The Oklahoma Mental Health Code makes sets no scientific or medical standards that can be proven by evidence or experiment to work. Nor, apparently, do the ruling bodies it sets up to oversee its administration. The only standard it has for deciding who is “dangerous”, besides being accused while mentally ill, is “two licensed mental health professionals”. As if this guarantees that the state of the art, or “standard of care”, is up to the task.
Those psychiatrists who presume to decide for society and the law which of us is “dangerous” seem to have no conception of the difference between temptation and intention. And since they have no direct access to our internal dialogues, they project that inability upon us. As far as they are concerned, mental illness is like a single drop of black blood in the Old South. According to many of them, the least bit of it, no matter what or how much [they aren’t very accurate in measuring that, either], deprives one of any military or religious or humanitarian discipline one ever obtained in growing up.
So they inflate every violent thought into a murderous plot, measured by the psychiatric buzzwords one is innocent or fool or ignorant enough to utter in their presence. Only angry or negative emotions or words count with them. The rest they discard as useless to their professional needs.
Under these biased and unscientific standards, just getting angry in a situation that would justifiably infuriate anyone else, marks the person with mental illness as a danger that needs their special control. Since they cannot really predict who will be violent when, except in a minority of cases involving histories of repeated violence, they just lock up all the usual suspects. Under the authority of a bigoted law, created largely to cater to ignorant fears and their continued livelihood, those psychiatrists steal from us the very right to have any negative or even assertive human emotions whatsoever.
Of course, the threat of losing civil rights and position in society, and dehumanizing and unjust incarceration drives many to hide any difficulties. And avoid seeking treatment, where they might arouse the notice of psychiatrists bent on this kind of “social improvement”. Making State mental health facilities and others self-defeating. It is better to heal one’s self or die in the attempt, than to endure that kind of “treatment”.
This, without any actual investigation on his part, is what one Federal Judge would dismiss, with prejudice, ironically, as irrational or unintelligible. Let us not ask the poor man to think too deeply upon such matters, as they seem to disturb his religiously fundamental and unshakable beliefs.
How can someone with a mental illness physically threaten an Oklahoma law enforcement or licensed mental health professional? With a look. And a thought, “What a jerk. Did you just crawl out from under a rock?”
And the question is: So, when two State mental health professionals get together and decide that someone is going to be dangerous and needs to be committed into their care, do they pool their psychic resources, or do they just call the hotline?
***************
Is Suspicious Black Man Syndrome in the DSM yet?
One of my neighbors suffers from suspicious black man syndrome. He has this old car with a broken driver’s side door and always gets in on the passenger side. So one day while he was getting in, one of his white neighbors had taken her dogs out to defecate next to it. She decided that he looked suspicious. So the next time he went out to his car, a TPD car was patrolling the parking lot, and she sent her boyfriend out to alert the officer.
The next thing my neighbor knows, three or four cop cars have him under a spotlight, with guns and tasers ready. They slap the cuffs on him and searched his car for the gun that this white lady claimed he had in his hands, and call in for any wants or warrants. No gun. He is a Viet Nam Vet, and has a carry permit and no criminal record. So they took the cuffs off and said, “Thank you for your service.” By backhanded way of apology, one might suppose.
If Suspicious Black Man Syndrome ever shows up in the psychiatric DSM book, TPD Officers won’t need to check anything. Under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, they can just take him on down to the local loony bin on general principles. The South shall rise again. And State of Oklahoma licensed mental health professionals can identify themselves to each other with that hoary old code:
“Oh, when will the Dark Night ever end?”
“With the dawn of the White Jubilee!”
Why, if that ever comes to pass, there might even be a couple of Federal and Tulsa District Court Judges changing their dark robes over to white linen. And growing some Kentucky Colonel goatees. It would complement her mustache.
This may not be 1790, but Mr. McKnight may not be as psychic as he seems to think, and he does not have the right to make up other people's minds for them. He only has the right to speak his own. One can argue that a Kentucky long rifle in the hands of a sharpshooter was the assault weapon of its day, as those patriots so often proved on British officers. Which, given his sympathies, Mr. McKnight might well have been in those days, as he marched on Lexington and Concord.
Recently in China, where virtually no one is allowed to own a gun, a teenager killed 8 or 9 people with a knife. There have been increasing incidents of mass school killings with knives in China, By May 12th, 2012, there had been five violent school attacks in the previous two months. In 2008 in Japan, where they have a thing about swords, a man plowed into a crowd with a rental truck and started killing pedestrians with a knife. In December 2010, a man boarded a bus in Toride, Japan, and stabbed four people.
With evil intent, most things can be used to kill or maim. Decades ago, in one of the first Bic commercials, they loaded one into a rifle in front of a blank cartridge, shot it partway through a pine board, and demonstrated that it could still write. With or without guns, with or without knives, where there is a violent will, there’s a way. Just ask the House of Borgia.
