple of Federal and Tulsa District Court Judges changing their dark robes over to white linen. And growing some Kentucky Colonel goatees. It would complement her mustache.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
How can someone with a mental illness physically threaten an Oklahoma law enforcement or licensed mental health professional? With a look. And a thought, “What a jerk. Did you just crawl out from under a rock?”
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
such people deserve to have
for the rest of eternity
a little frog
sitting on their shoulders
saying
bigot..bigot..bigot…
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Oklahoma Mental Health Code makes sets no scientific or medical standards that can be proven by evidence or experiment to work. Nor, apparently, do the ruling bodies it sets up to oversee its administration. The only standard it has for deciding who is “dangerous”, besides being accused while mentally ill, is “two licensed mental health professionals”. As if this guarantees that the state of the art, or “standard of care”, is up to the task.
Those psychiatrists who presume to decide for society and the law which of us is “dangerous” seem to have no conception of the difference between temptation and intention. And since they have no direct access to our internal dialogues, they project that inability upon us. As far as they are concerned, mental illness is like a single drop of black blood in the Old South. According to many of them, the least bit of it, no matter what or how much [they aren’t very accurate in measuring that, either], deprives one of any military or religious or humanitarian discipline one ever obtained in growing up.
So they inflate every violent thought into a murderous plot, measured by the psychiatric buzzwords one is innocent or fool or ignorant enough to utter in their presence. Only angry or negative emotions or words count with them. The rest they discard as useless to their professional needs.
Under these biased and unscientific standards, just getting angry in a situation that would justifiably infuriate anyone else, marks the person with mental illness as a danger that needs their special control. Since they cannot really predict who will be violent when, except in a minority of cases involving histories of repeated violence, they just lock up all the usual suspects. Under the authority of a bigoted law, created largely to cater to ignorant fears and their continued livelihood, those psychiatrists steal from us the very right to have any negative or even assertive human emotions whatsoever.
Of course, the threat of losing civil rights and position in society, and dehumanizing and unjust incarceration drives many to hide any difficulties. And avoid seeking treatment, where they might arouse the notice of psychiatrists bent on this kind of “social improvement”. Making State mental health facilities and others self-defeating. It is better to heal one’s self or die in the attempt, than to endure that kind of “treatment”.
This, without any actual investigation on his part, is what one Federal Judge would dismiss, with prejudice, ironically, as irrational or unintelligible. Let us not ask the poor man to think too deeply upon such matters, as they seem to disturb his religiously fundamental and unshakable beliefs.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
White people at the time no doubt justified that orgy of ethnic cleansing called the Trail of Tears as the best thing for the Native Americans who had the land they wanted. White plantation owners who displaced them could be heard to say that their slaves were simple people who needed white guidance, religion and physical discipline. When Oklahoma was approaching statehood, white people debated whether the two-state option, with one white state and one Native American, would be economically viable for natives. The Cherokee noted that no one was asking them to vote on it.
Many believe that medication should be forced upon people with mental illnesses, “for their own good”. As someone who sought out medication for severe problems with depression and PTSD, I once thought that forced medication would be appropriate for many with schizophrenia and bipolar depression. Now, after reading more about the effects, I doubt it. The medications given for those conditions heal nothing and cause even worse physical problems. Many of them slowly destroy the nerve functions they allegedly improve, leaving their victims as trembling zombies who can’t hold a cup of coffee still, or show an engaged personality. They act mainly as a chemical cosh to suppress socially unpopular behavior.
Recent research has indicated that schizophrenics who get off their medication have better medical futures than those who stay on them. Take for example, Dr. John Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie which took extensive dramatic liberties with the Sylvia Nasar biography, “A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash”. Dr. Nash never saw visual hallucinations, and did not hear voices until five years after being diagnosed as schizophrenia and forced onto medication. Eventually, he learned how to avoid the notice of psychiatrists and after 1970 stopped taking medication. He healed himself, training himself to reject his delusions as a waste of effort, and returned to making contributions in his field. If he had stayed on medication, he could not have done that, and likely would have deteriorated into someone needing permanent physical care. Which Oklahoma policy and law allegedly seek to prevent.
Even my medications have a price. I can no longer do higher math or computer programming reliably, and I’m dizzy a lot. Together, they suppress white blood cells and platelets, leaving me more open to infections. I’ve been on and off antibiotics since before the State released me from its enforced hospitality, and to the ER twice with high fever and infection, the last time Christmas morning of last year. So I’ve had to start slowly and carefully weaning myself off them.
