When Judges mess up, law insulates from their own mistakes they who rule with something like divine and royal right in this country. Instead they compel the rest of us to have intimate relations with the canine pet in their place.
If you have Windows 7, Do Not, repeat DO NOT, enable offline access to files on another computer on your network. Win7 will take up space on its own hard drive duplicating files on the network drive, which you might never get back. You may be unable to delete the folder containing those files, even if you are the only user/administrator on the computer, and the person who set up the mapped network drive. If you try to do so, you may get a message stating that you cannot do so until you get permission from yourself, which Win7 may not allow.
If you try to fix this by connecting to the network drive and re-enabling offline files, you may get errors that will not allow Windows to start, requiring you to do a Startup Repair. This problem may be connected with the installation of Microsoft Security Essentials, which admits in its license agreement that it might make changes that will keep programs or Windows from running. And limits the Microsoft’s responsibility for damages to $5.
Caveat Emptor
If only more packages ran on Linux easily, we could all dump Microsoft and its bugs.
If you install MSE, you may find that you can no longer 1) check your disk for errors, due to a “recently installed software package” 2) uninstall MSE, unless you institute a search for the installation files, because it will tell you that you don’t have access to a needed resource
I once contacted NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, about getting some legal help. The local chapter, I think. No, they didn’t do that. Instead, they advocate for the families of those with mental illness to get treatment for them, like involuntary commitment. So does a place on the web called mentalillnesspolicy.org.
These organizations emphasize the damage that a minority of people with mental illness do to themselves and others in order to motivate and create public policy for so-called “progressive” involuntary treatment. They show no awareness of or concern for what license it gives governments and institutions to threaten, abuse and damage anyone they deem in need of their care, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
So it doesn’t matter what we want or need; they don’t need to ask us. They just want to do what they think is good for us, voluntary or not. Kind of like that toilet law in the movie, The Help. Of course, those white Southern women didn’t lock their help in their special toilets for weeks or months on end. They needed their help for dirty work.
Imagine if Oklahoma legislators thought they could catch mental illness from a toilet seat. Based on what we’ve seen the last few years, it’s not inconceivable, them thinking that. Then I bet we’d get special toilets, too.
It saves all that trouble of asking those with mental illness what we need and what works best for us. Of considering how to approach us without threats, and get us voluntarily involved with counseling, medication and meaningful, productive employment.
Don’t we all see it every day? When it comes to raising money for a cause, fear and loathing sells better.
The Supreme Court of the United States has used extraordinarily specious logic to separate those with mental illnesses from civil rights and the standards of justice it would apply to everyone else. Which the lower courts have followed in lock step.
In the movie “Judgment at Nuremburg”, a movie well worth watching, Spencer Tracy’s character, a U.S. jurist, passes judgment on a German judge who worked under the Nazis. You can find his speech here: http://www.politicalspeeches.net/us-politics/spencer-tracy-delivers-final-verdict-from-judgement-at-nuremburg
In essence, if I remember correctly, the German judge had claimed the defense that he was just administering the laws as written. Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. It was in a Federal District courtroom – here in Tulsa. The judge told me that if I wanted a different result, then I should get the laws changed.
The thing is, he and all his colleagues have sworn an oath to the Constitution of the United States, which stands above the laws. The Supreme Court is not infallible. It occasionally makes stupidly egregious, unconstitutional decisions, based more upon the jerking of ideological knees than upon evidence. A lower court judge who administers them blindly, with no recourse to or consideration of constitutional values, absolves himself or herself with the same excuse as that German judge at Nuremburg.
Occasionally, rather than condemn the innocent to injustice, a lower court judge should stand up and be counted on the side of the Constitution, even if it means his or her career. The judge’s opinion should provide the Supreme Court with the evidence and reasoning necessary to see the error of its ways, even if the Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, then issues a reversal.
All it takes is courage and integrity, which people with unaccountable, lifetime appointments seem ill-inclined to exercise on behalf of those beneath them, whom they hold in judgment.
“Always tell the truth, even if it means your life.” - from the Knight’s Oath in the movie, The Kingdom of Heaven.
The Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any “consumer” inside its walls, citing HIPPA regulations. In its “Uncivil Rights” section, mentalillnesspolicy.org blames HIPPA regulations for keeping family members from finding out the status of loved ones who get scooped up by or shoved into mental institutions like TCBH. But what’s the truth?
When a friend of mine ended up in the hospital after a fall, I could call any hospital in town and find out whether or not he had been admitted, was there, or had been discharged. I could get his room number and telephone number. On one of those occasions, I went to visit him. HIPPA did not stop me.
Yet both kinds of institutions are covered by HIPPA. They both have to obey it. What’s the difference? Why in one case should even immediate family be deliberately kept in the dark about the status of their loved ones? Even the county jail has public information on who is there right up on the internet. Why is TCBH so special?
