I have some questions about the local and state mental health "services". Things may have changed since the third quarter of 2010, but maybe not. 1) Has anyone ever known the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services (COPES) to interview all those with reason to know about an alleged incident, before recommending emergency commitment to the local loony bin, to get a context for the situation and check on the truthfulness of those making accusations? 2) Has anyone ever known the mental health unit of the Public Defender's Office not only to inform a candidate for commitment of all of his or her rights under the state and federal constitutions, but to advise that candidate that he or she should ask for a jury trial so as to have the legal right to cross-examine witnesses and accusers? 3) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH aka the local loony bin aka This Can't Be Happening) to turn away someone brought in for examination as unjustly accused? 4) Has anyone ever known a "witness" for an involuntary civil commitment at TCBH, in any proceeding not a jury trial, to be someone other than an employee or contractor of the State or local government? 5) Has anyone ever known of a case where the person accused of being in need of treatment (aka "the consumer") was not examined, for mental defect and/or recommendation for commitment, by the Psychiatrist who would later benefit from employment as that person's doctor of record. 6) Does it strike anyone as improper that the Psychiatrist who would later benefit from such employment could sign papers as the "witness" for commitment, the "evaluator" for the commitment, and the person requesting the commitment? 7) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Police Department to help someone with difficulties and concerns Before it gets to the point of speculation about ending it all, so as to avoid the massive violation of civil liberties of an involuntary commitment? 8) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Police Department to take a person with mental health difficulties seriously enough to fully investigate a situation so as to determine the truthfulness of the accusers? 9) Has anyone ever known the Oklahoma Dept of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services to follow the civil commitment procedures listed in section 5-401 of the Mental Health Code (Title 43A), instead of just pretending that it was "Repealed", as it says on their web site. The actual code states that it was repealed and then amended to state what is listed on the Oklahoma Legislature's site.
This morning on NPR, Harry Belafonte noted that his mother said, "Never let an injustice pass unchallenged." Let's say there is an apartment complex containing about 120 units of elderly and disabled renters. The average rent (utilities included) is at least $600/month, heavily subsidized by the State and HUD. If the complex is 90% full, it grosses about $64,800 a month. It has only three full time employees, some part time employees and a number of sporadic contractors. Then let's say the out-of-state owner hires a new manager, firing the old one literally at her husband's death bed. I have some questions about that.
Is it right for this new manager to stop answering the emergency medical bell pulls after hours, leaving them to an answering machine or service? Particularly when this leads to a near death for one elderly and disabled resident who got sick. Is it right for this manager and her maintenance man to tell residents repeatedly that broken plumbing will be taken care of "tomorrow", then leave it broken for up to a month? Is it right for this manager to make only superficial cosmetic changes, and then call the complex "resort style living",? Especially when the amenities the manager takes credit for are some coin-operated laundry machines, an independent beauty contractor, and a number of things that the residents have provided or died and left behind, like computers, books, and often broken exercise equipment that the manager does not maintain. After the previous manager took care of regularly testing and refurbishing the apartment fire detectors, usually about seven feet above the floor, is it right for this manager to demand that residents should be responsible for them, also demanding that the residents, even those too crippled to walk, test them "at least once a month". Is if right for the manager to threaten or take away shopping carts, donated by Walmart, that the residents use to move furniture and heavy shopping bags, or just to use as a walker, just because it doesn't fit the manager's image of "resort style living"? Is it right for the manager to make many of the residents so terrified of eviction that they fear to criticize or challenge the management openly, and in one case, even to report part of a ceiling fallen in. Is it right, when the vast majority of residents are elderly, or disabled, or require oxygen and other special medical help, or are just waiting to die of a terminal disease, for the manager to proclaim in disgust that "this isn't a rest home", that it is a retirement resort. And then advertise online on a site that promotes assisted living. Is it right for this manager to proclaim to a resident, subject to previous drug theft and worried about master keys unchanged for for over five years, that anyone in the management can come into the resident's apartment at any time, for any reason, without prior notice? Is it right for this manager to verbally abuse another retired resident, trying to get that one to move when no reason can be found to evict? Is it right, when long term, long-suffering residents move out the manager's control, for this manager to call ordinary wear and tear on carpets and paint "damage" and charge hundreds of dollars for "repairs"? Especially when the management's web ads make one resident's ornate living quarters look like the norm, and takes credit for it. When a resident cannot be around to supervise a move, is it right for this manager to harass moving company personnel, demanding that they get things packed immediately, or else the property will be thrown in the trash the next day? Particularly when over a thousand dollars of property comes up missing, and the most of the rest is packed like pick-up sticks in boxes too large for the resident to move by hand. Is it right that the out-of-state owner thinks that this is the ethical and proper way to treat residents? When ambulances appear at least once a month at this complex, and at least one resident fears that this manager's actions could drive vulnerable seniors over the brink into the hospital and even death, is it right for the TPD to dismiss such concerns as not their problem, unless a resident turns up dead of violence? When a resident becomes concerned about these issues, is it right for Adult Protective Services to ignore repeated e-mail complaints? When a resident is both concerned about these issues and ready to defend against home invasion from any quarter, is it right for the District Attorney's Office to call this resident a "terrorist"? Especially without bothering to check with the resident's neighbors to determine the truth? Has it come down to the point that a business person in Tulsa can make any false and misleading advertisement, commit any abuse and make any accusation with the willing support of the TPD, the Sheriff's Office, District Attorney's Office and the local Courts, merely because the opposing party is not a business person, or just has some unpopular disability?
The manager in question no longer works for the apartment complex. But reportedly, the out-of-state owner regretting losing the manager to a better job, and the residents are still too frightened of eviction to openly discuss or testify about what happened. Is this the way that Tulsa proudly expects its elderly, sick and disabled to live out their last years?
I beg to differ with Mrs. Jazmond Murphy's concept of supporting the Second Amendment. For one thing she is already halfway to a gun controller's paradise when she makes a firearm so hard to get working that it cannot be realistically used in a blitz home invasion. I note that nowhere in her letter does she mention firearms safety training for her son to demystify the forbidden fruit she has created.
For another thing, what does she mean by "no history of mental illness"? The range of mental illness is as wide and varied as cancer. Do you have a history of postpartum depression? Then by that wide standard, you shouldn't own a gun. Are you suffering grief, depression and survivor's guilt from losing a loved one in an accident? Are you having anxiety attacks from being stalked by an ex-lover? Do you have post traumatic stress disorder from getting mugged, maimed in a car wreck, raped, gang raped, or terribly scarred by burns or surgery? Are you having bad tornado dreams because your house came apart around you here in tornado alley? Then by Mrs. Murphy's wide standard, you shouldn't have a gun. And if any of this happens to you and results in mental trauma, then you'll have to turn yours in. By this standard, those who become the most vulnerable will be denied the most effective means of self defense. Is Mrs. Murphy by any chance volunteering to stand guard over them?
For that matter, what about Police who often are badly affected by their traumatic experiences, and sometimes end their careers with a bad case of guninmouthia? Does one hear those who know just what to do about everything proposing to take their guns away? Or do we not count them because that last act puts an end to their histories? By the same token, do we ignore the Police who have been killed with their own guns, in creating reasons for who shouldn't have them? That would seem to depend less on any objective standard than someone's personal politics.
It's easier to tell, others what to do, if their experiences aren't real, unless they happen to you.
The inmates of the State of Oklahoma's mental facilities might be forgiven for wondering if their keepers (but not all of them) are the kind of people who at home lock their children in closets, or fly into a rage and scream, "I'll make you act right!" There are certainly people who need help, but that kind?
When I was inside TCBH, I met people with apparent delusions who needed assisted living, but not necessarily prison-like confinement in an intellectual desert and warm-body warehouse. There was the old woman who said she was God, and promised everyone a big car when we all got out. There was the old guy who had angry conversations with either people who weren’t there, or simply was acting out some internal dialog, erupting now and then with “Bam! Bam!”. There was the guy who went around saying that he had or would get a contract with the State to refurbish the facility, and that he was going to make a Univac computer out of a long-outdated vacuum-tube technology called Nuvistors. Some would stand and stare at nothing or break down and cry for no apparent reason. Or maybe because people they counted upon had abandoned them there. I wasn’t sure about the guy who said he had a castle in Poland. I had no knowledge or proof that he didn’t.
Although a few made threats or allusions to threats (“There’s going to be blood!”), aside from a few bloodless female cat fights, few had any violence in them. Not even the big guy with a history of abuse who made “money” by tearing strips of paper out of books, and did karate kicks in front of his mirror. The worst violence was directed at him or herself. Like the suicides, and the very nice young lady with deep scars on her arms who heard a voice telling her to cut herself and remove limbs. She was missing part of one leg just below the knee, and was on 24-hour observation.
Most of the problem seemed to be that no one wanted them around. They made regular people uncomfortable. They were there to be warehoused and drugged until either they became well-behaved enough to be acceptable, or the drugs made them shake so bad with palsy that they couldn’t care for themselves on the outside. The old guy with the angry expressions shook so bad that he wore a lot of his coffee on his front. The young lady with the missing shin was just starting to shake.
If you think it was about healing, consider this. The food was greasy and salty, with few fresh vegetables and almost no fruit. The shrinks showed up for maybe thirty minutes out of a week, if that. The psychiatrist who signed the petition for my commitment came in one session, and didn’t know either my history or the fact that she had prescribed medication for depression. Then she threatened to overmedicate me for not agreeing that I should be there. Her idea of breaking a hunger strike was to deny the electrolytes that kept a heart from racing.