The Honorable Stephen V. Manley, who believes in court-directed medication, founded the Santa Clara County Mental Health Treatment Court when he got tired of cycling mentally ill people with criminal problems repeatedly through jail. He gave an interview to the Center for Court Innovation in 2005. Even he noted several things:
“There’s a stigma with the mentally ill that they are more dangerous, which is not true. Some are, some are not. They are, however, far more difficult to work with.”
“I think they have to be very separate courts. In a drug court we use incentives and sanctions to motivate clients. With the mentally ill it is totally different.”
“I do not believe that just any judge could walk in and preside over a mental health court. A judge has to be committed, very patient, and willing to accept criticism from clients. Because mentally ill people are very honest. They will tell you almost everything and they will tell you what is and isn’t working and what they want—if you ever bother to listen to them.”
If you ever bother to listen to them. Not in Oklahoma law enforcement or courts. As far as Oklahoma law enforcement is concerned, if anyone abusing someone with mental illness gets a negative reaction, the abuser is the threatened victim. It says so right there in the law, in the Definitions section of Title 43A. No need to investigate all the circumstances; like African and Native Americans before them, people with mental illness aren’t worth that much trouble. Getting angry while mentally ill merits only a trip to the local loony bin.
An Oklahoma Mental Health Court is even worse. Mental health professionals in the attached State mental facility, who benefit from commitments, decide the outcome for the Judge before the commitment hearing ever starts. To make their case, they construct (in its legal sense) evaluations and suppress existing medical and other information to the contrary. They are their own proof that everything they do, even falsifying medical information, is “for the good” of the accused.
The Public Defender leaves the accused in the dark about rights, like demanding a jury trial to ensure the right to cross-examine accusers. The Judge refuses to hear any defense and accepts any uninvestigated, unproven, unsworn hearsay that the mental health professionals have presented as fact. The Public Defender raises no objection to this, abandoning all pretense of zealous advocacy for the accused. No one explains the legal difference in rights between voluntary and involuntary commitment. If the accused does not volunteer, then involuntary commitment is a done deal. After all, isn’t it “for their own good”?
Which gives the State mental health professionals another barbi-doll to play with. They get to force medications and behavior modification on the “consumer”. No one gets out without acting in a “proper” manner and telling those professionals what they want to hear: that they saved another one from him or her self. No healing need apply.
As Dr. John Nash and Dr. Benjamin Gray noted, captive patients are often afraid of their captors and what they can do. In a time not long past, and maybe still present in some places, mental health professionals would cut or burn out a section of a captive patients’ brains to make them act right. Whatever most economically enforces social norms. Hitler just gassed them. Very few people get out of such places without scars in themselves and on their civil rights. Like some runaway slaves, some would even prefer not to be taken alive another time.
Who says Jim Crow is dead?
The Oklahoma (and U.S.) legal system should be ashamed of its double standards. But don’t hold your breath. There’s no NAACP to represent Crazy People in the Supreme Court and Congress. And if there were, the “normals” would jeer at it just like they did the first one. Just as they would call this little screed rambling and unintelligible.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Look for the damage from the Aurora shootings to spread way beyond its borders, affecting those who are vulnerable. I don’t know about other people, but when 9-11 happened, I hadn’t been able to feel for other people for years, due to other traumas, like getting maimed by a drinking driver and cut open looking for cancer. Nor had I been able to get any help for it. But every time those survivors told their stories on TV, I cried. I think those emotional changes probably contributed to losing the job I had at the time.
I can tell you that getting help for such things is chancy. Much of psychiatry is humiliating, coercive and punitive. No one wants to get automatically profiled and locked up for having god-awful thoughts about god-awful events. In a 2009 issue of Schizophrenic Bulletin (35:4(661-663)), Dr. Benjamin Gray relates experiences from inside schizophrenia about hearing voices and compulsory treatment. He points out that fear of misinterpretation out of context, followed by punishment and forced medication, keeps many from fully discussing their problems and experiences with anyone, much less the psychiatrists dishing out the pain. Nor can you get much help from a society that says, “You just can’t think like that! You’re only going to hurt yourself.”