President Obama, for example, seems to be utterly immune to a sense of irony. He personally orders the deaths of terrorists and “collaterally” kills innocents in the attacks. He sends young Americans overseas to do the same thing, and a portion of them either die or come back maimed in body or mind. But let some nut start shooting people in a theatre, and for President Obama, that buck stops with people who never had any participation or intent in the awful tragedy. He knows to and what to blame, the NRA and anyone with a mental illness.
Like a white woman fearing that every black man who winks at her might rape her, President Obama joins in with the calls to crack down on people with mental illnesses so that, in so many words, “this will not happen again”. Like many a bigot who once feared people just like him, he acts as if most in the minority of people with mental illnesses are devoid of human empathy or compassion, conscience, character or restraint. That such people are sub-human and do not deserve the same rights and consideration as him. Even while he, himself, adds to that minority by sending young men and women to fight overseas. For whom he has attempted to reduce their civil rights.
It’s like he forgot how the blues were born. And now with Black Man on Top, he’s going to make some better ones. Irony – the South rose again and it’s a Black President.
Let 10 guilty men go free, lest one innocent man be convicted
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Bear in mind that of 1000 people without any diagnosed mental illness, about 30 will commit acts of violence. Out of 1000 with diagnosed mental illness, about 60 will commit acts of violence. More than 30 years ago, medical and legal researchers found that when Courts ordered inmates released from mental institutions, over the objections of psychiatrists who claimed they were too dangerous to be released, about 1/3 actually committed violent acts at a later date. So those predictions of dangerousness were wrong about two times out of three. But of those released as harmless, a much higher percentage was correctly predicted to be harmless. Let’s give the psychiatrists the benefit of the doubt and say that their predictions of harmlessness are right 9 times out of 10.
If out of 1000 people with mental illness evaluated at a State of Oklahoma mental health facility (like TCBH) 800 are retained as dangerous, and 200 let go, how many harmless people are incarcerated for every violent person let go? The number of harmless people incarcerated would be 0.67 times 800, or 536. The number of violent people let go would be 0.1 times 200, or 2. That means that TCBH would incarcerate 268 harmless people for every violent person let go.
But we don’t know the incarceration rates for places like TCBH. They don’t operate in the light of day. So let’s do the numbers for 800, 500 and 200 people out of each 1000 incarcerated.
800 kept → 536 harmless → 268 to 1 200 let go → 2 violent
500 kept → 335 harmless → 67 to 1 500 let go → 5 violent
200 kept → 134 harmless → 16 ¾ to 1 800 let go → 8 violent
I wonder how these numbers and punishments compare to driving while Black. If the government inflicted this kind of adverse “civil” action on newspaper and television reporters for mistakes in covering government scandals, or lawyers for raising frivolous suits, imagine the uproar. But then, these aren’t their oxes being gored.
Double check me on those numbers of people committing violence; it could be a factor of ten less. I neglected to look that up first. You can find it online in the MacArthur Foundation Violence Risk Assessment study.
There’s an overwhelming potential for abuse in psychiatry, especially in psychiatric hospitals, and state institutions and entities, where it is almost guaranteed. One can see this from the second hour’s topic on the Diane Rhem show this morning, introducing the author of “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves”, Dan Ariely. See http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-13/dan-ariely-honest-truth-about-dishonesty-how-we-lie-everyone-especially-ourselves And http://danariely.com/
In psychiatric hospitals, institutions, courts and agencies, those with power legitimize each other, and thus feel entitled to it. There is a vast separation between them and their patients, or “consumers” as the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health would have it, which makes it psychologically easier to be dishonest with them. If you have ever been in one of those places, you will hear at least some of the “care providers” talk about how great the job would be if they just didn’t have to deal with patients. A wall of secrecy surrounds all of their dealings, which keeps the outside world from ever checking on their methods. Further, there is a tacit mutual agreement that their patients are inferior and “need” their help, so that whatever they do is “for the good of the patient”. So if one of them cuts ethical corners, the rest find it easy both to accept and to duplicate. The monitoring cameras in Oklahoma state institutions can only see actual physical or sexual abuses, not psychological, medical, legal and civil rights abuses.
Then there is the question of whether or not what is being done in those places has any medical or scientific validity. Science will not generally accept any result or claim until a number of others can do the same experiment and repeat the reported results. Compared to psychiatry, most other medical care is conducted much more openly, with records that can be obtained to validate standards of care, with open access to the patients by relatives and legal advisors, and with patients allowed to seek other opinions, and even to refuse care. The medical tests used there have physical meaning that can be validated. A patient either has a fever or doesn’t, either has a suspicious mass on an x-ray or doesn’t, either has an infection that can be cultured or doesn’t, either has blood pressure over a certain value or doesn’t.
Religion on the other hand, is “the evidence of things not seen”. A bunch of people get together and agree to believe the same things about what is true or not, about what is right and wrong. And a cult is where they do it all in secret and don’t let people leave. Much like psychiatric practice and institutions.