We were not allowed to see any outside doctors at all, not even psychiatrists or general practitioners of long standing. It took a lot of bitching just to get TCBH just to ask established doctors for records of current prescriptions, so that they could be continued. And what real doctor doesn’t know that an asthma rescue inhaler has to be available upon request, not just twice a day at med times? The only times I can recall that anyone got out of there to see a real doctor (or dentist) was then one of the old guys started choking on food, and my abscessed tooth finally got so bad that I couldn’t eat.
The ones that got out fastest tended to be those who had actually committed some act of violence, the suicides, and those who ran from, threatened or fought police. One young woman came in with knife scars on her throat, and either left in a few days, or was transferred to the other unit, though that rarely happened. Apparently they were the easiest to coerce into “giving the Wookie what he wants”, the politically correct statements that the psychiatrists and counselors wanted to hear.
Another group with fast turnaround were those who came in for a quick detox, especially if they had been found unconscious or senseless. One young woman came in for reasons unknown, looking like an Original Gangster, and was back out in a few days. When someone was picking her old clothes out of a bin, out dropped a glass crack pipe. No doubt more miracle cures.
Most seemed to be there because they had been denounced by some person or persons who just didn’t like the way they acted. For example, State law Title 43A-1-103 includes the in the definition, “Risk of harm to self or others”, the clause 18.c, “having placed another person or persons in a reasonable fear of violent behavior directed towards such person or persons or serious physical harm to them as manifested by serious and immediate threats”. This has two parts. If someone has actually pulled out a weapon, pointed it at someone and threatened to use it one them, or set up an obvious deadly boobytrap, or deliberately torched a building with someone in it, those actions obviously fit the second part.
But many people being warehoused and drugged only “fit” the first part, the “reasonable fear of violent behavior” as seen or alleged by the person making the complaint. As Professor Joan G. Brannon of the School of Government of the University of North Carolina put it in “The Magistrate’s Role in Involuntary Commitment”, Administration of Justice Bulletin, 05 September 2007: “Dangerous to Others A magistrate must also issue a custody order for a mentally ill respondent if he or she is dangerous to others. A respondent is dangerous to others if, within the relevant past, he or she has: (1) inflicted or attempted to inflict serious bodily harm on another, or has acted in a way that creates a substantial risk of serious bodily harm to another, or has engaged in extreme destruction of property, and (2) there is a reasonable probability that such conduct will be repeated.36 (36. G.S. 122C-3(11)(b).)”
She goes on to state: “In order to find a respondent dangerous to others on the basis of threats alone, however, the petitioner must present specific evidence about the kind of harm the respondent threatened, when the threats were made, and in what context. For example, the mere allegation that the “respondent ha[d] made statements to her husband of a threatening nature,” without more, is insufficient.40”
Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1979 standard in Addington v. Texas that such allegations require “clear and convincing evidence” to justify involuntary commitment, it seems apparent that the “context” must be fully explored, and not rest entirely upon the mere allegations of those who have bigoted or intolerant or malicious axes to grind. Failure to establish that those making the allegations are indeed truthful can only lead to an extremely damaging miscarriage of justice and deprivation of civil liberties.
Unfortunately, few who make false complaints out of bigotry, intolerance or malicious self-interest have any fear or probability of ever being caught and held to account. Especially not when those investigating the allegations are bigots trained by bigots. They are like D.W. Griffith, who directed the 1915 silent film “Birth of a Nation”. In which a skulking white man dressed up in blackface threatened the purity and virginity of a Southern damsel, only to be thwarted by the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan.
No one has to explain to Black Americans how the bigoted myth of uncontrollable racial lust works. The current bigoted myth that those with mental illness tend to be criminal and violent is just as effective. In the movies and news media, people with disabilities are either supercrips (Google it) or serial killers/mass murders, with serial killers/mass murders way in the lead. For example, "In this content analysis of television, the portrayal of persons with mental disorders was highly correlated with the portrayal of violent crime. The mentally ill were found to be nearly 10 times more violent than the general population of television characters, and 10 to 20 times more violent (during a two week sample) than the mentally ill in the U.S. population (over the course of an entire year). The mentally ill on television were also judged to have a negative impact on society and a negative quality of life." [Diefenbach, DL. "The Portrayal Of Mental Illness On Prime-Time Television."Journal of Community Psychology 25 (3): 289-302 MAY 1997]
It’s so easy to lock up people and make them pay for one’s intolerance when they have no political clout and can’t fight back. Or, as one disabled person put it, “Why don’t we have a march on Washington? Because it’s such a bitch to get there.”
Additional reading. Even just the abstracts of the articles are instructive. Other reading can be found at PubMed.gov, the online journal database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine - somewhat more substantial than myths. Search on “serious mental illness”, “crime”, “violence” and related terms in various combinations.
1. Monahan, Jerome. "Celluloid madness." (Teacher)(PSHE)(portrayal of mental illness in the media) Times Educational Supplement, Dec 5, 2003 2. Monahan, John. Circa 1980 (1st Ed), 1995 (new Ed.), The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior, Jason Aronson, Inc., Northvale NJ and London, 134 p. 3. Monahan, John, and Steadman, Henry J. 1994, Violence and Mental Disorder: Developments in Risk Analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 318 p. 4. Schneider, Irving "The theory and practice of movie psychiatry." American Journal of Psychiatry. Vol 144(8), Aug 1987, pp. 996-1002 5. Signorielli, Nancy. "The stigma of mental illness on television." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Summer 1989 v33 n3 p325-331 6. Wahl, O.F., Lefkowits, J. Y. "Impact Of a Television Film on Attitudes Toward Mental-Illness." American Journal of Community Psychology 17 (4): 521-528 Aug 1989 7. Nasar, Sylvia "The Man Behind a Beautiful Mind: The real John Nash never saw visions, and after 1970 he never took medication. But his love affair with Alicia, he says, is 'just like a movie.'" Newsweek March 11, 2002 p52 (780 words) 8. Rockmore, Daniel "Exploiting a Beautiful Mind." (the real life of John Nash, the mathematician depicted in 'A Beautiful Mind') The Chronicle of Higher Education Jan 25, 2002 v48 i20 pB18(2) 9. Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness. Contributors: Otto F. Wahl - author. Publisher: Rutgers University Press. Place of Publication: New Brunswick, NJ. Publication Year: 1995. 10. Marilyn Dahl, The Role of the Media in Promoting Images of Disability- Disability as Metaphor: The Evil Crip, Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 18, No 1 (1993) 11. Lisa Lopez Levers, Representations Of Psychiatric Disability In Fifty Years Of Hollywood Film: An Ethnographic Content Analysis, Theory & Science (2001), ISSN: 1527-5558 12. Linden M, Kavanagh R. Attitudes of qualified vs. student mental health nurses towards an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia. J Adv Nurs. 2011 Oct 9. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2011.05848.x.
Well, what do I know? I thought the point of setting one’s self up as an example of proper thinking would be to imply that others should do it better. I didn’t think that even the U.S. Army had a handgun and ammunition that could leap out of a child-proof drawer and assemble themselves. With all those precautions to keep a firearm from a child, I thought he had to be much older. At 19 months, I don’t think I could tie my shoes. I suppose that everyone’s child is the next Einstein, but I would have thought that a simple child-proof cabinet lock should have sufficed for a while. And I could be wrong, but I think there might be some kind of problem with putting the bottle it came in and the bleach into separate locations. That’s not something I would try with my fatally child-toxic prescription medications. But then, I’m easily confused :)
I suppose that would have been following the episode of CSI which depicted furry events as sexual. I have to admit that I fell for that one. "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" has an amazing amount of influence. We all fall for it sooner or later.
The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) occasionally publishes its version of the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A. On its web site, the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services lists section 5-401 of Title 43A, the Oklahoma Mental Health Code as "Repealed", and ignores its provisions. It has done so for a number of years.
For example: circa 2003: http://www.odmhsas.org/emer_rule/2003%20-%2043A.pdf circa 2006: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6532648/Oklahoma-Mental-Health-Laws circa 2007: http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/documents/Title 43A Mental Health Law.pdf circa 2010: http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/documents/2010%20-%2043A.pdf
Nor is it alone. So do the local District Court, the District Attorney and Public Defender's Office here in Tulsa. Yet the official version on the Oklahoma Legislature site says,
"§43A-5-401. Repealed by Laws 1997, c. 387, § 11, eff. Nov. 1, 1997. >NOTE: Subsequent to repeal, § 5-401 was amended by Laws 1997, c. 195, § >3 to read as follows:"
Where I went to junior high, "subsequent" means "after". The numerous provisions that dictate what officials involved in involuntary commitment shall do includes §43A-5-401.D.1, which states:
“The attorney appointed by the court shall be a licensed and actively practicing attorney who shall represent the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment until final disposition of the case. The court may appoint a public defender where available. The attorney shall meet and consult with the person within one (1) day of notification of his appointment. The attorney shall immediately, upon meeting with the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment, present to such person a statement of the person's rights, including all rights afforded to the person by the Oklahoma and United States Constitutions. …”
It is substantially repeated in §43A-5-411.D.1, under Rights of Person Alleged to be a Person Requiring Treatment, which ODMHSAS does not list as “Repealed”. However, the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH), the Tulsa County Mental Health Court, the Public Defender’s Office and the District Attorney treat such “consumer rights” more as mere guidelines that can be ignored for convenience’s sake, rather than things they shall observe.