It’s not. The truth is that alternative incarceration in a mental facility was originally meant to apply only to those who had committed crimes while mentally ill. Under that system, they could be admitted to a place like TCBH, to be treated for mental health issues that gave rise to criminal behavior, only after (note this) publicly renouncing all claims to innocence.
Places like TCBH don’t adhere to such legal niceties. After being arrested in public by swarming police, whom apparently HIPPA does not restrict from publicly humiliating people, the inmates are “evaluated” by “mental health professionals” who have been shown by research to be wrong about two out of every three times. Even when they don’t put their thumbs on the scales in their own favor, to justify their own jobs.
Who is the so-called privacy for? By the time people get to TCBH, the public police swarm and handcuffing has already pulled the privacy cat out of its bag. If friends and neighbors who were never interviewed didn’t think there was anything wrong with an inmate before, they now have reason to wonder. If the inmates hadn’t been stressed out and emotionally troubled before, they are now.
HIPPA has nothing to do with it. Places like TCBH are not primarily involved in medical care. Places like TCBH function mainly as gulags for people who have annoyed someone with more social power with “inappropriate behavior”. Their “treatment” mainly consists of making the inmate feel guilty and responsible for whatever someone else didn’t like about them. For every person that might actually be having a mental health crisis, one can expect that TCBH houses at least two more who are there merely to have their attitudes adjusted to better suit those around them on the outside.
Instead, the “privacy” is for TCBH and the Mental Health Court, so that no one on the outside can see that they are not truly a health care facility or dedicated to Constitutional justice, or examine their “standard of care” or their standards of due process, and complain about them.
So the next time someone disappears into the gulag, and the gulag says, “We can neither confirm nor deny”, don’t take the gulag’s word. If you truly care about that person, get a lawyer and a judge and force the gulag to disclose your loved one’s status, and to allow in other Doctors whom you trust, to examine your loved one and produce a second opinions. You might just find that the so-called mental health crisis was produced and/or manufactured by publicly humiliating police action and the same people who claim to be “treating” it.
Houston Chronicle 1990s “Profitable Addictions” series
I’ve been searching the Houston Chronicle archives ( http://search.chron.com/chronicle/search.do search on: profitable addictions psychiatric hospital ) and finding the series to be even more extensive than I had realized. I’ve downloaded 40 “Profitable Addictions” and related articles and still not seen them all. They paint a chilling picture of patient abuses committed by private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals in Texas, that have some striking similarities to the practices of the State-operated and funded mental health system here and now. They include:
State laws that allowed abuses. A State mental health department contributing to the problems. The use of hearsay to justify Doctors’ orders for detention and commitment. Crisis lines run by hospitals that funneled callers into hospitals. Crisis teams that always recommend commitment. Lack of regulation on mental health recommendations made to courts. Courts depending upon hospital staff to make recommendations for commitment to their hospitals. Patients isolated from their doctors, lawyers and families.
In that system, children as young as one-year-old, whom we all know don’t have fully-developed brains, were put in psychiatric hospitals. Some teenagers were kept for years, robbing them of their childhoods. As noted here before, healthy adults and children were abducted from the street and their homes, even on the orders of psychiatrists who had not seen or examined them.
Even conservative Texans found this appalling, but not the Supreme Court of the United States, whose Decisions on the mental health evaluations of Texas prisoners preceded these abuses. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, for example, the Court ruled on the use of the testimony by Dr. James Grigson (otherwise known as Dr. Death or The Hanging Psychiatrist, later expelled in 1995 for malpractice in such cases by both the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians) to put convicted murderer Barefoot on death row. Dr. Grigson nearly always recommended the death penalty, even for prisoners he had never personally examined and for at least one who later turned out to be innocent. Among other things, the Court held that
a) Barefoot had no right to question the accuracy and reliability of any psychiatrist’s prediction of his future violent behavior, partly out of concern that not only would this resource for putting people on death row be lost, it would affect other expert witnesses.
b) “Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions.”
c) "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact.", citing the California Supreme Court to justify using psychiatric predictions of future violence, even though they were wrong two times out of three.
Thus the Supreme Court paved the way for psychiatric hospitals in Texas to order the detention and commitment of people they had never seen or examined, usually on the basis of hearsay. Doctors could even order this on their own authority, never bothering with the courts. What a pity we don’t seem to have investigative reporters here to take as good a look at our mental health system.
Does it occur to anyone that if mental institutions like This Can’t Be Happening detain and commit every warm body brought to them for evaluation, then inevitably they won’t have a bed available some time when someone who has a real crisis needs help? Besides, I think that case law demands that they let anyone go whom they cannot improve with treatment. Now, what treatment would that be? The coloring books, or the demands to accept guilt for merely being accused of being threatening? And what experimental and follow-up evidence do they have that they actually help anyone? Do they even bother to keep anonymous records of patients so that their treatments can be independently examined without violating HIPPA?