Most if not all of the “medical tests” in psychiatry involve asking the patients questions and then deciding from a philosophical standpoint what the psychiatrist or counselor believes about the answers and the patient. The “standard of care” consists entirely of what a group of people in that profession agree with each other to say it is. It is almost entirely subjective, in the eyes of the beholder.
Psychiatrists don’t have any physical voltmeters or thermometers, and very few chemical or genetic tests, to say “this one is bipolar” and “that one is schizophrenic”. What few brain scans could be used are so expensive that they are rarely used. So shading the truth in order to force someone into their “care”, “for their own good” of course, not to mention the income of the psychiatrist or institution, becomes very, very easy. Especially to deal with a socially unwelcome and disliked minority in secret.
If you think that is paranoid, it may well depend upon your “religion”. I know of a certain Federal Judge who belongs to that church.
In comparing the number of harmless people committed to the number of violent people let go in a system that is wrong 2 out of 3 times in designating people “dangerous”, and wrong 1 out of 10 times in designating people “harmless”, I missed a decimal point in the second calculation. I’ve redone the numbers and get the following:
let go commit harmless violent Harmless Violent committed let go Committed Let go
990 10 6.7 99 1 to 14.85 985 15 10 98.5 1 to 9.85 960 40 26.7 96 1 to 3.6 900 100 66.7 90 1 to 1.35 869 131 87.3 86.9 1.005 to 1 800 200 133.3 80 1.667 to 1 500 500 333.3 50 6.667 to 1 200 800 533.3 20 26.67 to 1 100 900 600 10 60 to 1 30 970 646. 7 3 215. 6 to 1 10 990 660 1 660 to 1
Compare this to “Let ten guilty men go free lest one innocent man be convicted.” Federal Judges have more than turned that around for people with mental illness, as if such people are 10 to 100 times more dangerous than violent predators, and getting committed doesn’t destroy lives. If Federal Judges had to face this kind of justice in their confirmation hearings, with the added penalty that if not confirmed they lose forever the right to practice, they would be squealing about a lot worse than “high-tech lynchings”.
Well, this is frustrating. It seems that the Urban Tulsa editor program does not allow this to be put into nice, readable columns. If you wish to reconstruct this, the column headings are "let go", "committed", "harmless committed" one word over the other, "violent (over) let go", "Harmless (over) Committed", and "Violent (over) Let go".
Right after the Martin Luther King assassination, an Iowa teacher named Jane Elliot (http://www.janeelliott.com/) asked her class of white 8 year olds what they knew about black people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott). According to Wikipedia, she stated, “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” So with the agreement of the students, she divided her class up into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students. In WWII, Jews had been sent to the gas chambers that way.
She gave the blue-eyed students special privileges, and in general had them treat the brown-eyed children to the same discrimination as Blacks in the South, even to the point of dispensing pseudo-scientific clap trap to support it. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed minority was behaving like true bigots, and the brown-eyed majority like a beaten people. The next day, Ms. Elliot reversed the situation. Then the brown-eyed children behaved like bigots, but not quite as bad as the first bunch.
See also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
When most people discuss mental illness, they mostly share ignorance and stereotypes. Like many states, Oklahoma’s mental health code and legal system is a huge blue-eyes/brown-eyes experiment, let run to ghastly lengths. Without a shred of scientific or medical standards or proof about who can be predicted to be “dangerous”, it puts the onus on those who are feared, to prove that they are not. It literally defines a person to be “in need of treatment” if that person is merely accused of threatening another person while mentally ill. The people in charge of that system then take that license to transform mere accusation into proven “fact”, against which no defense is allowed. Under those conditions, it is almost impossible not to be committed.
Oh, really? You think if they hadn’t done something wrong, they wouldn’t be there? So if this kind of marsupial justice were applied to you, how would you define “ghastly”? For, according to reasonable estimates from medical research, if one were to impose the standard that ten dangerous people be let free for every harmless person committed, the State mental courts and facilities could only commit about 15 out of every 1000 people brought before them, of which 10 would be harmless.
Certainly the State Council on Judicial Complaints doesn’t worry about it much. If a mental health court judge accepts hearsay as proven fact, makes utterly no attempt to find any “less restrictive alternative”, files a false claim about available medical information, and refuses to allow a defendant to plead his or her situation at the commitment hearing, the Council will dismiss any complaint. It claims to be “limited by the constitution and statutes of Oklahoma to matters concerning misconduct and physical and mental ability of persons occupying judicial positions.”
One might reasonably suspect that the Council consists entirely of blue-eyed 2nd graders.
"Whether it is adults or children, or seniors, for that matter, is it moral to give people dubious, harmful psychiatric diagnoses in order to get paid?"
-Jim Gottstein, in http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/diagnosing-dangers/
Deprivation of civil liberties under the health food model
In what other “medical” discipline besides psychiatry are patients are afraid to be completely honest, for fear of being “diagnosed” as less deserving of human rights than those around them, who are often just as screwed up?
How do such “mental health professionals” figure that’s going to work? Aside from milking insurance and tax money? Is knowing that someone can yank you back into the local loony bin, at any time for nearly any reason, supposed to be liberating and healing? Or just as depressing, punitive and repressive as it feels?