This is important because, among other things, the right to a jury trial must be “requested” or “demanded”. This not likely to happen if neither the Public Defender’s Office nor the Mental Health Court Judge ever mentions it to the person alleged to need treatment. A jury trial provides under §43A-5-411.D
“6. The right to present and to cross-examine witnesses. The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition. When the hearing is conducted as a jury trial, the petitioner and any witness in behalf of the petitioner shall be subject to cross-examination by the attorney for the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment. The person alleged to be a person requiring treatment may also be called as a witness and cross-examined.”
Otherwise, under Tulsa County Mental Health Court procedures in the fall of 2010, the only testimony comes from the person alleged to need treatment, and that person does not get to see any evidence against him or her, have accusers appear in Court and give statements sworn under the penalties of perjury, cross-examine either accusers or mental health examiners or witnesses for the District Attorney or to present witnesses in his or her own defense, not even doctors and/or psychiatrists of long-standing. Without a jury trial, the Judge may under 43A consider the evaluations of the State’s psychiatrists without reference to any other source. The State psychiatrists don’t even have to show up at any hearing. This leaves the person alleged to need treatment entirely at the mercy of ODMHSAS/TCBH and the Mental Health Court, which in this place tends to act as a rubber stamp for ODMHSAS psychiatrists.
From what one has seen, the Public Defender’s Office explains very little about one’s rights under the State and Federal constitutions. The right to demand a jury trial is one sentence, buried on one page of one court document that did not, in August 2010, explicitly identify the person alleged to need treatment as the person who has that right. I complained bitterly about getting railroaded without any witnesses, for or against, appearing to be cross-examined. I did not find out about these provisions, and the consequence of not demanding a jury trial, until conducting my own research after my release. The Public Defender’s Office seems to be willing to go along to get along, and not waste too much time and expense on people that the local authorities have written off as “losers”, regardless of the proof or truth of any allegations, or lack thereof.
By contrast, in about 1995, the JOINT LEGISLATIVE AUDIT AND REVIEW COMMISSION OF THE VIRGINIA GENERAL ASSEMBLY wrote some 37 Recommendations on how to improve the efficiency and due process of involuntary commitment in that State. Consider "Recommendation (22). The Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services should develop a written booklet which explains the involuntary mental commitment process and an individual’s rights within that process. Included within the booklet should be an explanation of the individual’s right to retain private counsel or be represented by a court-appointed attorney, to present any defenses including independent evaluation and expert testimony or the testimony of other witnesses, to be present during the hearing and testify, to appeal any certification for involuntary admission to the circuit court, and to have a jury trial on appeal. The booklet should be written in a simple and straight-forward manner."
One might note that the State of Virginia had some little thing to do with writing the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Would that Oklahoma could follow its example. But in Tulsa, both TCBH and the District Attorney’s Office insisted, and the Mental Health Court accepted, that all it takes to commit someone involuntarily is “a preponderance of the evidence”, not the higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence” both written into Title 43A in eight locations, and mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1979 Addington v. Texas case. But in Tulsa, if by hearsay three people reportedly get together and say you’re nuts, then that is “a preponderance of the evidence”, and accepted thereafter as proven fact. In most cases, accusers may not even have to make out a sworn statement, which the person alleged to need treatment may not be allowed to see, even if they do.
Isn’t that just special? So watch your back. And try not to look paranoid about it.
Dear Ms. Murphy, It's not my place to say how you should protect your child. I don't have any and thus don't have to protect any from my medications. I can, however note the various government and private studies have listed drowning, suffocation and motor vehicle accident as the worst dangers of accidental and preventable death to your child. Child-proof locks must be working, because preventable death due to toxins and firearms accidents are way down on the list. But I've seen OCD up close, and what it does to children. It's not pretty. However, if you must have the last word, please do so.
The way the Oklahoma Mental Health Code is administered, it’s not about healing. Whatever good intentions people may have had when they wrote this flawed set of standards, it has degenerated into state-sponsored exploitation and bigotry.
Am I an expert on any of this? Imagine a horse making a rude noise from either end. I’m just a guy who got caught in society’s undertow and started reading up on it so that I could express myself as fully and accurately as possible.
But let’s back up a bit. I’ve had psychiatrists tell me that I’m not self-aware when I disagree with them. It’s a common tactic when they wish to impose their way of thinking, through the intimidation of the greater authority and opportunity to mess up one’s life with involuntary treatment. From my point of view, they have much in common with evangelists and threats of hell. Except that psychiatrists can make it come true in this life if one chooses one’s words poorly.
We’ve all seen people work themselves up into a perfect frenzy over things they think threaten their persons, lives, property and standard of living. For conservatives, it’s things like welfare mothers and Cadillacs, lack of personal responsibility, sharia law and one-world government. For liberals it includes gun control and political incorrectness, which covers a huge area in their psyche. For some people on the other side of the world, it’s things like the oppressive and creeping influence of Western corruption and imperialism. Political and religious hot buttons all.
Due to some rather unpleasant events in my life, and the ways I’ve been forced to look at it, at any time I can get a spontaneous and unwelcome echo either from past events, or the infinite possibilities of physical and verbal assault in the present. It feels almost real, and makes my body react. It’s very similar to the way that other people get upset about things, but mostly I know that it’s not real, that it’s unproductive, and that I don’t like it.
Other people can feel this way perfectly convinced of their truth and righteousness. But if I feel that way and know that it’s not real, it’s not self-knowledge, politics or religion, it’s a classification in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Not to mention a psychiatrist hot to tell me so. If a Christian admits that he or she is flawed and a sinner, that’s religion and protected by the Constitution. But if I admit that I’m flawed and don’t like the way I think sometimes, it’s a handle for a self-righteous and unscrupulous psychiatrists (not all are) to attempt forcing changes in behavior through involuntary drugging and incarceration. And then they expect me to thank them for it.
For example, consider the way that the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health follows the conservative standard of “personal responsibility”. At least one counselor, with the approval of TCBH, tells any involuntarily incarcerated inmate who is having trouble coping with the rest of society, that there is one common denominator in all those contacts. “And that’s you,” she says, making the inmate responsible for every reaction that ever comes from involuntary abuse or violence in the past. You just try that with a Black American complaining about racism, or a victim of rape complaining about sexual innuendos, and see how far you get. The people who get out of TCBH generally don’t get out because they have been helped or cured. They get out because they have toed the line and are now too frightened of future “treatment” to expose what ills or hurts they have, and may be left to fester in socially-approved silence.
The State Mental Health Code not only makes it legitimate to do this to a person still suffering from violence and abuse, either it or its administration makes it legitimate or common to incarcerate a person on any complaint from allegedly normal people, no matter how poorly an investigation of the facts of false, malicious or trivial allegations was done; no matter how inaccurate or malfeasant the mental health evaluation and evaluators; no matter how bigoted the assumptions or actions of the investigators or evaluators; no matter how poorly that person was represented and informed by public counsel; no matter how thoroughly the Judge abrogated his or her responsibilities in favor of rubber-stamping the evaluators; no matter how uninformed, poorly trained, or far back in the dark ages of medicine the investigators, evaluators and Judge may live; and no matter how unethically the State and local authorities treated that person’s rights to due process and equal treatment under the law.
Perhaps not many would stand up and testify, “Yes, they did this to me, too.” It’s not only an unpleasant topic, but in doing so any person who has been involuntarily committed risks both added adverse action from the State, and abandonment even by family. No matter what the unethical or illegitimate circumstances of a commitment, the commitment itself will be held up as a reason to disregard any testimony. It’s like trying to swim in an undertow. One of which most of society seems to approve, as it once did of segregation.
The racist grandmother of a friend would reportedly hurl epithets at any passing Black American. Her justification? “They don’t look like us. They don’t walk like us. They don’t think like us. They don’t even smell like us. They’re just different.” Tulsa and Oklahoma seem to be saying the same things about the people they secretly lock up in the gulag of facilities like TCBH.
What if energy was cheap again? Would we still be in this economic mess? Maybe the Democrats and Republicans both have it wrong, and it isn’t politics that will get us out, but the same kind of concentrated research and development work towards a goal that got us to the Moon. There are new and old technologies that would make that possible.
Not too long from now, we may very well have another Sputnik moment when China develops thorium reactors before we do. It used to be our technology. Is it something that we want to have to buy back from them?
The health risks of thorium are on par with radon gas, not directly toxic in small quantities, but able to stimulate tumors years after significant exposure. You are living with it right now; it’s everywhere, even in ordinary soil. The industrial risks of, and hazardous waste from, a liquid salt thorium reactor are many times less than a uranium reactor. No Chernobyl, no Three Mile Island, no China syndrome, no hydrogen explosions, no flood of neutrons to make all the surroundings highly radioactive, no bomb-grade material production, and much lower and safety shielding requirements. The reactor essentially burns all of the thorium, producing up to 1000 times less waste. So no Yucca Mountain storage site needed. Eventually, you might have one in your neighborhood or utility closet.
There is about four times as much thorium in the world as uranium. Together, Australia, the U.S. and Canada hold from 35 to 56% of those reserves, depending on who is doing the estimating. At current power consumption, the reserves in North America could last well over 500 years. Long enough to develop other energy sources and start mining the asteroids for it.