I’d guess not. Then they would actually have to demonstrate accountability for the tax money they spend and the lives they damage.
In Huffman v. OPM, 2001, #00-3184, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit went to a dictionary to define the word “disclose” in the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). It ruled that telling a wrongdoer about his or her wrongdoing cannot be a “disclosure”’ because the wrongdoer already knows about it, and because the purpose of the WPA is:
“to encourage disclosures that are likely to remedy the wrong. … The wrongdoer is not such a person. Extending the WPA to cover reports to a supervisor of the supervisor’s own misconduct would also have drastic adverse consequences. As we stated in Willis, “[d]iscussion and even disagreement with supervisors over job-related duties is a normal part of most occupations.” Willis, 141 F.3d at 1143. If every complaint made to a supervisor concerning an employee’s disagreement with the supervisor’s actions were considered to be a disclosure protected under the WPA, virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim the protection of the Act. Although Congress intended that the WPA’s coverage be broad, we think it unlikely that Congress intended the Act to extend that far, and we hold that it did not.”
It seems more likely that the Court refers to “drastic” consequences to its own docket than to the employee. But it misses the point. Instead of pinning nature of the disclosure on the consequences of the wrongdoing, no matter how criminal or disastrous, the Court pinned it on the mere circumstances.
Its decision means that the WPA does not protect the innocent employee of a criminal enterprise who sees something he is not supposed to, and reports it to his supervisor, not knowing that his supervisor is in on it. Thus the supervisor could murder the employee and, under the Court’s interpretation, it could not be a WPA case.
In Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), in order to put a convicted murderer on death row, the Supreme Court of the United States held that no one could question whether psychiatry even had any validity in predicting future dangerous behavior; that the psychiatrist making the prediction did not even have to personally examine person about whom the prediction is made; and that merely answering of hypothetical questions about the person is good enough to admit as evidence in a court of law. Paraphrasing the decision, one might as well say:
“Don’t worry about a thing; even though your heart surgeon has not examined either you or your medical record, he has learned about you through hypothetical questions, and there is no evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable.”
In the Toyota v. Willams case, 2002, U.S. Supreme Court certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the sixth circuit, No. 00-1089, a woman who could not raise her arms above her head was fired because Toyota instituted a job rotation policy requiring every person on the line to be able to perform every job on the line. They called it a “business necessity”, which perhaps not coincidentally would eliminate anyone who couldn’t do it because of a disability. The Japanese have been notoriously intolerant of differences. The High Court unanimously ruled in Toyota’s favor, stringing out a long, involved rationale on the nature of disabilities which none on the Court apparently had.
Not even the U.S. Army requires every grunt and tech to do every job. If it did, it might send to the firing squad every helicopter tech who couldn’t bake a cake, and every cook who couldn’t maintain a helicopter. It would be a long list and a lot of bullets.
Wisdom and reasoning and decisions worthy of the highest Courts in the land should not be so easy to lampoon. But when they are specially constructed to reach a desired end, rather than as expressions of Constitutional justice, they quickly become so.
Correction: The Court pinned the nature of the disclosure on on the mere circumstances of the disclosure, instead of the consequences of the wrongdoing, dismissing it no matter how criminal or disastrous the wrongdoing.
Back during the Christmas season of 2010, I called someone I knew inside TCBH (the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, or This Can’t Be Happening, the local loony bin), and asked how many people were confined there. For those of us with things like PTSD and depression, the holidays are particularly miserable. Many of our families have long ago made it clear that we just aren’t welcome. Some going all the way back to childhood, which is one reason why we have things like PTSD and depression.
We remember how it used to be, or how it should be from what we see in other families, and for us, it isn’t. Maybe some as they exclude us, hog a beloved parent’s time. Isn’t that just special; doesn’t that just put the angel on the top of the tree. So anger and depression are not far away.
And do you know what my friend inside said? There weren’t many inmates in TCBH for the holidays. Instead of filling up to capacity, the beds had been mostly emptied.
Small wonder to some of us who have known the place. A few who are seriously ill and need a place to stay can’t be released without serious liability to TCBH. And even for them, it’s just a warm-body warehouse, kept nearly full the rest of the year to keep the place running. So on the holidays, why keep the staff from their families for the sake of those inmates the staff has manipulated into filling beds. Head ‘em up, move ‘em out, rawhide.
It would be interesting to go back over the records of all the state mental institutions, individually and together, and see just how the inmate levels change with the holidays. And compare them to the county jails. Even better, to see if the inmates get shifted from one to the other. No doubt the State might wish to avoid that comparison. It might say something negative about its sincerity and commitment in treating mental illness.