A tormented state of mind may bring on occasional lapses in judgment, but it is not the same as stupid. It is merely one part of the human condition. Forcing someone from a bad situation into a worse one doesn’t improve it. It’s like kicking a dog for having diarrhea. It may get the dog out of your house or off your lawn, but from the dog’s point of view, it only adds to its misery and makes it afraid of you.
And if some “mental health professional” claims that it the State mental health system does help people, where is the scientific and medical evidence? Where are the links to such evidence and statistics on its web sites? Where has it done and published any study with the same scope as the MacArthur Study on violence risk assessment, freely available on the net? How and where has it demonstrated that its rules and methods for committing “dangerous” people are just, helpful and effective?
Blustering doesn’t count. You actually have to run long-term experiments using real data on evaluations, treatments and outcomes, which any outside expert can freely examine and interpret. Which means that you actually have to collect and keep aggregate and de-personalized data, and make publicly available that data and the rules under which it was collected. The same as any real doctor and scientist does when publishing in a journal. To truly demonstrate its fairness and usefulness, the State mental health system must to be open to investigation and professional criticism.
The empty-suited shamans in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services are rightly afraid of doing this. It would expose them as having very little if any evidence-based treatment. Their “standard of care” is a bunch of people concurring that what they are doing is right, with no more evidence of medical efficacy than many health foods sold on the Internet. It they were medical pills instead of the kind they are, they couldn’t get past the stringent FDA requirements. They might as well be scientologists, because any cult or fringe group can make the same claims of saving and improving lives with secret methods that the uninitiated cannot fathom.
If we have freedom of religion in this country, why does State law favor them? The continuous silly season in the Legislature, perhaps? And if I’m wrong, let’s see the State mental health system demonstrate it with something besides forcibly detaining and medicating me like a Soviet “mental patient” in Lubyanka.
Witnessing a crime while mentally ill Or, the other kind of don’t-snitch mentality, A legacy of State “help”
Getting involved with the State of Oklahoma’s mental health system teaches you several things. First, as far as police are concerned, you are automatically prejudged to be unable either to tell the truth or report reality. So no one has any obligation or incentive to investigate your story. That conveniently saves the police a lot of foot and paperwork.
Second, the State has predefined you as likely to be “dangerous” in any violent or threatening situation. That is how it trains police. Third, any mental health professionals upon whom the police and prosecutor depend are trained to emphasize that you are likely to be dangerous, just to be on the conservative side of “public safety”. You found that out in Mental Health Court, where mental health evaluators prostitute their opinions to justify committing you to their care, and even your public defender won’t bother to vigorously represent you.
So if you happen to be in the vicinity of a violent crime and report it, guess who gets to be the prime suspect. Especially if someone with a malicious bone to pick denounces you as the one likely to have done it. How handy that is for the police, and the criminal, who can easily be the one accusing you. It’s a win-win for them. The police don’t have to work so hard clearing the case, and the criminal gets away with it.
And even if you aren’t the one charged with the crime, you automatically have no credibility in court. You found that out in Mental Health Court, too. A lawyer whose opinions are paid for by the hour, with a client who has the most to gain from it, will tear you to shreds on the stand. “But aren’t you taking medication for a mental illness?”, or “But weren’t you committed to a mental institution on this date?” If you are telling the truth and accurately reporting what you heard and saw, it won’t matter to anyone. Maybe not even to the victim, who might easily be led to believe you did it.
So if you witness a violent crime while mentally ill, what, besides your sense of civic duty, is your incentive to report it or give witness about it in court? When you stand a good chance of suffering as badly as, if not worse than, the victim of the crime. Are you willing to pay that price to do the right thing, when the guilty will likely go free, and you may be crucified in their place?
Who is going to stand up and dispute that reality? The state and local authorities who have predefined and judged you as “dangerous to self or others”, upon any mere or false allegation of threatening behavior? Fan-tastic.
When they treat white people with mental illness this way, it’s not hard to imagine how they have treated black people, now and in the past. Do police and prosecutors really wonder where don’t-snitch distrust comes from without ever bothering to look at themselves, or are they just satisfied with their own superior attitudes and assumptions? Too lazy and conceited to go back and investigate what they wouldn’t before.
Romney should release all of his tax returns back through his involvement with Bain Capital, and Obama should release all internal BATFE and related Executive Branch documents in the period of his administration. Then we would learn what we should know about both Bain Capital and the BATFE’s Operation Fast and Furious. Of course, that might cut down on voter turnout on both sides, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.
Putting all that money offshore and leaving it there? Is he running for American President or African Dictator? He should just admit he made a mistake and repatriate it yesterday. Then make up for it by putting his Republican money where his trickle-down mouth is. Invest it in small businesses. For example, a blind angel trust, or kickstarter.com, small business loans, some incubators. Make up for the Medicaid losses of 5000 people in poverty who start small businesses. Show up at a gun show, an arts and crafts fair, and a farmer's market, buy a bunch of stuff, look around and ask, "Has anyone seen President Obama?" Surely as a businessman, he can think of many more.