Because the reactor does not require all of the safety requirements and inspections, or highly trained and paid personnel to run, or the heavy shielding and pressure containment of a uranium reactor, it is much cheaper to build and run. At 1000KW per person, five of the proposed reactors, about the size of a railroad tanker car, could supply the greater Tulsa area. One estimate puts the initial cost of those reactors at 125 million dollars, once the new-technology costs have been reduced. The personal cost of the fuel and maintenance thereafter is estimated to be less than a dollar a year.
The U.S. Navy is putting modest amounts of R&D money into another technology it wants for use on its ships, called aneutronic fusion. A proton and a boron11 nucleus combine to produce three very energetic alpha particles, or helium nuclei. These positively charged particles can be used directly to produce electricity. Potential efficiencies could be in electricity production could be very high, estimated by one source at 80 to 85%. Since no neutrons are emitted, the process does not generate radioactive waste. One estimate puts operating of a commercial plant at 2020. There is even more boron in the world than thorium.
And guess who else is working on it? Iran. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing – a Sputnik moment with Iran.
How could this energy be put to use? One technology can kill several birds with one stone, the artificial synthesis of methyl alcohol or methanol. All it requires is electricity, carbon dioxide and water. The Indianapolis 500 has required its use in Indie cars since a fiery and horrific multiple-car pileup of gasoline engine cars. With some modifications to internal combustion engines to account for extra corrosion problems, it can be used now. It has already been used in a fuel called M85, which is 85% methanol and 15% gasoline.
Furthermore, fuel cells are being developed that can turn methanol and air back into electricity, carbon dioxide and water. According to Wikipedia, methanol has ten times the energy density of the highly compressed hydrogen proposed for hydrogen-powered cars, and 15 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, the current technology used in electric cars. Methanol can be dispensed from current service station pumps, and does not depend upon the foreign importation of lithium from Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and, you guessed it, China. I think that it could eventually replace natural gas in existing pipelines, and reduce the environmental problems caused by fracking.
Notice that it also removes carbon dioxide from the air. It can also be used as a feedstock to synthesize other organic compounds. So that part, not either burned or consumed in a fuel cell, if used in the production of solid compounds like plastic, paints and construction materials, could take carbon dioxide out of the air almost permanently.
Some are good parents and deserve their children. Some aren't and don't. Some are wise enough not to inflict themselves on innocents. Some will simply never have the joy and wonder of a family, and can only watch those who do.
Mr. Hamilton's argument on sales tax and larger government falls in line with some health care studies. They showed that if Doctors and clinics listed the cost of each procedure where consumers could see them, and customers were responsible for at least part of the bill, the cost of both offered and total provided services went down compared to the much more anonymous insurance-pays-all approach.
There's a good book I've been reading, "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reis, available at Amazon.com for less than $30. It discusses, among other things, how in many large businesses separate departments come to demand more and more of the pie, and sabotage other departments. In other words, office politics. Wouldn't it be nice if we could dispense with the bickering between dogmatic politicians, and concentrate on what works? Reis offers a way out that he shows can apply to all types of organizations, from business startups, to innovation centers in large companies, and to government and non-profit agencies.
Further, his suggestions for innovation "sandboxes" may show the way to improve the outcomes of the "technology incubators" that so often provide more promise than results. If Oklahoma were to consider this approach, it might get more people off the dole and back to work quicker. It would even help just to have State support in paying fees for Provisional Patent and Trademark Applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
In the interest of full disclosure, I live on disability and the State dole. I have three engineering degrees and a Ph.D., all currently useless. I'm stuck on the dole because if I earn just one dollar more a month, I suddenly lose many more dollars in State benefits that add up to $160 to $170 a month in expenses. A hit I can't take. This is no myth. A nice lady at DRS laid it out for me.
What if the State, using all the methods advocated by Reis, started doing small scale experiments in changing DHS rules and OSBDC programs to see if more people could get off the dole, and create jobs and businesses. Wouldn't it be worth a try? It's called split-testing, and has been proven to work in business. It wouldn't be kicking people off the dole or cutting benefits to save money. It would using some seed money to find the best ways, plural, to get the American dream back on track. Whatever works. How could either political Party rationally disagree with that?
I've heard that the Legislature is considering changes in DHS rules. If you have read Reis' book and happen to agree, please feel free to print this out and send it to your State and Federal representatives, along with your own comments.
"All things to all men"? That statement could use a little more explanation. Isn't that how we accuse our politicians when we mean they are shifty, deceptive, amoral con-men and opportunists, who say whatever they think someone wants to hear? (I met her.) Not a few Christians are only one thing to all men: self-righteous.
"...public television's none-too-subtle attempts to placate the noisy right by giving conservatives a pass on some hot-button issues."? Well, I don't get to watch public television any more, or much else. My Digital TV adapter doesn't pick it up. But I did notice lately that NPR's coverage of the Congress grilling Attorney General Eric Holder refers to Operation Fast and Furious as a "flawed program" in which "mistakes" were made. As if it had nothing to do with creating the liberal myth that most of the Mexican drug cartel guns come from over the border in the U.S., not from the black market in Central America. The BATF insisted that gun dealers who raised objections to suspicious purchases let them go through. Then didn't even tell its own people in Mexico what was going on. If you bend over backwards far enough to satisfy your extremist base of any stripe, you might find yourself crawling into a deep, black hole.
What do you call someone who thinks that any pain or upset you might still have from getting hit and maimed by a drinking driver is just something you have to take responsibility for and get over? An Oklahoma State psychiatrist or an Arkansas orthopedist - take your pick.
What’s the difference between a cultural or political belief and a delusion? Who are you going to ask, a Democrat or Republican congressperson? In Oklahoma it seems to depend upon whether or not the person who holds a belief that disagrees with someone else’s also happens to have an admitted or recognized mental illness, no matter how it was acquired. No mental illness = cultural belief (say, God’s gonna call Oral Roberts home if he doesn’t get that money). Mental illness = automatic delusion. So if you deal with depression or PTSD due to the experience of past involuntary violence, like a rape, tornado or car wreck, be careful who you talk to and disagree with.
For example, one of the white grad students in our Department had come back from Malawi in Africa with a black African wife, after a stint in the Peace Corps, or something like. He told of having black children flee from him in a terror that he would catch them and eat them. And how in her culture, cats are considered demonic creatures with no bones. One time, he said, they were visiting in this country and a kitten crawled up on her lap. She swatted it across the room. She was a nice woman, not the kind of woman to go hunting other people’s pets, but could not tolerate that kitten upon her body.
In Oklahoma, a habitual liar with a grudge could simply claim that his wife had threatened her cats, and that the liar was afraid his wife would attack her as well. Then, under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, the Tulsa Police and the local community mental health emergency service would be only too willing to forgo any investigation beyond consulting the liar, and happy to drag her off to a local Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services facility. Where State counselors and psychiatrists would be only too happy to declare her paranoid, delusional and unfit to run her own life, without their special care in an involuntary commitment. With which the local mental health court would be only too pleased to agree.
All because she grew up in a different culture, had different experiences from theirs, and ran afoul of someone willing to make false charges. So here’s an important question, can State psychiatrists in State facilities tell the difference between a delusion and a cultural belief, or is it just their cultural belief that they can?
It's quite likely that such people, like the school administrators who accept bullying in the schools, bully their own children at home. It's part of the culture in this area and Arkansas, that stems both from "spare the rod and spoil the child" and from the abuse they got from their own parents. It's supposed to "toughen up" the kids. And besides, they consider that if they lived through it, and they think it didn't hurt them, why not their kids, and everyone else's? Haven't we all seen and heard it before? They're going to raise their children just like they were raised because it's the "right way".
If you want to cut down on crime and violence, stop child abuse.
In some agricultural and metropolitan areas, eastern Arkansas and central Utah for example, the water resources are literally being mined. Taken out of the ground at a rate faster than they can ever be replenished. Some of it is fossil water, laid down in geological epochs far in the past, which can never be replaced. In the rice and soybean fields of eastern AR, the farmers have to pump from deeper and deeper depths as the water surface drops. And when this happens, the aquifer often compacts from the pressure of the overburden of earth, reducing its capacity to accept any new water, even if any is available. To date, the water in an aquifer can only be replaced by rainfall in an area it can reach the aquifer by soaking into the earth. Perhaps the only other possibility is the desalinization of sea water, which will likely be possible only when new energy sources become very, very cheap. Note that Texas has a coastline, and a possible future resource. If Oklahoma water is going to be sold to Texas, the contract had better be year-to-year, contingent upon excess supply being replaced by rainfall. Or Oklahoma will regret it, and possibly end up buying water from Texas in the future.
Why is the Oklahoma Court system and the legal community willing to allow the local District Attorney, Public Defender and (District) Mental Health Court to deny civil and due process rights to defendants in that Court? What else can you call it when the local Mental Health Court assumes that its Judge “may” dispense with a “right” that the defendant “shall have” according to law, and the Public Pretender neither objects nor informs the defendant of the right? What else can you call it when the DA’s proxy lies in Court, stating that the standard of evidence against the defendant need only be a majority or “preponderance”, instead of the “clear and convincing evidence” demanded eight times in the Mental Health Code, and neither the Judge nor the Public Pretender object, nor do they inform the defendant? Does it go too far to suspect some kind of public malfeasance, or malign prejudice against people who have been singled out by the Legislature and State Courts for heightened scrutiny and second-class treatment?
The Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A, states in section 43A-5-411.A, Rights of an individual alleged to require treatment, “An individual alleged to be a person requiring treatment shall have the following rights:”. They include in A.6 “The right to present and to cross-examine witnesses. The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition. …” As I understand it, the legal meaning of “shall” is mandatory. This is the way that it must be done to be legal. So when the petitioner and alleged “witnesses” don’t show up, and the Judge even cuts off the defendant when the defendant tries to explain what happened, the Judge has violated the defendant’s rights under law, denying to that defendant the due process of law.
And when the Public Pretender doesn’t even bother to object to this state of affairs, the defendant effectively has no counsel, as mandated in 43A-5-411.A.2. The would be the same Public Pretender who in 43A-5-411.D.1 “shall immediately, upon meeting with the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment, present to such person a statement of the (person’s) rights, including all rights afforded to persons alleged to be a person requiring treatment by the Oklahoma and the United States Constitutions.” (That didn’t happen.) This provision is repeated in 43A-5-401.D.1, which the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services has falsely listed on its web site as “REPEALED” since at least 2003.
The only fig leaf the Mental Health Court might point to appears in 43A-5-401.J, -5-415.C.2 and -5-511.D.1, where the law states that “If a jury trial is not demanded, the court may take as evidence and act upon” the evaluations, affidavits and reports presented the mental health examiners. Only in 5-401.J, which the ODMHSAS would have “REPEALED”, does it say “without further evidence being presented”. In legal terms, one would think that “may” is merely permissive and incapable of dispensing with due process rights for the personal, political or prejudicial convenience of a Judge. The clause does not say that the defendant may not or shall not be allowed to present testimony, evidence and witnesses.
So when a Judge overrides a defendant’s protests of innocence and attempts to tell the true story, and allows the mental facility, which will receive the benefit of another warm body to justify its existence, to be the sole source of evidence and evaluation, one is justified in calling this a kangaroo court. And when, after the damage is already done, one must discover for one’s self the nature and extent of violations of due process and civil liberties, without any help from the local or state legal community, one may reasonably suspect that legal community of being a nest of bigots.
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Posted by: Don B
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
1) Has anyone ever known the Community Outreach Psychiatric Emergency Services (COPES) to interview all those with reason to know about an alleged incident, before recommending emergency commitment to the local loony bin, to get a context for the situation and check on the truthfulness of those making accusations?
2) Has anyone ever known the mental health unit of the Public Defender's Office not only to inform a candidate for commitment of all of his or her rights under the state and federal constitutions, but to advise that candidate that he or she should ask for a jury trial so as to have the legal right to cross-examine witnesses and accusers?
3) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH aka the local loony bin aka This Can't Be Happening) to turn away someone brought in for examination as unjustly accused?
4) Has anyone ever known a "witness" for an involuntary civil commitment at TCBH, in any proceeding not a jury trial, to be someone other than an employee or contractor of the State or local government?
5) Has anyone ever known of a case where the person accused of being in need of treatment (aka "the consumer") was not examined, for mental defect and/or recommendation for commitment, by the Psychiatrist who would later benefit from employment as that person's doctor of record.
6) Does it strike anyone as improper that the Psychiatrist who would later benefit from such employment could sign papers as the "witness" for commitment, the "evaluator" for the commitment, and the person requesting the commitment?
7) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Police Department to help someone with difficulties and concerns Before it gets to the point of speculation about ending it all, so as to avoid the massive violation of civil liberties of an involuntary commitment?
8) Has anyone ever known the Tulsa Police Department to take a person with mental health difficulties seriously enough to fully investigate a situation so as to determine the truthfulness of the accusers?
9) Has anyone ever known the Oklahoma Dept of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services to follow the civil commitment procedures listed in section 5-401 of the Mental Health Code (Title 43A), instead of just pretending that it was "Repealed", as it says on their web site. The actual code states that it was repealed and then amended to state what is listed on the Oklahoma Legislature's site.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Is it right for this new manager to stop answering the emergency medical bell pulls after hours, leaving them to an answering machine or service? Particularly when this leads to a near death for one elderly and disabled resident who got sick.
Is it right for this manager and her maintenance man to tell residents repeatedly that broken plumbing will be taken care of "tomorrow", then leave it broken for up to a month?
Is it right for this manager to make only superficial cosmetic changes, and then call the complex "resort style living",? Especially when the amenities the manager takes credit for are some coin-operated laundry machines, an independent beauty contractor, and a number of things that the residents have provided or died and left behind, like computers, books, and often broken exercise equipment that the manager does not maintain.
After the previous manager took care of regularly testing and refurbishing the apartment fire detectors, usually about seven feet above the floor, is it right for this manager to demand that residents should be responsible for them, also demanding that the residents, even those too crippled to walk, test them "at least once a month".
Is if right for the manager to threaten or take away shopping carts, donated by Walmart, that the residents use to move furniture and heavy shopping bags, or just to use as a walker, just because it doesn't fit the manager's image of "resort style living"?
Is it right for the manager to make many of the residents so terrified of eviction that they fear to criticize or challenge the management openly, and in one case, even to report part of a ceiling fallen in.
Is it right, when the vast majority of residents are elderly, or disabled, or require oxygen and other special medical help, or are just waiting to die of a terminal disease, for the manager to proclaim in disgust that "this isn't a rest home", that it is a retirement resort. And then advertise online on a site that promotes assisted living.
Is it right for this manager to proclaim to a resident, subject to previous drug theft and worried about master keys unchanged for for over five years, that anyone in the management can come into the resident's apartment at any time, for any reason, without prior notice?
Is it right for this manager to verbally abuse another retired resident, trying to get that one to move when no reason can be found to evict?
Is it right, when long term, long-suffering residents move out the manager's control, for this manager to call ordinary wear and tear on carpets and paint "damage" and charge hundreds of dollars for "repairs"? Especially when the management's web ads make one resident's ornate living quarters look like the norm, and takes credit for it.
When a resident cannot be around to supervise a move, is it right for this manager to harass moving company personnel, demanding that they get things packed immediately, or else the property will be thrown in the trash the next day? Particularly when over a thousand dollars of property comes up missing, and the most of the rest is packed like pick-up sticks in boxes too large for the resident to move by hand.
Is it right that the out-of-state owner thinks that this is the ethical and proper way to treat residents?
When ambulances appear at least once a month at this complex, and at least one resident fears that this manager's actions could drive vulnerable seniors over the brink into the hospital and even death, is it right for the TPD to dismiss such concerns as not their problem, unless a resident turns up dead of violence?
When a resident becomes concerned about these issues, is it right for Adult Protective Services to ignore repeated e-mail complaints?
When a resident is both concerned about these issues and ready to defend against home invasion from any quarter, is it right for the District Attorney's Office to call this resident a "terrorist"? Especially without bothering to check with the resident's neighbors to determine the truth?
Has it come down to the point that a business person in Tulsa can make any false and misleading advertisement, commit any abuse and make any accusation with the willing support of the TPD, the Sheriff's Office, District Attorney's Office and the local Courts, merely because the opposing party is not a business person, or just has some unpopular disability?
The manager in question no longer works for the apartment complex. But reportedly, the out-of-state owner regretting losing the manager to a better job, and the residents are still too frightened of eviction to openly discuss or testify about what happened. Is this the way that Tulsa proudly expects its elderly, sick and disabled to live out their last years?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
For another thing, what does she mean by "no history of mental illness"? The range of mental illness is as wide and varied as cancer. Do you have a history of postpartum depression? Then by that wide standard, you shouldn't own a gun. Are you suffering grief, depression and survivor's guilt from losing a loved one in an accident? Are you having anxiety attacks from being stalked by an ex-lover? Do you have post traumatic stress disorder from getting mugged, maimed in a car wreck, raped, gang raped, or terribly scarred by burns or surgery? Are you having bad tornado dreams because your house came apart around you here in tornado alley? Then by Mrs. Murphy's wide standard, you shouldn't have a gun. And if any of this happens to you and results in mental trauma, then you'll have to turn yours in. By this standard, those who become the most vulnerable will be denied the most effective means of self defense. Is Mrs. Murphy by any chance volunteering to stand guard over them?
For that matter, what about Police who often are badly affected by their traumatic experiences, and sometimes end their careers with a bad case of guninmouthia? Does one hear those who know just what to do about everything proposing to take their guns away? Or do we not count them because that last act puts an end to their histories? By the same token, do we ignore the Police who have been killed with their own guns, in creating reasons for who shouldn't have them? That would seem to depend less on any objective standard than someone's personal politics.
It's easier to tell,
others what to do,
if their experiences aren't real,
unless they happen to you.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
When I was inside TCBH, I met people with apparent delusions who needed assisted living, but not necessarily prison-like confinement in an intellectual desert and warm-body warehouse. There was the old woman who said she was God, and promised everyone a big car when we all got out. There was the old guy who had angry conversations with either people who weren’t there, or simply was acting out some internal dialog, erupting now and then with “Bam! Bam!”. There was the guy who went around saying that he had or would get a contract with the State to refurbish the facility, and that he was going to make a Univac computer out of a long-outdated vacuum-tube technology called Nuvistors. Some would stand and stare at nothing or break down and cry for no apparent reason. Or maybe because people they counted upon had abandoned them there. I wasn’t sure about the guy who said he had a castle in Poland. I had no knowledge or proof that he didn’t.