*******
This morning the Diane Rehm show had a discussion about the mental health and employment needs of veterans coming back from our wars. A lot of them are coming back with things like PTSD and depression. I can attest to one statement, that employment is the best mental health treatment. Of course, in a very conservative state like this one, which has little or no tolerance for any kind of difference or deviance, that is a very long shot. And religion, in this most fundamentalist of states? One soldier who has spent more than a decade killing people said, “So what do I do on Sunday morning?”
The show made mention of the terrible need for “evidence-based treatment” and “cognitive behavior therapy”. Evidence-based treatment has actually been tested to see if it works. It means that someone has actually bothered to follow up with patients and find that out. The results in patients are important, not the philosophy or personal agenda of the psychiatrist. It can only work if the patient is not satisfied with being upset, and wants to find another way to think.
TCBH takes a stab at cognitive behavior therapy, paying it some lip service. But one can hardly expect it to work in a place where patients are upset because the staff has filled the beds by any means possible, including false accusations and evaluations. Where the staff itself behaves in ways guaranteed to trigger PTSD and depression, attempting to motivate the patients only with guilt and incarceration. And then claims cures and salvation when patients merely utter some formula statement that gets them out, about not being a danger to anyone.
That kind of phony, intrusive, involuntary, and even retaliatory approach subverts the whole process. But then, TCBH does not take much account of due process in either medicine or law. It might interfere with business.
All the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, I’d say that the judiciary is a fair representation of the electorate these days. Left wingnuts, right wingnuts, partisan bickering and divide. About as able to produce justice as Congress is to produce a workable budget. When we have no choice but to go to them without lawyers, asking for justice, and they tell us they are not obliged to make our cases for us, it’s not that much different from Congress refusing to govern. Only with judges, that attitude often comes with a lifetime appointment.
No sense of noblesse oblige there. Tell me again about term limits.
Having heard that cognitive behavioral therapy is evidence-based, I went looking to find out what it is. According to the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists, http://www.nacbt.org/whatiscbt.htm:
“1. CBT is based on the Cognitive Model of Emotional Response. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.”
Move over Pollyanna. Could it be that none of these therapists has ever been maimed, raped, threatened with death, or tortured, or has killed people in a war? Perhaps if one goes and slaps one in the face, one can tell the therapist if he or she feels angry or hurt, it’s their own fault for thinking that way. “Well, I’m just sorry that you feel like that.”
Now I see where TCBH LPC Julie King got her spiel. “If you had trouble with all those people, who’s the common denominator? It’s you.” Tell that to your friend or wife who’s been raped and then has to go back to work with a bunch of sexist yahoos. See how long your relationship lasts.
Maybe it works for some people in some circumstances, but it seems to me that even then it has to be applied with some sensitivity or it just defeats itself. The counselor or psychiatrist who tries force it on someone, and then claim they are “just not self aware” if they don’t buy it, does more harm than good. Rather like the husband who berates his wife a month after she was raped, because she didn’t get over it and service him in the manner to which he was accustomed.
I use the example of rape because most people in this country have understood it better and longer than things like schizophrenia, PTSD and depression. Women, after all, form a majority of the electorate and have a better union than people with mental illnesses. If you go to PubMed.gov, the online journal abstracting service of the National Library of Medicine, and do some research, you will find that many if not most people with serious mental illnesses reported seeing or experiencing abuse or abandonment when they were children.
Now we are noticing that Veterans experience the same effects. Someone on the Diane Rehm show noted that when they lose control in the service and get a dishonorable discharge, they lose all the mental health benefits they would otherwise have had. The commentator recommended that (for the benefit of society as a whole) whatever else they lose, they should not lose this.
Now imagine if State of Oklahoma institutions like TCBH weren’t falsifying medical records and evaluations, just to lock people up involuntarily and keep themselves running. Imagine if they fired the corrupt staff and went back to the original model of Mental Health Courts; supplying an alternative for mentally ill people who had actually been charged with a crime due to mental illness, instead of just accused. Imagine if they provided proactive, but voluntary and non-coercive programs for the mentally ill, including Veterans dishonorably discharged due to mental health issues. Imagine how much more good they could do if they weren’t stuck on feeding their own importance, no matter what the cost to their inmate patients.
Now try to get that through our State Legislature during its annual silly season. If they are afraid of Sharia law in our courts, imagine their terror of people with mental illnesses who actually exist. It’s hard to get rational discussion on a difficult subject into or out of some men; the opening in a penis is very, very small. I’ve met women like that, too. Maybe they envy all the wrong penises.
An interesting thing about U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving mental health issues; even though one can develop a basic understanding of the consensus of knowledge about mental illnesses just by reading the abstracts on PubMed.gov, the Court absolves judges from knowing anything about them, as if they are the unquestionable mysteries of God, which only the psychiatrist-priest may interpret. Apparently with a psychic dowsing rod, when it comes to civil commitments.