To my mind, that stupidity in the field of psychiatry, which enables psychiatrists to dominate patients like it’s a BDSM game, contributes to such shootings. The shooters aren’t people who suddenly went bad, just because they had access to firearms. Whatever brought them to that violence built up over time. BDSM psychiatry, like that practiced by the State of Oklahoma, cuts them off from alternatives and healing. And for vast majority of those with mental illnesses, who aren’t ever going to shoot anyone, both the lack of decent and compassionate psychiatry, and violent attacks that lack never touches, add to the ignorant and unreasoning fear and stigma in the rest of society that cuts such people off from valued and productive lives.
Perhaps for most of us with mental illnesses, BDSM is not an option. It would only make us relive horrors. But one has to wonder if for some, who might otherwise become violent, practicing BDSM with restraint in a controlled and safe setting, so as to defuse certain emotions, might be better than the law-backed and judicially-enabled BDSM humiliation and coercion that so often passes for psychiatry.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In most Federal and State venues, falsifying medical records is a felony. Nurses have lost their jobs for sins as small as post-dating a medication record, even if the medication, dosage and medication time written down were correct. But here in Oklahoma, the State Attorney General’s Office claims the actions of State employees in State mental facilities and courts are covered by “absolute immunity”.
Take for example the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH) and the Tulsa City and County Mental Health Court. In a Mental Health Court document, a Request for Pre-Hearing Detention, filed Aug 05 2010 in case MH-2010-0404, Dr. Lori C. Miller of TCBH swears under the oath of perjury that, “I am familiar with the Respondent’s condition, conduct and actions”, to justify an opinion that the Respondent was too dangerous to remain free.
That was a lie. Prior to Aug 3, 2010, Dr. Miller had never met that person. She gave no indication of having interviewed his family, friends, neighbors, or even received medical records covering the previous nearly seven years from his physicians and psychiatrists at O.U. Physicians. Later, in order to get more of his normal medications (not all), that person had to insist that his medical records be transferred from O.U. Family Medicine.
In a Mental Health Evaluation, filed that same day with the Mental Health Court, Dr. Miller and LPC Julie King depict that person’s statements about abiding by the Oklahoma Castle Doctrine in the case of a home invasion, and hearsay about unsworn accusations, as “threatening statements”, “threats to hurt others” and “unable to state that he would not harm anyone” with a firearm. Miller and King claimed, “unable to care for himself”.
Despite never having inspected his living conditions, his disability income, his OK Dept of Rehabilitative Services Ticket to Work Program, his balanced checkbook, his paid bills, his regularly laundered underwear, or his well-used toothbrush. Apparently on the basis of mere appearances on some very bad days, when that person had been suffering from a painful bad tooth, repeatedly dehydrated working in the worst heat of the year to get his possessions out of his apartment ahead of a threatened eviction, dressed in his grubbies to go work in the dirt and heat, handcuffed in front of his friends and neighbors, and deprived at TCBH of a hair tie, which made his nightly washed and very dry hair look wild. There is such a thing as shock and anger at outrageous treatment.
Miller checked off the part of the form stating that “Reasonable efforts have been made to provide for the mental health … needs of the person through the provision of less restrictive alternatives, and the alternatives have failed to meet the treatment needs of the person”. Yet, she made no reference to ongoing medication management with the O.U. Psychiatric Clinic, as required by OS §43A-5-417. Nor made any offer to simply help that person get his possessions out of his old apartment and into his new one, which would have ended a bad situation.
Indeed, OS §43A-5-415.E.1 states: “The court shall not order hospitalization without a thorough consideration of available treatment alternatives to hospitalization and may direct the submission of evidence as to the least restrictive treatment alternative or may order a mental health examination.” Thus the Court depends upon those who have the information to submit it, and typically relies upon the State facility. For it seems to have no judgment of its own.
In the “Petition for Mental Health Treatment and Application for Release of Confidential Records”, filed with the Court on Aug 05 2010, Dr. Miller took out of all context and intent a statement badgered out of that person by a TCBH Licensed Professional Counselor King to the effect that he had not decided on his ultimate course of action regarding his accusers (like this blog), and transformed it into “that he has not yet decided his plan of violence against the apartment staff, ‘I haven’t decided yet’”. The only “witnesses to the alleged facts” whom she cites come only from COPES and TCBH.
In the Court document filed Aug 06 2010, “Order Setting Hearing and Directing Pre-Hearing Detention; and Order Releasing Confidential Records”, Mental Health Court Judge Theresa Dreiling claims, among other things:
“WHEREAS, it has been made to appear by clear and convincing evidence that there is probable cause to detain said Respondent until a hearing on said Petition and”
….