Although a few made threats or allusions to threats (“There’s going to be blood!”), aside from a few bloodless female cat fights, few had any violence in them. Not even the big guy with a history of abuse who made “money” by tearing strips of paper out of books, and did karate kicks in front of his mirror. The worst violence was directed at him or herself. Like the suicides, and the very nice young lady with deep scars on her arms who heard a voice telling her to cut herself and remove limbs. She was missing part of one leg just below the knee, and was on 24-hour observation.
Most of the problem seemed to be that no one wanted them around. They made regular people uncomfortable. They were there to be warehoused and drugged until either they became well-behaved enough to be acceptable, or the drugs made them shake so bad with palsy that they couldn’t care for themselves on the outside. The old guy with the angry expressions shook so bad that he wore a lot of his coffee on his front. The young lady with the missing shin was just starting to shake.
If you think it was about healing, consider this. The food was greasy and salty, with few fresh vegetables and almost no fruit. The shrinks showed up for maybe thirty minutes out of a week, if that. The psychiatrist who signed the petition for my commitment came in one session, and didn’t know either my history or the fact that she had prescribed medication for depression. Then she threatened to overmedicate me for not agreeing that I should be there. Her idea of breaking a hunger strike was to deny the electrolytes that kept a heart from racing.
We were not allowed to see any outside doctors at all, not even psychiatrists or general practitioners of long standing. It took a lot of bitching just to get TCBH just to ask established doctors for records of current prescriptions, so that they could be continued. And what real doctor doesn’t know that an asthma rescue inhaler has to be available upon request, not just twice a day at med times? The only times I can recall that anyone got out of there to see a real doctor (or dentist) was then one of the old guys started choking on food, and my abscessed tooth finally got so bad that I couldn’t eat.
The ones that got out fastest tended to be those who had actually committed some act of violence, the suicides, and those who ran from, threatened or fought police. One young woman came in with knife scars on her throat, and either left in a few days, or was transferred to the other unit, though that rarely happened. Apparently they were the easiest to coerce into “giving the Wookie what he wants”, the politically correct statements that the psychiatrists and counselors wanted to hear.
Another group with fast turnaround were those who came in for a quick detox, especially if they had been found unconscious or senseless. One young woman came in for reasons unknown, looking like an Original Gangster, and was back out in a few days. When someone was picking her old clothes out of a bin, out dropped a glass crack pipe. No doubt more miracle cures.
Most seemed to be there because they had been denounced by some person or persons who just didn’t like the way they acted. For example, State law Title 43A-1-103 includes the in the definition, “Risk of harm to self or others”, the clause 18.c, “having placed another person or persons in a reasonable fear of violent behavior directed towards such person or persons or serious physical harm to them as manifested by serious and immediate threats”. This has two parts. If someone has actually pulled out a weapon, pointed it at someone and threatened to use it one them, or set up an obvious deadly boobytrap, or deliberately torched a building with someone in it, those actions obviously fit the second part.
But many people being warehoused and drugged only “fit” the first part, the “reasonable fear of violent behavior” as seen or alleged by the person making the complaint. As Professor Joan G. Brannon of the School of Government of the University of North Carolina put it in “The Magistrate’s Role in Involuntary Commitment”, Administration of Justice Bulletin, 05 September 2007:
“Dangerous to Others
A magistrate must also issue a custody order for a mentally ill respondent if he or she is dangerous to others. A respondent is dangerous to others if, within the relevant past, he or she has: (1) inflicted or attempted to inflict serious bodily harm on another, or has acted in a way that creates a substantial risk of serious bodily harm to another, or has engaged in extreme destruction of property, and (2) there is a reasonable probability that such conduct will be repeated.36 (36. G.S. 122C-3(11)(b).)”
She goes on to state: “In order to find a respondent dangerous to others on the basis of threats alone, however, the petitioner must present specific evidence about the kind of harm the respondent threatened, when the threats were made, and in what context. For example, the mere allegation that the “respondent ha[d] made statements to her husband of a threatening nature,” without more, is insufficient.40”
Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1979 standard in Addington v. Texas that such allegations require “clear and convincing evidence” to justify involuntary commitment, it seems apparent that the “context” must be fully explored, and not rest entirely upon the mere allegations of those who have bigoted or intolerant or malicious axes to grind. Failure to establish that those making the allegations are indeed truthful can only lead to an extremely damaging miscarriage of justice and deprivation of civil liberties.
Unfortunately, few who make false complaints out of bigotry, intolerance or malicious self-interest have any fear or probability of ever being caught and held to account. Especially not when those investigating the allegations are bigots trained by bigots. They are like D.W. Griffith, who directed the 1915 silent film “Birth of a Nation”. In which a skulking white man dressed up in blackface threatened the purity and virginity of a Southern damsel, only to be thwarted by the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan.
No one has to explain to Black Americans how the bigoted myth of uncontrollable racial lust works. The current bigoted myth that those with mental illness tend to be criminal and violent is just as effective. In the movies and news media, people with disabilities are either supercrips (Google it) or serial killers/mass murders, with serial killers/mass murders way in the lead. For example, "In this content analysis of television, the portrayal of persons with mental disorders was highly correlated with the portrayal of violent crime. The mentally ill were found to be nearly 10 times more violent than the general population of television characters, and 10 to 20 times more violent (during a two week sample) than the mentally ill in the U.S. population (over the course of an entire year). The mentally ill on television were also judged to have a negative impact on society and a negative quality of life." [Diefenbach, DL. "The Portrayal Of Mental Illness On Prime-Time Television."Journal of Community Psychology 25 (3): 289-302 MAY 1997]
It’s so easy to lock up people and make them pay for one’s intolerance when they have no political clout and can’t fight back. Or, as one disabled person put it, “Why don’t we have a march on Washington? Because it’s such a bitch to get there.”
Additional reading. Even just the abstracts of the articles are instructive. Other reading can be found at PubMed.gov, the online journal database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine - somewhat more substantial than myths. Search on “serious mental illness”, “crime”, “violence” and related terms in various combinations.
1. Monahan, Jerome.
"Celluloid madness." (Teacher)(PSHE)(portrayal of mental illness in the media) Times Educational Supplement, Dec 5, 2003
2. Monahan, John. Circa 1980 (1st Ed), 1995 (new Ed.), The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior, Jason Aronson, Inc., Northvale NJ and London, 134 p.
3. Monahan, John, and Steadman, Henry J. 1994, Violence and Mental Disorder: Developments in Risk Analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 318 p.
4. Schneider, Irving
"The theory and practice of movie psychiatry." American Journal of Psychiatry. Vol 144(8), Aug 1987, pp. 996-1002
5. Signorielli, Nancy.
"The stigma of mental illness on television." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Summer 1989 v33 n3 p325-331
6. Wahl, O.F., Lefkowits, J. Y.
"Impact Of a Television Film on Attitudes Toward Mental-Illness." American Journal of Community Psychology 17 (4): 521-528 Aug 1989
7. Nasar, Sylvia
"The Man Behind a Beautiful Mind: The real John Nash never saw visions, and after 1970 he never took medication. But his love affair with Alicia, he says, is 'just like a movie.'" Newsweek March 11, 2002 p52 (780 words)
8. Rockmore, Daniel
"Exploiting a Beautiful Mind." (the real life of John Nash, the mathematician depicted in 'A Beautiful Mind') The Chronicle of Higher Education Jan 25, 2002 v48 i20 pB18(2)
9. Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness. Contributors: Otto F. Wahl - author. Publisher: Rutgers University Press. Place of Publication: New Brunswick, NJ. Publication Year: 1995.
10. Marilyn Dahl, The Role of the Media in Promoting Images of Disability- Disability as Metaphor: The Evil Crip, Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 18, No 1 (1993)
11. Lisa Lopez Levers, Representations Of Psychiatric Disability In Fifty Years Of Hollywood Film: An Ethnographic Content Analysis, Theory & Science (2001), ISSN: 1527-5558
12. Linden M, Kavanagh R.
Attitudes of qualified vs. student mental health nurses towards an individual diagnosed with schizophrenia. J Adv Nurs. 2011 Oct 9. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2011.05848.x.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: News Updates
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
For example:
circa 2003: http://www.odmhsas.org/emer_rule/2003%20-%2043A.pdf
circa 2006: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6532648/Oklahoma-Mental-Health-Laws
circa 2007: http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/documents/Title 43A Mental Health Law.pdf
circa 2010: http://www.ok.gov/odmhsas/documents/2010%20-%2043A.pdf
Nor is it alone. So do the local District Court, the District Attorney and Public Defender's Office here in Tulsa. Yet the official version on the Oklahoma Legislature site says,
"§43A-5-401. Repealed by Laws 1997, c. 387, § 11, eff. Nov. 1, 1997. >NOTE: Subsequent to repeal, § 5-401 was amended by Laws 1997, c. 195, § >3 to read as follows:"
Where I went to junior high, "subsequent" means "after". The numerous provisions that dictate what officials involved in involuntary commitment shall do includes §43A-5-401.D.1, which states:
“The attorney appointed by the court shall be a licensed and actively practicing attorney who shall represent the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment until final disposition of the case. The court may appoint a public defender where available. The attorney shall meet and consult with the person within one (1) day of notification of his appointment. The attorney shall immediately, upon meeting with the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment, present to such person a statement of the person's rights, including all rights afforded to the person by the Oklahoma and United States Constitutions. …”
It is substantially repeated in §43A-5-411.D.1, under Rights of Person Alleged to be a Person Requiring Treatment, which ODMHSAS does not list as “Repealed”. However, the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health (TCBH), the Tulsa County Mental Health Court, the Public Defender’s Office and the District Attorney treat such “consumer rights” more as mere guidelines that can be ignored for convenience’s sake, rather than things they shall observe.