Too bad the Court doesn't give the rest of us the same break on the byzantine Federal Rules of Procedure. The judges just pick out something they don't like about a case, and hang the dismissal on that, ignoring all other rational argument and violations of civil and constitutional rights. Imagine if teachers flunked students on that basis. “No, Billy Stillborn, this was a three page assignment and you handed in four. I have to throw it out.”
And the Constitution says nothing specific about the right to an education, much less a just and effective one.
Roberson, Shawn. 2009. Interrogations and False Confessions – What Attorneys Should Know From the Social Sciences. The Gauntlet, Law Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, Spring 2009:57-71
According to one commentator on NPR, a huge majority of Pro Se petitioners (those who can’t afford lawyers and try to file their own lawsuits) get thrown out of the courts, not necessarily on the merits of their case, but on their technical construction. In Federal Courts, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require those judges to give Pro Se petitioners a break. Federal Judges then get around the rules by quoting them and stating that they are still not obliged to make the petitioner’s cases for them. This gives them the excuse to pick any one small technical error and pronounce that the petitioner has not “stated a case” or “made a claim”. And ninety times or more out of hundred, the petitioner doesn’t know enough either to correct the alleged error or to dispute the judge.
Problem solved. One more case the judge doesn’t have to deal with, especially one that will take more time because the petitioner is not particularly skilled in making legal arguments or sticking to rules and formats. Or perhaps even so traumatized by an experience that just dealing with abusive lawyers from the other side is nearly impossible. Did the petitioner suffer massive and unjust deprivations of civil liberties and rights? Not the judge’s problem.
Wait a minute here. We have got massively complicated computer software that helps people to figure taxes, make medical differential diagnoses, put icons on your computer screen and fight computer-graphic alien monsters. It can’t be that impossible to create software that would guide a Pro Se petitioner through all the laws, case laws, evidence and witnesses to fill out court documents that would comply with all the applicable rules and standards. Not to mention save the poor, beleaguered judges all their precious time deciding how to scotch a case.
Of course the lawyers will object. That’s what they do, and don’t we all love them for it. Just remember the last time you tried to find a lawyer who would fight for you when you had almost nothing, and write your Congressional Representative and Senators tomorrow. If someone can start a company like YouTube or Google with a few thousand dollars and a garage, imagine what could be done with just a few million in government money (chump change to agencies like NSA or DoJ or DARPA) to develop that kind of software. Even better, a modest continuing budget to make it supported freeware, like Linux, along with U.S. Government certification of its correctness and effectiveness.
Mathematician John Nash and family advocate for mental health care, By Susan K. Livio/Statehouse Bureau (http://connect.nj.com/user/sklivio/index.html), New Jersey Messenger-Gazette, Published: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 10:00 PM
These are five references found on the Internet regarding mathematics Prof. John Nash, inaccurately portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. One portrays him as having been nasty almost to the point of psychopathy, and might or might not be a hatchet job. It’s the Internet, after all. Taken together, they depict a brilliant but deeply flawed man who became delusional in his adulthood with schizophrenia, starting about 1959.
Nash was forcibly committed several times, a practice he never enjoyed or appreciated. He was never again committed after 1970, and stopped taking medication. He cured himself of his delusions through his own determination and the love and support of his family and friends. He and his wife had a son with schizophrenia and have advocated for treatment in the community, instead of commitment, and the healing dignity of productive employment.
Just because people have mental difficulties doesn’t mean they don’t notice when they are being used and manipulated without just regard for their civil rights. Research at PubMed.gov shows that patients who are involuntarily committed in situations where, as here in Tulsa, due process is denied or manipulated, tend to become embittered with psychiatry, and are less likely to maintain any medication or contact with counseling agencies.
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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.
When Judges mess up, law insulates from their own mistakes they who rule with something like divine and royal right in this country. Instead they compel the rest of us to have intimate relations with the canine pet in their place.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
If you have Windows 7, Do Not, repeat DO NOT, enable offline access to files on another computer on your network. Win7 will take up space on its own hard drive duplicating files on the network drive, which you might never get back. You may be unable to delete the folder containing those files, even if you are the only user/administrator on the computer, and the person who set up the mapped network drive. If you try to do so, you may get a message stating that you cannot do so until you get permission from yourself, which Win7 may not allow.
If you try to fix this by connecting to the network drive and re-enabling offline files, you may get errors that will not allow Windows to start, requiring you to do a Startup Repair. This problem may be connected with the installation of Microsoft Security Essentials, which admits in its license agreement that it might make changes that will keep programs or Windows from running. And limits the Microsoft’s responsibility for damages to $5.