And “WHEREAS, it appears further that the” (medical) “information sought is not available elsewhere and can only be obtained from the detaining and/or treating facility” (TCBH) “or the Department of Mental Health and Substance Services (sic)”
Note that most of these documents are fill-in-the-blanks forms, indicating that the State treats people with mental illnesses like this as a matter of course.
This is how the previous seven years of non-violent behavior, regular contact with physical and psychiatric doctors, and responsible adherence to taking medication can be made by State doctors and mental health courts to disappear, in order to obtain captive patients. Nor did TCBH and O.U. Physicians allow that person to consult with or get a second opinion from his regular Psychiatrists at O.U.. Which in this case I believe is a violation of OS §59-637.A.2.b, which gives “using intimidation, coercion or deception to obtain or retain a patient or discourage the use of a second opinion or consultation,” as reason to suspend the license of an Osteopath.
Oklahoma claims that perjury is a felony. For anyone else, that is. But the State’s Attorney (and a local Federal Judge) indicates that it is just peachy keen dandy for State employees to construct false medical documents in the cases of people with mental illnesses. The State’s Attorney demands “absolute immunity” for doing things the same old way. And State Boards of Examination are loath to “interfere”. Never mind that this may well be violations of multiple Federal laws, such as Title II of the ADA, HIPAA, 18 U.S.C. § 241, 18 U.S.C. § 242, 42 USC § 1320a–7b, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and 31 U.S.C. § 3729-3733.
But can we expect the U.S. Attorney to enforce those laws for people with mental illnesses? My, that is a good question. It would depend upon whether or not he’s a bigot.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Some of us, when we go looking on the Internet to find out what “BDSM” means, recognize the Dominant/submissive concept from childhood. Even without any history of sexual abuse, we immediately recognize the voice of humiliation. I doubt that any child who has had it applied repeatedly can ever forget it. It even drives some to suicide or murder or prostitution.
Just because someone with a State license gives it voice in a State institution, like a so-called mental hospital, it doesn’t suddenly become healing and therapeutic medical treatment. It’s still punishment dished out by those who deem themselves and their morality superior to anyone who isn’t them. Working in a State-authorized civil commitment system that allows them to make BDSM dolls out of real people, and play with them.
At least BDSM is consensual, and doesn’t require bending civil law into a pretzel to make it work for those playing Dominants.
Writing in the 1963 book, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, Szasz notes: “The ghost of the ‘dangerous mental patient’ will not be laid to rest until it is recognized that the institution to which the so-call mental patient is committed is not a hospital but a prison. Lawbreakers, regardless of their mental health, ought to be treated as offenders. This would afford possibilities for “therapy” in a context where personal liberties could be protected; whereas our present practices, which use civil law to deprive people of their liberties, make both therapy and protection of civil liberties impossible.”
Unfortunately, too many people with power do so enjoy playing with living dolls. And this is the kind of rational discussion that a local Federal Judge, who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution (against all enemies foreign and domestic, without any mental reservation) would dismiss as “irrational”, “unintelligible”, “rambling”, “frivolous” or “malicious”. It does not matter to this Judge that State employees can be shown to create biased and fictitious medical documents, and suppress real ones, to achieve their advantage and maintain their prerogatives. Or that they have suspended due process for those they abuse. Apparently, it only matters that any person making such objections would not be admitted to the Judge’s circle of elevated society.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In this election season, it’s time to write about this again. Did you realize that Medicaid has a built-in penalty for trying to get off it? Here we have conservatives trying to cut back or eliminate it, and liberals trying to expand it, and neither side willing to set it up so that people can work their way off it.
Can you say “stupid”?
Due to disability or age or both, some of us will never be hired again to do anything meaningful and rewarding. Felons have better job prospects than anyone with a serious disability, especially psychiatric disabilities. So what if I can write well? Most employers, prejudiced by fear, will not hire anyone who admits to a mental illness. From experience, I know that I would only have to get angry or upset about anything once, and my employer would fire me for fear of my going postal. Even though I have no significant history of physical violence, especially repeated offenses, and no drug or alcohol problems, the only medically and statistically reliable indicators of future behavior.
I think it’s easier for gays to come out and still work. Even vampires get better press. After all, the State doesn’t have any law making them dangerous when accused, until proven otherwise. Many people with disabilities, who want jobs and can’t work full time, have to start businesses for themselves that will accommodate them. Virtually no one else will.