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COMMENTS
Posted by: Don B
208 comments total
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Oklahoma Mental Health Code makes sets no scientific or medical standards that can be proven by evidence or experiment to work. Nor, apparently, do the ruling bodies it sets up to oversee its administration. The only standard it has for deciding who is “dangerous”, besides being accused while mentally ill, is “two licensed mental health professionals”. As if this guarantees that the state of the art, or “standard of care”, is up to the task.
Those psychiatrists who presume to decide for society and the law which of us is “dangerous” seem to have no conception of the difference between temptation and intention. And since they have no direct access to our internal dialogues, they project that inability upon us. As far as they are concerned, mental illness is like a single drop of black blood in the Old South. According to many of them, the least bit of it, no matter what or how much [they aren’t very accurate in measuring that, either], deprives one of any military or religious or humanitarian discipline one ever obtained in growing up.
So they inflate every violent thought into a murderous plot, measured by the psychiatric buzzwords one is innocent or fool or ignorant enough to utter in their presence. Only angry or negative emotions or words count with them. The rest they discard as useless to their professional needs.
Under these biased and unscientific standards, just getting angry in a situation that would justifiably infuriate anyone else, marks the person with mental illness as a danger that needs their special control. Since they cannot really predict who will be violent when, except in a minority of cases involving histories of repeated violence, they just lock up all the usual suspects. Under the authority of a bigoted law, created largely to cater to ignorant fears and their continued livelihood, those psychiatrists steal from us the very right to have any negative or even assertive human emotions whatsoever.
Of course, the threat of losing civil rights and position in society, and dehumanizing and unjust incarceration drives many to hide any difficulties. And avoid seeking treatment, where they might arouse the notice of psychiatrists bent on this kind of “social improvement”. Making State mental health facilities and others self-defeating. It is better to heal one’s self or die in the attempt, than to endure that kind of “treatment”.
This, without any actual investigation on his part, is what one Federal Judge would dismiss, with prejudice, ironically, as irrational or unintelligible. Let us not ask the poor man to think too deeply upon such matters, as they seem to disturb his religiously fundamental and unshakable beliefs.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
such people deserve to have
for the rest of eternity
a little frog
sitting on their shoulders
saying
bigot..bigot..bigot…
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
How can someone with a mental illness physically threaten an Oklahoma law enforcement or licensed mental health professional? With a look. And a thought, “What a jerk. Did you just crawl out from under a rock?”
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
And the question is:
So, when two State mental health professionals get together and decide that someone is going to be dangerous and needs to be committed into their care, do they pool their psychic resources, or do they just call the hotline?
***************
Is Suspicious Black Man Syndrome in the DSM yet?
One of my neighbors suffers from suspicious black man syndrome. He has this old car with a broken driver’s side door and always gets in on the passenger side. So one day while he was getting in, one of his white neighbors had taken her dogs out to defecate next to it. She decided that he looked suspicious. So the next time he went out to his car, a TPD car was patrolling the parking lot, and she sent her boyfriend out to alert the officer.
The next thing my neighbor knows, three or four cop cars have him under a spotlight, with guns and tasers ready. They slap the cuffs on him and searched his car for the gun that this white lady claimed he had in his hands, and call in for any wants or warrants. No gun. He is a Viet Nam Vet, and has a carry permit and no criminal record. So they took the cuffs off and said, “Thank you for your service.” By backhanded way of apology, one might suppose.
If Suspicious Black Man Syndrome ever shows up in the psychiatric DSM book, TPD Officers won’t need to check anything. Under the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, they can just take him on down to the local loony bin on general principles. The South shall rise again. And State of Oklahoma licensed mental health professionals can identify themselves to each other with that hoary old code:
“Oh, when will the Dark Night ever end?”
“With the dawn of the White Jubilee!”
Why, if that ever comes to pass, there might even be a couple of Federal and Tulsa District Court Judges changing their dark robes over to white linen. And growing some Kentucky Colonel goatees. It would complement her mustache.
Re: Love Letters, hate mail
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAj9W0ntUMI – Footage of the JRC torturing a person (aired in court)
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Recently in China, where virtually no one is allowed to own a gun, a teenager killed 8 or 9 people with a knife. There have been increasing incidents of mass school killings with knives in China, By May 12th, 2012, there had been five violent school attacks in the previous two months. In 2008 in Japan, where they have a thing about swords, a man plowed into a crowd with a rental truck and started killing pedestrians with a knife. In December 2010, a man boarded a bus in Toride, Japan, and stabbed four people.
With evil intent, most things can be used to kill or maim. Decades ago, in one of the first Bic commercials, they loaded one into a rifle in front of a blank cartridge, shot it partway through a pine board, and demonstrated that it could still write. With or without guns, with or without knives, where there is a violent will, there’s a way. Just ask the House of Borgia.