Caveat Emptor
If only more packages ran on Linux easily, we could all dump Microsoft and its bugs.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
If you install MSE, you may find that you can no longer
1) check your disk for errors, due to a “recently installed software package”
2) uninstall MSE, unless you institute a search for the installation files, because it will tell you that you don’t have access to a needed resource
Get something like Avast free antivirus instead.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I once contacted NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, about getting some legal help. The local chapter, I think. No, they didn’t do that. Instead, they advocate for the families of those with mental illness to get treatment for them, like involuntary commitment. So does a place on the web called mentalillnesspolicy.org.
These organizations emphasize the damage that a minority of people with mental illness do to themselves and others in order to motivate and create public policy for so-called “progressive” involuntary treatment. They show no awareness of or concern for what license it gives governments and institutions to threaten, abuse and damage anyone they deem in need of their care, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
So it doesn’t matter what we want or need; they don’t need to ask us. They just want to do what they think is good for us, voluntary or not. Kind of like that toilet law in the movie, The Help. Of course, those white Southern women didn’t lock their help in their special toilets for weeks or months on end. They needed their help for dirty work.
Imagine if Oklahoma legislators thought they could catch mental illness from a toilet seat. Based on what we’ve seen the last few years, it’s not inconceivable, them thinking that. Then I bet we’d get special toilets, too.
It saves all that trouble of asking those with mental illness what we need and what works best for us. Of considering how to approach us without threats, and get us voluntarily involved with counseling, medication and meaningful, productive employment.
Don’t we all see it every day? When it comes to raising money for a cause, fear and loathing sells better.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Supreme Court of the United States has used extraordinarily specious logic to separate those with mental illnesses from civil rights and the standards of justice it would apply to everyone else. Which the lower courts have followed in lock step.
In the movie “Judgment at Nuremburg”, a movie well worth watching, Spencer Tracy’s character, a U.S. jurist, passes judgment on a German judge who worked under the Nazis. You can find his speech here:
http://www.politicalspeeches.net/us-politics/spencer-tracy-delivers-final-verdict-from-judgement-at-nuremburg
In essence, if I remember correctly, the German judge had claimed the defense that he was just administering the laws as written. Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. It was in a Federal District courtroom – here in Tulsa. The judge told me that if I wanted a different result, then I should get the laws changed.
The thing is, he and all his colleagues have sworn an oath to the Constitution of the United States, which stands above the laws. The Supreme Court is not infallible. It occasionally makes stupidly egregious, unconstitutional decisions, based more upon the jerking of ideological knees than upon evidence. A lower court judge who administers them blindly, with no recourse to or consideration of constitutional values, absolves himself or herself with the same excuse as that German judge at Nuremburg.
Occasionally, rather than condemn the innocent to injustice, a lower court judge should stand up and be counted on the side of the Constitution, even if it means his or her career. The judge’s opinion should provide the Supreme Court with the evidence and reasoning necessary to see the error of its ways, even if the Supreme Court, in its not entirely unreliable infinite wisdom, then issues a reversal.
All it takes is courage and integrity, which people with unaccountable, lifetime appointments seem ill-inclined to exercise on behalf of those beneath them, whom they hold in judgment.
“Always tell the truth, even if it means your life.” - from the Knight’s Oath in the movie, The Kingdom of Heaven.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The Tulsa Center for “Behavioral Health” claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the presence of any “consumer” inside its walls, citing HIPPA regulations. In its “Uncivil Rights” section, mentalillnesspolicy.org blames HIPPA regulations for keeping family members from finding out the status of loved ones who get scooped up by or shoved into mental institutions like TCBH. But what’s the truth?
When a friend of mine ended up in the hospital after a fall, I could call any hospital in town and find out whether or not he had been admitted, was there, or had been discharged. I could get his room number and telephone number. On one of those occasions, I went to visit him. HIPPA did not stop me.
Yet both kinds of institutions are covered by HIPPA. They both have to obey it. What’s the difference? Why in one case should even immediate family be deliberately kept in the dark about the status of their loved ones? Even the county jail has public information on who is there right up on the internet. Why is TCBH so special?
It’s not. The truth is that alternative incarceration in a mental facility was originally meant to apply only to those who had committed crimes while mentally ill. Under that system, they could be admitted to a place like TCBH, to be treated for mental health issues that gave rise to criminal behavior, only after (note this) publicly renouncing all claims to innocence.
Places like TCBH don’t adhere to such legal niceties. After being arrested in public by swarming police, whom apparently HIPPA does not restrict from publicly humiliating people, the inmates are “evaluated” by “mental health professionals” who have been shown by research to be wrong about two out of every three times. Even when they don’t put their thumbs on the scales in their own favor, to justify their own jobs.
Who is the so-called privacy for? By the time people get to TCBH, the public police swarm and handcuffing has already pulled the privacy cat out of its bag. If friends and neighbors who were never interviewed didn’t think there was anything wrong with an inmate before, they now have reason to wonder. If the inmates hadn’t been stressed out and emotionally troubled before, they are now.