A Benefits Analyst at the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitative Services was kind enough to send me a report on what would happen if I earn any money trying to start a business. I already know from DHS that if I make any income at all, I lose food stamps. Which would eliminate the LifeLine discount that keeps my phone bill down $30-$40 a month. I get special help from state Medicaid for premiums on Medicare Parts B and D, drug co-pays and the “donut hole”. At the time of the analysis, the Medicare premiums were $115.40/month.
Everyone who has looked into it knows that a startup business doesn’t turn a real profit for the first year, most often two. DHS has told me that if I start a business, they will count gross income, not net. So I would lose “special help” if I make just $1/month more. So that’s about a $150/month loss for a $1/month gain, never mind business expenses. If I start a business, it has to make at least $1800 profit, possibly as much as $3000, in the first sale to cover the losses in aid for that year.
What would you choose to do without? Rent? Food? Medicine? How many hungry, homeless people do you know that start businesses? There’s no real choice.
I wrote about this to Senator Coburn’s office. The guy that called back said that they wanted to help people like me. But mostly I just got the speech about how being afraid that working would cost one Medicaid was a “myth”. I sent them a copy of my OKDRS Benefits Summary & Analysis Report, suggesting that they should not give out semi-legal advice without checking their facts. Somebody might get hurt.
And never heard back. It seems that I would already have to have a business, and be a potential campaign contributor, to get any real help with changing Medicaid in a humane and business-friendly way.
It might even shake my faith in the sincerity of politicians.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
No, Virginia, we’re not talking about homosexual insects. That’s a topic for another time, to make conservative heads explode. “Those perverts are walking on my food!”
Start with a vacuum cleaner, some yogurt cups and good old-fashioned flypaper. The vacuum cleaner works best with a long extension in the evening, when flies start circling the lights. You can have only limited success trying to chase them down with it. They dodge. But they do tend to follow fix circuits around a light. So you just hold the end of the extension in its path and let it fly right into the suction.
Flypaper works on both, but it needs a little help, something to concentrate them in that area. The web pages that say fruit flies can’t find their way out of homemade traps are wrong. I’ve seen it. But fruit flies like to sit on edges. Maybe so they can watch for danger in more directions. Like the edges of a long, narrow roll of flypaper that pulls out of one of those little tubes. They’re cheap and may even last a season.
Here’s where the yogurt cups comes in. When you’ve finished eating the yogurt, you drop some pieces of peeled fruit into the bottom to rot and attract flies. Then cover it with a piece of plastic wrap held in place by a rubber band. Use a toothpick or barbeque skewer to punch two holes in the middle of the plastic, a bit less and no more than 1/16 inch across. Not the edges – the flies try to get out by circling the edges and can find holes there a lot easier. Don’t pile the fruit up too close to the hole, either. You don’t need that much. Then put several close under the flypaper roll hanging down. It couldn’t hurt to put one or two in the garbage can, too.
You won’t smell them much, but the flies can. The get into the holes and either die there, or get tired from trying to get out, and tend to land on the flypaper when they do. After a while, you won’t see so many around any more. If a yogurt cup does start to smell enough to notice, just toss it and have another.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
What kind of psychiatrist would pretend to heal a suicide by sending that person on a guilt trip? Despite promises to provide “trauma informed” care and treatment, you can find them in the mental facilities of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. Like the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health.
Some people seem to think that suicide is always an easy way out, or a “plea to get attention”, a self-absorbed act by people who blame everyone else for their problems. I suspect that those people, in their ignorance, have never been affected by physical and emotional abuse as children. Or have never been stripped of all pride and self-confidence and made to feel as if they don’t really deserve to live or belong in their own families.
There’s nothing easy about suicide. You have to go through hell to get there. And if you go to a private place to do it and fail, who are you going to tell? It would only invite more abuse. Maybe even some horrible psychiatric treatment that involves burning or cutting out a part of your self and brain. On the approval of an adult who has ever been eager to say, “I’ll fix you!” If you thought getting the belt and the red-faced, spitting, screaming, paranoid rages were bad, what could be better about something even more extreme. You could go four years after hiding an attempt and never say a word about it to anyone else. Until the next time.
What moron would think that suicidal children always blame it all on everyone else? When they have always been told the their abuse is instigated and justified by their own sins and faults, to the point of destroying all pride, self-confidence, hope for the future and full ability to function effectively in society. It’s not unheard that such children never have a permanent relationship or found a family, because they believe so strongly in their own failings. What kind of sadistic psychiatrist or counselor would then say, “Well if you’ve had all these problems with other people, what’s the common denominator? It’s you!” You need look no farther than TCBH.