President Obama, for example, seems to be utterly immune to a sense of irony. He personally orders the deaths of terrorists and “collaterally” kills innocents in the attacks. He sends young Americans overseas to do the same thing, and a portion of them either die or come back maimed in body or mind. But let some nut start shooting people in a theatre, and for President Obama, that buck stops with people who never had any participation or intent in the awful tragedy. He knows to and what to blame, the NRA and anyone with a mental illness.
Like a white woman fearing that every black man who winks at her might rape her, President Obama joins in with the calls to crack down on people with mental illnesses so that, in so many words, “this will not happen again”. Like many a bigot who once feared people just like him, he acts as if most in the minority of people with mental illnesses are devoid of human empathy or compassion, conscience, character or restraint. That such people are sub-human and do not deserve the same rights and consideration as him. Even while he, himself, adds to that minority by sending young men and women to fight overseas. For whom he has attempted to reduce their civil rights.
It’s like he forgot how the blues were born. And now with Black Man on Top, he’s going to make some better ones. Irony – the South rose again and it’s a Black President.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Bear in mind that of 1000 people without any diagnosed mental illness, about 30 will commit acts of violence. Out of 1000 with diagnosed mental illness, about 60 will commit acts of violence. More than 30 years ago, medical and legal researchers found that when Courts ordered inmates released from mental institutions, over the objections of psychiatrists who claimed they were too dangerous to be released, about 1/3 actually committed violent acts at a later date. So those predictions of dangerousness were wrong about two times out of three. But of those released as harmless, a much higher percentage was correctly predicted to be harmless. Let’s give the psychiatrists the benefit of the doubt and say that their predictions of harmlessness are right 9 times out of 10.
If out of 1000 people with mental illness evaluated at a State of Oklahoma mental health facility (like TCBH) 800 are retained as dangerous, and 200 let go, how many harmless people are incarcerated for every violent person let go? The number of harmless people incarcerated would be 0.67 times 800, or 536. The number of violent people let go would be 0.1 times 200, or 2. That means that TCBH would incarcerate 268 harmless people for every violent person let go.
But we don’t know the incarceration rates for places like TCBH. They don’t operate in the light of day. So let’s do the numbers for 800, 500 and 200 people out of each 1000 incarcerated.
800 kept → 536 harmless → 268 to 1
200 let go → 2 violent
500 kept → 335 harmless → 67 to 1
500 let go → 5 violent
200 kept → 134 harmless → 16 ¾ to 1
800 let go → 8 violent
I wonder how these numbers and punishments compare to driving while Black. If the government inflicted this kind of adverse “civil” action on newspaper and television reporters for mistakes in covering government scandals, or lawyers for raising frivolous suits, imagine the uproar. But then, these aren’t their oxes being gored.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
There’s an overwhelming potential for abuse in psychiatry, especially in psychiatric hospitals, and state institutions and entities, where it is almost guaranteed. One can see this from the second hour’s topic on the Diane Rhem show this morning, introducing the author of “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves”, Dan Ariely.
See http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-13/dan-ariely-honest-truth-about-dishonesty-how-we-lie-everyone-especially-ourselves
And http://danariely.com/
In psychiatric hospitals, institutions, courts and agencies, those with power legitimize each other, and thus feel entitled to it. There is a vast separation between them and their patients, or “consumers” as the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health would have it, which makes it psychologically easier to be dishonest with them. If you have ever been in one of those places, you will hear at least some of the “care providers” talk about how great the job would be if they just didn’t have to deal with patients. A wall of secrecy surrounds all of their dealings, which keeps the outside world from ever checking on their methods. Further, there is a tacit mutual agreement that their patients are inferior and “need” their help, so that whatever they do is “for the good of the patient”. So if one of them cuts ethical corners, the rest find it easy both to accept and to duplicate. The monitoring cameras in Oklahoma state institutions can only see actual physical or sexual abuses, not psychological, medical, legal and civil rights abuses.
Then there is the question of whether or not what is being done in those places has any medical or scientific validity. Science will not generally accept any result or claim until a number of others can do the same experiment and repeat the reported results. Compared to psychiatry, most other medical care is conducted much more openly, with records that can be obtained to validate standards of care, with open access to the patients by relatives and legal advisors, and with patients allowed to seek other opinions, and even to refuse care. The medical tests used there have physical meaning that can be validated. A patient either has a fever or doesn’t, either has a suspicious mass on an x-ray or doesn’t, either has an infection that can be cultured or doesn’t, either has blood pressure over a certain value or doesn’t.
Religion on the other hand, is “the evidence of things not seen”. A bunch of people get together and agree to believe the same things about what is true or not, about what is right and wrong. And a cult is where they do it all in secret and don’t let people leave. Much like psychiatric practice and institutions.
Most if not all of the “medical tests” in psychiatry involve asking the patients questions and then deciding from a philosophical standpoint what the psychiatrist or counselor believes about the answers and the patient. The “standard of care” consists entirely of what a group of people in that profession agree with each other to say it is.