HIPPA has nothing to do with it. Places like TCBH are not primarily involved in medical care. Places like TCBH function mainly as gulags for people who have annoyed someone with more social power with “inappropriate behavior”. Their “treatment” mainly consists of making the inmate feel guilty and responsible for whatever someone else didn’t like about them. For every person that might actually be having a mental health crisis, one can expect that TCBH houses at least two more who are there merely to have their attitudes adjusted to better suit those around them on the outside.
Instead, the “privacy” is for TCBH and the Mental Health Court, so that no one on the outside can see that they are not truly a health care facility or dedicated to Constitutional justice, or examine their “standard of care” or their standards of due process, and complain about them.
So the next time someone disappears into the gulag, and the gulag says, “We can neither confirm nor deny”, don’t take the gulag’s word. If you truly care about that person, get a lawyer and a judge and force the gulag to disclose your loved one’s status, and to allow in other Doctors whom you trust, to examine your loved one and produce a second opinions. You might just find that the so-called mental health crisis was produced and/or manufactured by publicly humiliating police action and the same people who claim to be “treating” it.
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I’ve been searching the Houston Chronicle archives
( http://search.chron.com/chronicle/search.do search on: profitable addictions psychiatric hospital )
and finding the series to be even more extensive than I had realized. I’ve downloaded 40 “Profitable Addictions” and related articles and still not seen them all. They paint a chilling picture of patient abuses committed by private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals in Texas, that have some striking similarities to the practices of the State-operated and funded mental health system here and now. They include:
State laws that allowed abuses.
A State mental health department contributing to the problems.
The use of hearsay to justify Doctors’ orders for detention and commitment.
Crisis lines run by hospitals that funneled callers into hospitals.
Crisis teams that always recommend commitment.
Lack of regulation on mental health recommendations made to courts.
Courts depending upon hospital staff to make recommendations for commitment to their hospitals.
Patients isolated from their doctors, lawyers and families.
In that system, children as young as one-year-old, whom we all know don’t have fully-developed brains, were put in psychiatric hospitals. Some teenagers were kept for years, robbing them of their childhoods. As noted here before, healthy adults and children were abducted from the street and their homes, even on the orders of psychiatrists who had not seen or examined them.
Even conservative Texans found this appalling, but not the Supreme Court of the United States, whose Decisions on the mental health evaluations of Texas prisoners preceded these abuses. In the 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision, for example, the Court ruled on the use of the testimony by Dr. James Grigson (otherwise known as Dr. Death or The Hanging Psychiatrist, later expelled in 1995 for malpractice in such cases by both the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians) to put convicted murderer Barefoot on death row. Dr. Grigson nearly always recommended the death penalty, even for prisoners he had never personally examined and for at least one who later turned out to be innocent. Among other things, the Court held that
a) Barefoot had no right to question the accuracy and reliability of any psychiatrist’s prediction of his future violent behavior, partly out of concern that not only would this resource for putting people on death row be lost, it would affect other expert witnesses.
b) “Psychiatric testimony need not be based on personal examination of the defendant, but may properly be given in response to hypothetical questions.”
c) "expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact.", citing the California Supreme Court to justify using psychiatric predictions of future violence, even though they were wrong two times out of three.
Thus the Supreme Court paved the way for psychiatric hospitals in Texas to order the detention and commitment of people they had never seen or examined, usually on the basis of hearsay. Doctors could even order this on their own authority, never bothering with the courts. What a pity we don’t seem to have investigative reporters here to take as good a look at our mental health system.
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I’d guess not. Then they would actually have to demonstrate accountability for the tax money they spend and the lives they damage.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
In Huffman v. OPM, 2001, #00-3184, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit went to a dictionary to define the word “disclose” in the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). It ruled that telling a wrongdoer about his or her wrongdoing cannot be a “disclosure”’ because the wrongdoer already knows about it, and because the purpose of the WPA is:
“to encourage disclosures that are likely to remedy the wrong. … The wrongdoer is not such a person. Extending the WPA to cover reports to a supervisor of the supervisor’s own misconduct would also have drastic adverse consequences. As we stated in Willis, “[d]iscussion and even disagreement with supervisors over job-related duties is a normal part of most occupations.” Willis, 141 F.3d at 1143. If every complaint made to a supervisor concerning an employee’s disagreement with the supervisor’s actions were considered to be a disclosure protected under the WPA, virtually every employee who was disciplined could claim the protection of the Act. Although Congress intended that the WPA’s coverage be broad, we think it unlikely that Congress intended the Act to extend that far, and we hold that it did not.”
It seems more likely that the Court refers to “drastic” consequences to its own docket than to the employee. But it misses the point. Instead of pinning nature of the disclosure on the consequences of the wrongdoing, no matter how criminal or disastrous, the Court pinned it on the mere circumstances.