This is important because, among other things, the right to a jury trial must be “requested” or “demanded”. This not likely to happen if neither the Public Defender’s Office nor the Mental Health Court Judge ever mentions it to the person alleged to need treatment. A jury trial provides under §43A-5-411.D
“6. The right to present and to cross-examine witnesses. The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition. When the hearing is conducted as a jury trial, the petitioner and any witness in behalf of the petitioner shall be subject to cross-examination by the attorney for the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment. The person alleged to be a person requiring treatment may also be called as a witness and cross-examined.”
Otherwise, under Tulsa County Mental Health Court procedures in the fall of 2010, the only testimony comes from the person alleged to need treatment, and that person does not get to see any evidence against him or her, have accusers appear in Court and give statements sworn under the penalties of perjury, cross-examine either accusers or mental health examiners or witnesses for the District Attorney or to present witnesses in his or her own defense, not even doctors and/or psychiatrists of long-standing. Without a jury trial, the Judge may under 43A consider the evaluations of the State’s psychiatrists without reference to any other source. The State psychiatrists don’t even have to show up at any hearing. This leaves the person alleged to need treatment entirely at the mercy of ODMHSAS/TCBH and the Mental Health Court, which in this place tends to act as a rubber stamp for ODMHSAS psychiatrists.
From what one has seen, the Public Defender’s Office explains very little about one’s rights under the State and Federal constitutions. The right to demand a jury trial is one sentence, buried on one page of one court document that did not, in August 2010, explicitly identify the person alleged to need treatment as the person who has that right. I complained bitterly about getting railroaded without any witnesses, for or against, appearing to be cross-examined. I did not find out about these provisions, and the consequence of not demanding a jury trial, until conducting my own research after my release. The Public Defender’s Office seems to be willing to go along to get along, and not waste too much time and expense on people that the local authorities have written off as “losers”, regardless of the proof or truth of any allegations, or lack thereof.
By contrast, in about 1995, the JOINT LEGISLATIVE AUDIT AND REVIEW COMMISSION OF THE VIRGINIA GENERAL ASSEMBLY wrote some 37 Recommendations on how to improve the efficiency and due process of involuntary commitment in that State. Consider
"Recommendation (22). The Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services should develop a written booklet which explains the involuntary mental commitment process and an individual’s rights within that process. Included within the booklet should be an explanation of the individual’s right to retain private counsel or be represented by a court-appointed attorney, to present any defenses including independent evaluation and expert testimony or the testimony of other witnesses, to be present during the hearing and testify, to appeal any certification for involuntary admission to the circuit court, and to have a jury trial on appeal. The booklet should be written in a simple and straight-forward manner."
One might note that the State of Virginia had some little thing to do with writing the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Would that Oklahoma could follow its example. But in Tulsa, both TCBH and the District Attorney’s Office insisted, and the Mental Health Court accepted, that all it takes to commit someone involuntarily is “a preponderance of the evidence”, not the higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence” both written into Title 43A in eight locations, and mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1979 Addington v. Texas case. But in Tulsa, if by hearsay three people reportedly get together and say you’re nuts, then that is “a preponderance of the evidence”, and accepted thereafter as proven fact. In most cases, accusers may not even have to make out a sworn statement, which the person alleged to need treatment may not be allowed to see, even if they do.
Isn’t that just special? So watch your back. And try not to look paranoid about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
It's not my place to say how you should protect your child. I don't have any and thus don't have to protect any from my medications. I can, however note the various government and private studies have listed drowning, suffocation and motor vehicle accident as the worst dangers of accidental and preventable death to your child. Child-proof locks must be working, because preventable death due to toxins and firearms accidents are way down on the list. But I've seen OCD up close, and what it does to children. It's not pretty. However, if you must have the last word, please do so.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Am I an expert on any of this? Imagine a horse making a rude noise from either end. I’m just a guy who got caught in society’s undertow and started reading up on it so that I could express myself as fully and accurately as possible.
But let’s back up a bit. I’ve had psychiatrists tell me that I’m not self-aware when I disagree with them. It’s a common tactic when they wish to impose their way of thinking, through the intimidation of the greater authority and opportunity to mess up one’s life with involuntary treatment. From my point of view, they have much in common with evangelists and threats of hell. Except that psychiatrists can make it come true in this life if one chooses one’s words poorly.
We’ve all seen people work themselves up into a perfect frenzy over things they think threaten their persons, lives, property and standard of living. For conservatives, it’s things like welfare mothers and Cadillacs, lack of personal responsibility, sharia law and one-world government. For liberals it includes gun control and political incorrectness, which covers a huge area in their psyche. For some people on the other side of the world, it’s things like the oppressive and creeping influence of Western corruption and imperialism. Political and religious hot buttons all.
Due to some rather unpleasant events in my life, and the ways I’ve been forced to look at it, at any time I can get a spontaneous and unwelcome echo either from past events, or the infinite possibilities of physical and verbal assault in the present. It feels almost real, and makes my body react. It’s very similar to the way that other people get upset about things, but mostly I know that it’s not real, that it’s unproductive, and that I don’t like it.
Other people can feel this way perfectly convinced of their truth and righteousness. But if I feel that way and know that it’s not real, it’s not self-knowledge, politics or religion, it’s a classification in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Not to mention a psychiatrist hot to tell me so. If a Christian admits that he or she is flawed and a sinner, that’s religion and protected by the Constitution. But if I admit that I’m flawed and don’t like the way I think sometimes, it’s a handle for a self-righteous and unscrupulous psychiatrists (not all are) to attempt forcing changes in behavior through involuntary drugging and incarceration. And then they expect me to thank them for it.
For example, consider the way that the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health follows the conservative standard of “personal responsibility”. At least one counselor, with the approval of TCBH, tells any involuntarily incarcerated inmate who is having trouble coping with the rest of society, that there is one common denominator in all those contacts. “And that’s you,” she says, making the inmate responsible for every reaction that ever comes from involuntary abuse or violence in the past. You just try that with a Black American complaining about racism, or a victim of rape complaining about sexual innuendos, and see how far you get. The people who get out of TCBH generally don’t get out because they have been helped or cured. They get out because they have toed the line and are now too frightened of future “treatment” to expose what ills or hurts they have, and may be left to fester in socially-approved silence.
The State Mental Health Code not only makes it legitimate to do this to a person still suffering from violence and abuse, either it or its administration makes it legitimate or common to incarcerate a person on any complaint from allegedly normal people, no matter how poorly an investigation of the facts of false, malicious or trivial allegations was done; no matter how inaccurate or malfeasant the mental health evaluation and evaluators; no matter how bigoted the assumptions or actions of the investigators or evaluators; no matter how poorly that person was represented and informed by public counsel; no matter how thoroughly the Judge abrogated his or her responsibilities in favor of rubber-stamping the evaluators; no matter how uninformed, poorly trained, or far back in the dark ages of medicine the investigators, evaluators and Judge may live; and no matter how unethically the State and local authorities treated that person’s rights to due process and equal treatment under the law.
Perhaps not many would stand up and testify, “Yes, they did this to me, too.” It’s not only an unpleasant topic, but in doing so any person who has been involuntarily committed risks both added adverse action from the State, and abandonment even by family. No matter what the unethical or illegitimate circumstances of a commitment, the commitment itself will be held up as a reason to disregard any testimony. It’s like trying to swim in an undertow. One of which most of society seems to approve, as it once did of segregation.
The racist grandmother of a friend would reportedly hurl epithets at any passing Black American. Her justification? “They don’t look like us. They don’t walk like us. They don’t think like us. They don’t even smell like us. They’re just different.” Tulsa and Oklahoma seem to be saying the same things about the people they secretly lock up in the gulag of facilities like TCBH.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Not too long from now, we may very well have another Sputnik moment when China develops thorium reactors before we do. It used to be our technology. Is it something that we want to have to buy back from them?
The health risks of thorium are on par with radon gas, not directly toxic in small quantities, but able to stimulate tumors years after significant exposure. You are living with it right now; it’s everywhere, even in ordinary soil. The industrial risks of, and hazardous waste from, a liquid salt thorium reactor are many times less than a uranium reactor. No Chernobyl, no Three Mile Island, no China syndrome, no hydrogen explosions, no flood of neutrons to make all the surroundings highly radioactive, no bomb-grade material production, and much lower and safety shielding requirements. The reactor essentially burns all of the thorium, producing up to 1000 times less waste. So no Yucca Mountain storage site needed. Eventually, you might have one in your neighborhood or utility closet.
There is about four times as much thorium in the world as uranium. Together, Australia, the U.S. and Canada hold from 35 to 56% of those reserves, depending on who is doing the estimating. At current power consumption, the reserves in North America could last well over 500 years. Long enough to develop other energy sources and start mining the asteroids for it.
Because the reactor does not require all of the safety requirements and inspections, or highly trained and paid personnel to run, or the heavy shielding and pressure containment of a uranium reactor, it is much cheaper to build and run. At 1000KW per person, five of the proposed reactors, about the size of a railroad tanker car, could supply the greater Tulsa area. One estimate puts the initial cost of those reactors at 125 million dollars, once the new-technology costs have been reduced. The personal cost of the fuel and maintenance thereafter is estimated to be less than a dollar a year.