It is almost entirely subjective, in the eyes of the beholder.
Psychiatrists don’t have any physical voltmeters or thermometers, and very few chemical or genetic tests, to say “this one is bipolar” and “that one is schizophrenic”. What few brain scans could be used are so expensive that they are rarely used. So shading the truth in order to force someone into their “care”, “for their own good” of course, not to mention the income of the psychiatrist or institution, becomes very, very easy. Especially to deal with a socially unwelcome and disliked minority in secret.
If you think that is paranoid, it may well depend upon your “religion”. I know of a certain Federal Judge who belongs to that church.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Liberals and conservatives have at least one thing in common.
Their knees jerk on the Richter scale.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In comparing the number of harmless people committed to the number of violent people let go in a system that is wrong 2 out of 3 times in designating people “dangerous”, and wrong 1 out of 10 times in designating people “harmless”, I missed a decimal point in the second calculation. I’ve redone the numbers and get the following:
let go commit harmless violent Harmless Violent
committed let go Committed Let go
990 10 6.7 99 1 to 14.85
985 15 10 98.5 1 to 9.85
960 40 26.7 96 1 to 3.6
900 100 66.7 90 1 to 1.35
869 131 87.3 86.9 1.005 to 1
800 200 133.3 80 1.667 to 1
500 500 333.3 50 6.667 to 1
200 800 533.3 20 26.67 to 1
100 900 600 10 60 to 1
30 970 646. 7 3 215. 6 to 1
10 990 660 1 660 to 1
Compare this to “Let ten guilty men go free lest one innocent man be convicted.” Federal Judges have more than turned that around for people with mental illness, as if such people are 10 to 100 times more dangerous than violent predators, and getting committed doesn’t destroy lives. If Federal Judges had to face this kind of justice in their confirmation hearings, with the added penalty that if not confirmed they lose forever the right to practice, they would be squealing about a lot worse than “high-tech lynchings”.
Well, this is frustrating. It seems that the Urban Tulsa editor program does not allow this to be put into nice, readable columns. If you wish to reconstruct this, the column headings are "let go", "committed", "harmless committed" one word over the other, "violent (over) let go", "Harmless (over) Committed", and "Violent (over) Let go".
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Right after the Martin Luther King assassination, an Iowa teacher named Jane Elliot (http://www.janeelliott.com/) asked her class of white 8 year olds what they knew about black people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott). According to Wikipedia, she stated, “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” So with the agreement of the students, she divided her class up into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students. In WWII, Jews had been sent to the gas chambers that way.
She gave the blue-eyed students special privileges, and in general had them treat the brown-eyed children to the same discrimination as Blacks in the South, even to the point of dispensing pseudo-scientific clap trap to support it. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed minority was behaving like true bigots, and the brown-eyed majority like a beaten people. The next day, Ms. Elliot reversed the situation. Then the brown-eyed children behaved like bigots, but not quite as bad as the first bunch.
See also http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
When most people discuss mental illness, they mostly share ignorance and stereotypes. Like many states, Oklahoma’s mental health code and legal system is a huge blue-eyes/brown-eyes experiment, let run to ghastly lengths. Without a shred of scientific or medical standards or proof about who can be predicted to be “dangerous”, it puts the onus on those who are feared, to prove that they are not. It literally defines a person to be “in need of treatment” if that person is merely accused of threatening another person while mentally ill. The people in charge of that system then take that license to transform mere accusation into proven “fact”, against which no defense is allowed. Under those conditions, it is almost impossible not to be committed.
Oh, really? You think if they hadn’t done something wrong, they wouldn’t be there? So if this kind of marsupial justice were applied to you, how would you define “ghastly”? For, according to reasonable estimates from medical research, if one were to impose the standard that ten dangerous people be let free for every harmless person committed, the State mental courts and facilities could only commit about 15 out of every 1000 people brought before them, of which 10 would be harmless.
Certainly the State Council on Judicial Complaints doesn’t worry about it much. If a mental health court judge accepts hearsay as proven fact, makes utterly no attempt to find any “less restrictive alternative”, files a false claim about available medical information, and refuses to allow a defendant to plead his or her situation at the commitment hearing, the Council will dismiss any complaint. It claims to be “limited by the constitution and statutes of Oklahoma to matters concerning misconduct and physical and mental ability of persons occupying judicial positions.”
One might reasonably suspect that the Council consists entirely of blue-eyed 2nd graders.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
-Jim Gottstein, in http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/diagnosing-dangers/
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In what other “medical” discipline besides psychiatry are patients are afraid to be completely honest, for fear of being “diagnosed” as less deserving of human rights than those around them, who are often just as screwed up?
How do such “mental health professionals” figure that’s going to work? Aside from milking insurance and tax money? Is knowing that someone can yank you back into the local loony bin, at any time for nearly any reason, supposed to be liberating and healing? Or just as depressing, punitive and repressive as it feels?