Some people think it’s impossible for such children to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, and how to fix it. Or that it’s their own fault if they can’t do it in some socially approved time period. “You should just get over it and get on with your life!” Another reason to hide it.
Like the psychiatrist or counselor or nurse who has probably never been there, but can’t stand to be contradicted by anyone who’s been dealing with and surviving this kind of pain for decades. They have a whip they use on anyone who disagrees with them. It’s, “You don’t have any insight!”, or “You’re just not self aware!” The last refuge of a quack, someone who cares less about doing further damage, than for his or her own ego.
Or how about the COPES agents who construct “Third Party Statements” for the Police, using only those things you might do or say that can be presented as damning, in order to justify a commitment at TCBH. Or using unproven and uninvestigated malicious hearsay, for which they never even bother to collect any sworn statement, which might later be challenged in the cross-examinations that the Mental Health Court won’t allow. So that TCBH can demand that you “accept responsibility for being here”.
As Gollum in Lord of the Rings said, “Always tries to be helpful.” Never mind if that kind of self-righteous stupidity might make one lose hope and consider suicide just to escape the barrage of degrading, humiliating, dehumanizing demonization. Well, at least you’re no stranger to that kind of “adult” behavior, the kind that religious zealots often inflict on their own children. You’d think that it might be kinder and more honest for their parents (or “licensed mental health professionals”) just to kill and eat them.
Re: Prosecuting Mothers
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
This morning, NPR Morning Edition ran a piece discussing the abject failure of the Michigan public defender system in representing the poor.
See http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154849477/michigan-finally-eyeing-changes-to-lawyers-for-poor
In Michigan, public defenders are often the lowest bidders, paid by the case, not the workload. So they have reason to urge their poor clients to plead guilty as fast as possible, doing as little work as possible, so they can run as many through the system as fast as possible, and thus make a decent living. Individual case loads can run as high as 400 per year, leaving no time to investigate or prepare a case.
As a result, an innocent person like Mr. Edward Carter can spend as much as 35 years in jail for a crime of violence committed while he was in custody on other charges. An ACLU lawyer suing the State calls it “assembly line justice”, just another way of saying “railroad”. Even the Republican Governor and a County Prosecutor acknowledge that the system is broken.
Can you see DA Tim Harris acknowledging the same thing about the railroad running through the Tulsa County Mental Health Court? I think that a certain warm place would freeze over and warm back up again first. It’s much too handy for disposing of people he can’t successfully prosecute in a criminal court.
So how do public defenders get paid here? Obviously not enough to inform their captive clients of all their rights. Or to mount a zealous defense, or to demand a rigorous and even-handed investigation by police,. Or to object to hearsay, to patently false statements filed by the Court, to bogus evidentiary standards, to the lack of cross examination of accusers, and to the corrupt practice of allowing the jailers and their effective subcontractors to be the only “witnesses”.
No, in order to support such things, they would first have to have a sense of shame about their failure to uphold the Constitution. In this neck of the woods, you can’t even depend on getting that from a Federal Judge or District Attorney.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Abstract from: Gottstein, James B., INVOLUNTARY COMMITMENT AND FORCED PSYCHIATRIC DRUGGING IN THE TRIAL COURTS: RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, Alaska Law Review, 2008, Vol 25:51-105,
available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/alr/vol25/iss1/3
"A commonly-held belief is that locking up and forcibly drugging people diagnosed with mental illness is in their best interests as well as society’s as a whole. The truth is far different. Rather than protecting the public from harm, public safety is decreased. Rather than helping psychiatric respondents, many are greatly harmed. The evidence on this is clear. Constitutional, statutory, and judge-made law, if followed, would protect psychiatric respondents from being erroneously deprived of their freedom and right to decline psychiatric drugs. However, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents, and judges hearing these cases uncritically reflect society’s beliefs and do not engage in legitimate legal processes when conducting involuntarily commitment and forced drugging proceedings. By abandoning their core principle of zealous advocacy, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents interpose little, if any, defense and are not discovering and presenting to judges the evidence of the harm to their clients. By abandoning their core principle of being faithful to the law, judges have become instruments of oppression, rather than protectors of the rights of the downtrodden. While this Article focuses on Alaska, similar processes may be found in other United States’ jurisdictions, with only the details differing."
This is an example of the kind of in-depth article challenging bigotry that not a few local judges and lawyers would rather feed to their dogs than read for homework. Perhaps after barbecuing it and posting the video on YouTube.