See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_costs/thorium_costs.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cyclehttp://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
The U.S. Navy is putting modest amounts of R&D money into another technology it wants for use on its ships, called aneutronic fusion. A proton and a boron11 nucleus combine to produce three very energetic alpha particles, or helium nuclei. These positively charged particles can be used directly to produce electricity. Potential efficiencies could be in electricity production could be very high, estimated by one source at 80 to 85%. Since no neutrons are emitted, the process does not generate radioactive waste. One estimate puts operating of a commercial plant at 2020. There is even more boron in the world than thorium.
And guess who else is working on it? Iran. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing – a Sputnik moment with Iran.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
http://earthsociety.org/wordpress/archives/320
http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/35/
http://www.crossfirefusion.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
http://www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/index.html
http://users.erols.com/iri/FocusFusion-Ver6.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
http://www.tomligon.com/fusion.htm
http://research.duke.edu/blog/archive/201103
http://www.economist.com/node/106651
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=lUUiqa8RiIUC&pg=PA359&lpg=PA359&dq=boron+fusion+reactor+success&source=bl&ots=0CWxU_v3nI&sig=uyT5ea3q0LFiadQ2DDjOFlvohgM&hl=en&ei=6auyTqKiPOXjsQK8t-X6Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCDgK#v=onepage&q=boron%20fusion%20reactor%20success&f=false
How could this energy be put to use? One technology can kill several birds with one stone, the artificial synthesis of methyl alcohol or methanol. All it requires is electricity, carbon dioxide and water. The Indianapolis 500 has required its use in Indie cars since a fiery and horrific multiple-car pileup of gasoline engine cars. With some modifications to internal combustion engines to account for extra corrosion problems, it can be used now. It has already been used in a fuel called M85, which is 85% methanol and 15% gasoline.
Furthermore, fuel cells are being developed that can turn methanol and air back into electricity, carbon dioxide and water. According to Wikipedia, methanol has ten times the energy density of the highly compressed hydrogen proposed for hydrogen-powered cars, and 15 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, the current technology used in electric cars. Methanol can be dispensed from current service station pumps, and does not depend upon the foreign importation of lithium from Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and, you guessed it, China. I think that it could eventually replace natural gas in existing pipelines, and reduce the environmental problems caused by fracking.
Notice that it also removes carbon dioxide from the air. It can also be used as a feedstock to synthesize other organic compounds. So that part, not either burned or consumed in a fuel cell, if used in the production of solid compounds like plastic, paints and construction materials, could take carbon dioxide out of the air almost permanently.
See:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie100508w
http://ses.nau.edu/AZSynFuels/literature-refs/Methanol%20Energy%20Balance.pdf
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v69/v69-16.pdf
http://ourenergypolicy.org/docs/8/ZSWMethanolCycle.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_methanol_fuel_cell
http://www.mtimicrofuelcells.com/technology/methanol.asp
http://www.icis.com/blogs/green-chemicals/2010/07/plastics-from-biomethanol-comi.html
http://www.wiley.com/college/boyer/0470003790/cutting_edge/methanol/methanol.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Production
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=Qdnc7uK-aH8C&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=methanol+electric+synthesis&source=bl&ots=tUGuaxptxp&sig=ZoFW_NQnqyARIbHEB_ZyA4zvfoo&hl=en&ei=FZ-yTsuNCoX42gXUoqHKAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=methanol%20electric%20synthesis&f=false
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
What's the difference between a State psychiatrist and a real Doctor? One heals. The other creates fear. The bigots like it that way.
Re: Behind the Times
There's a good book I've been reading, "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reis, available at Amazon.com for less than $30. It discusses, among other things, how in many large businesses separate departments come to demand more and more of the pie, and sabotage other departments. In other words, office politics. Wouldn't it be nice if we could dispense with the bickering between dogmatic politicians, and concentrate on what works? Reis offers a way out that he shows can apply to all types of organizations, from business startups, to innovation centers in large companies, and to government and non-profit agencies.
Further, his suggestions for innovation "sandboxes" may show the way to improve the outcomes of the "technology incubators" that so often provide more promise than results. If Oklahoma were to consider this approach, it might get more people off the dole and back to work quicker. It would even help just to have State support in paying fees for Provisional Patent and Trademark Applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
In the interest of full disclosure, I live on disability and the State dole. I have three engineering degrees and a Ph.D., all currently useless. I'm stuck on the dole because if I earn just one dollar more a month, I suddenly lose many more dollars in State benefits that add up to $160 to $170 a month in expenses. A hit I can't take. This is no myth. A nice lady at DRS laid it out for me.
What if the State, using all the methods advocated by Reis, started doing small scale experiments in changing DHS rules and OSBDC programs to see if more people could get off the dole, and create jobs and businesses. Wouldn't it be worth a try? It's called split-testing, and has been proven to work in business. It wouldn't be kicking people off the dole or cutting benefits to save money. It would using some seed money to find the best ways, plural, to get the American dream back on track. Whatever works. How could either political Party rationally disagree with that?
I've heard that the Legislature is considering changes in DHS rules. If you have read Reis' book and happen to agree, please feel free to print this out and send it to your State and Federal representatives, along with your own comments.
Re: Culture Matters
Re: Forbidden Fantasy
Well, I don't get to watch public television any more, or much else. My Digital TV adapter doesn't pick it up. But I did notice lately that NPR's coverage of the Congress grilling Attorney General Eric Holder refers to Operation Fast and Furious as a "flawed program" in which "mistakes" were made. As if it had nothing to do with creating the liberal myth that most of the Mexican drug cartel guns come from over the border in the U.S., not from the black market in Central America. The BATF insisted that gun dealers who raised objections to suspicious purchases let them go through. Then didn't even tell its own people in Mexico what was going on. If you bend over backwards far enough to satisfy your extremist base of any stripe, you might find yourself crawling into a deep, black hole.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
An Oklahoma State psychiatrist or an Arkansas orthopedist - take your pick.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
For example, one of the white grad students in our Department had come back from Malawi in Africa with a black African wife, after a stint in the Peace Corps, or something like. He told of having black children flee from him in a terror that he would catch them and eat them. And how in her culture, cats are considered demonic creatures with no bones. One time, he said, they were visiting in this country and a kitten crawled up on her lap. She swatted it across the room. She was a nice woman, not the kind of woman to go hunting other people’s pets, but could not tolerate that kitten upon her body.
In Oklahoma, a habitual liar with a grudge could simply claim that his wife had threatened her cats, and that the liar was afraid his wife would attack her as well. Then, under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, the Tulsa Police and the local community mental health emergency service would be only too willing to forgo any investigation beyond consulting the liar, and happy to drag her off to a local Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services facility. Where State counselors and psychiatrists would be only too happy to declare her paranoid, delusional and unfit to run her own life, without their special care in an involuntary commitment. With which the local mental health court would be only too pleased to agree.
All because she grew up in a different culture, had different experiences from theirs, and ran afoul of someone willing to make false charges. So here’s an important question, can State psychiatrists in State facilities tell the difference between a delusion and a cultural belief, or is it just their cultural belief that they can?
Re: Love Letters/Hate Mail
If you want to cut down on crime and violence, stop child abuse.
Re: Aqua Marine
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Oklahoma Mental Health Code, Title 43A, states in section 43A-5-411.A, Rights of an individual alleged to require treatment, “An individual alleged to be a person requiring treatment shall have the following rights:”. They include in A.6 “The right to present and to cross-examine witnesses. The petitioner and witnesses identified in the petition shall offer testimony under oath at the hearing on the petition. …” As I understand it, the legal meaning of “shall” is mandatory. This is the way that it must be done to be legal. So when the petitioner and alleged “witnesses” don’t show up, and the Judge even cuts off the defendant when the defendant tries to explain what happened, the Judge has violated the defendant’s rights under law, denying to that defendant the due process of law.
And when the Public Pretender doesn’t even bother to object to this state of affairs, the defendant effectively has no counsel, as mandated in 43A-5-411.A.2. The would be the same Public Pretender who in 43A-5-411.D.1 “shall immediately, upon meeting with the person alleged to be a person requiring treatment, present to such person a statement of the (person’s) rights, including all rights afforded to persons alleged to be a person requiring treatment by the Oklahoma and the United States Constitutions.” (That didn’t happen.) This provision is repeated in 43A-5-401.D.1, which the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services has falsely listed on its web site as “REPEALED” since at least 2003.
The only fig leaf the Mental Health Court might point to appears in 43A-5-401.J, -5-415.C.2 and -5-511.D.1, where the law states that “If a jury trial is not demanded, the court may take as evidence and act upon” the evaluations, affidavits and reports presented the mental health examiners. Only in 5-401.J, which the ODMHSAS would have “REPEALED”, does it say “without further evidence being presented”. In legal terms, one would think that “may” is merely permissive and incapable of dispensing with due process rights for the personal, political or prejudicial convenience of a Judge. The clause does not say that the defendant may not or shall not be allowed to present testimony, evidence and witnesses.
So when a Judge overrides a defendant’s protests of innocence and attempts to tell the true story, and allows the mental facility, which will receive the benefit of another warm body to justify its existence, to be the sole source of evidence and evaluation, one is justified in calling this a kangaroo court. And when, after the damage is already done, one must discover for one’s self the nature and extent of violations of due process and civil liberties, without any help from the local or state legal community, one may reasonably suspect that legal community of being a nest of bigots.