A tormented state of mind may bring on occasional lapses in judgment, but it is not the same as stupid. It is merely one part of the human condition. Forcing someone from a bad situation into a worse one doesn’t improve it. It’s like kicking a dog for having diarrhea. It may get the dog out of your house or off your lawn, but from the dog’s point of view, it only adds to its misery and makes it afraid of you.
And if some “mental health professional” claims that it the State mental health system does help people, where is the scientific and medical evidence? Where are the links to such evidence and statistics on its web sites? Where has it done and published any study with the same scope as the MacArthur Study on violence risk assessment, freely available on the net? How and where has it demonstrated that its rules and methods for committing “dangerous” people are just, helpful and effective?
Blustering doesn’t count. You actually have to run long-term experiments using real data on evaluations, treatments and outcomes, which any outside expert can freely examine and interpret. Which means that you actually have to collect and keep aggregate and de-personalized data, and make publicly available that data and the rules under which it was collected. The same as any real doctor and scientist does when publishing in a journal. To truly demonstrate its fairness and usefulness, the State mental health system must to be open to investigation and professional criticism.
The empty-suited shamans in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services are rightly afraid of doing this. It would expose them as having very little if any evidence-based treatment. Their “standard of care” is a bunch of people concurring that what they are doing is right, with no more evidence of medical efficacy than many health foods sold on the Internet. It they were medical pills instead of the kind they are, they couldn’t get past the stringent FDA requirements. They might as well be scientologists, because any cult or fringe group can make the same claims of saving and improving lives with secret methods that the uninitiated cannot fathom.
If we have freedom of religion in this country, why does State law favor them? The continuous silly season in the Legislature, perhaps? And if I’m wrong, let’s see the State mental health system demonstrate it with something besides forcibly detaining and medicating me like a Soviet “mental patient” in Lubyanka.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Or, the other kind of don’t-snitch mentality,
A legacy of State “help”
Getting involved with the State of Oklahoma’s mental health system teaches you several things. First, as far as police are concerned, you are automatically prejudged to be unable either to tell the truth or report reality. So no one has any obligation or incentive to investigate your story. That conveniently saves the police a lot of foot and paperwork.
Second, the State has predefined you as likely to be “dangerous” in any violent or threatening situation. That is how it trains police. Third, any mental health professionals upon whom the police and prosecutor depend are trained to emphasize that you are likely to be dangerous, just to be on the conservative side of “public safety”. You found that out in Mental Health Court, where mental health evaluators prostitute their opinions to justify committing you to their care, and even your public defender won’t bother to vigorously represent you.
So if you happen to be in the vicinity of a violent crime and report it, guess who gets to be the prime suspect. Especially if someone with a malicious bone to pick denounces you as the one likely to have done it. How handy that is for the police, and the criminal, who can easily be the one accusing you. It’s a win-win for them. The police don’t have to work so hard clearing the case, and the criminal gets away with it.
And even if you aren’t the one charged with the crime, you automatically have no credibility in court. You found that out in Mental Health Court, too. A lawyer whose opinions are paid for by the hour, with a client who has the most to gain from it, will tear you to shreds on the stand. “But aren’t you taking medication for a mental illness?”, or “But weren’t you committed to a mental institution on this date?” If you are telling the truth and accurately reporting what you heard and saw, it won’t matter to anyone. Maybe not even to the victim, who might easily be led to believe you did it.
So if you witness a violent crime while mentally ill, what, besides your sense of civic duty, is your incentive to report it or give witness about it in court? When you stand a good chance of suffering as badly as, if not worse than, the victim of the crime. Are you willing to pay that price to do the right thing, when the guilty will likely go free, and you may be crucified in their place?
Who is going to stand up and dispute that reality? The state and local authorities who have predefined and judged you as “dangerous to self or others”, upon any mere or false allegation of threatening behavior? Fan-tastic.
When they treat white people with mental illness this way, it’s not hard to imagine how they have treated black people, now and in the past. Do police and prosecutors really wonder where don’t-snitch distrust comes from without ever bothering to look at themselves, or are they just satisfied with their own superior attitudes and assumptions? Too lazy and conceited to go back and investigate what they wouldn’t before.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Romney should release all of his tax returns back through his involvement with Bain Capital, and Obama should release all internal BATFE and related Executive Branch documents in the period of his administration. Then we would learn what we should know about both Bain Capital and the BATFE’s Operation Fast and Furious. Of course, that might cut down on voter turnout on both sides, but it’s a price we should be willing to pay.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Putting all that money offshore and leaving it there? Is he running for American President or African Dictator? He should just admit he made a mistake and repatriate it yesterday. Then make up for it by putting his Republican money where his trickle-down mouth is. Invest it in small businesses. For example, a blind angel trust, or kickstarter.com, small business loans, some incubators. Make up for the Medicaid losses of 5000 people in poverty who start small businesses. Show up at a gun show, an arts and crafts fair, and a farmer's market, buy a bunch of stuff, look around and ask, "Has anyone seen President Obama?" Surely as a businessman, he can think of many more.