Its decision means that the WPA does not protect the innocent employee of a criminal enterprise who sees something he is not supposed to, and reports it to his supervisor, not knowing that his supervisor is in on it. Thus the supervisor could murder the employee and, under the Court’s interpretation, it could not be a WPA case.
In Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), in order to put a convicted murderer on death row, the Supreme Court of the United States held that no one could question whether psychiatry even had any validity in predicting future dangerous behavior; that the psychiatrist making the prediction did not even have to personally examine person about whom the prediction is made; and that merely answering of hypothetical questions about the person is good enough to admit as evidence in a court of law. Paraphrasing the decision, one might as well say:
“Don’t worry about a thing; even though your heart surgeon has not examined either you or your medical record, he has learned about you through hypothetical questions, and there is no evidence that he is almost entirely unreliable.”
In the Toyota v. Willams case, 2002, U.S. Supreme Court certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the sixth circuit, No. 00-1089, a woman who could not raise her arms above her head was fired because Toyota instituted a job rotation policy requiring every person on the line to be able to perform every job on the line. They called it a “business necessity”, which perhaps not coincidentally would eliminate anyone who couldn’t do it because of a disability. The Japanese have been notoriously intolerant of differences. The High Court unanimously ruled in Toyota’s favor, stringing out a long, involved rationale on the nature of disabilities which none on the Court apparently had.
Not even the U.S. Army requires every grunt and tech to do every job. If it did, it might send to the firing squad every helicopter tech who couldn’t bake a cake, and every cook who couldn’t maintain a helicopter. It would be a long list and a lot of bullets.
Wisdom and reasoning and decisions worthy of the highest Courts in the land should not be so easy to lampoon. But when they are specially constructed to reach a desired end, rather than as expressions of Constitutional justice, they quickly become so.
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Back during the Christmas season of 2010, I called someone I knew inside TCBH (the Tulsa Center for Behavioral Health, or This Can’t Be Happening, the local loony bin), and asked how many people were confined there. For those of us with things like PTSD and depression, the holidays are particularly miserable. Many of our families have long ago made it clear that we just aren’t welcome. Some going all the way back to childhood, which is one reason why we have things like PTSD and depression.
We remember how it used to be, or how it should be from what we see in other families, and for us, it isn’t. Maybe some as they exclude us, hog a beloved parent’s time. Isn’t that just special; doesn’t that just put the angel on the top of the tree. So anger and depression are not far away.
And do you know what my friend inside said? There weren’t many inmates in TCBH for the holidays. Instead of filling up to capacity, the beds had been mostly emptied.
Small wonder to some of us who have known the place. A few who are seriously ill and need a place to stay can’t be released without serious liability to TCBH. And even for them, it’s just a warm-body warehouse, kept nearly full the rest of the year to keep the place running. So on the holidays, why keep the staff from their families for the sake of those inmates the staff has manipulated into filling beds. Head ‘em up, move ‘em out, rawhide.
It would be interesting to go back over the records of all the state mental institutions, individually and together, and see just how the inmate levels change with the holidays. And compare them to the county jails. Even better, to see if the inmates get shifted from one to the other. No doubt the State might wish to avoid that comparison. It might say something negative about its sincerity and commitment in treating mental illness.
*******
This morning the Diane Rehm show had a discussion about the mental health and employment needs of veterans coming back from our wars. A lot of them are coming back with things like PTSD and depression. I can attest to one statement, that employment is the best mental health treatment. Of course, in a very conservative state like this one, which has little or no tolerance for any kind of difference or deviance, that is a very long shot. And religion, in this most fundamentalist of states? One soldier who has spent more than a decade killing people said, “So what do I do on Sunday morning?”
The show made mention of the terrible need for “evidence-based treatment” and “cognitive behavior therapy”. Evidence-based treatment has actually been tested to see if it works. It means that someone has actually bothered to follow up with patients and find that out. The results in patients are important, not the philosophy or personal agenda of the psychiatrist. It can only work if the patient is not satisfied with being upset, and wants to find another way to think.
TCBH takes a stab at cognitive behavior therapy, paying it some lip service. But one can hardly expect it to work in a place where patients are upset because the staff has filled the beds by any means possible, including false accusations and evaluations. Where the staff itself behaves in ways guaranteed to trigger PTSD and depression, attempting to motivate the patients only with guilt and incarceration. And then claims cures and salvation when patients merely utter some formula statement that gets them out, about not being a danger to anyone.
That kind of phony, intrusive, involuntary, and even retaliatory approach subverts the whole process. But then, TCBH does not take much account of due process in either medicine or law. It might interfere with business.
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All the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, I’d say that the judiciary is a fair representation of the electorate these days. Left wingnuts, right wingnuts, partisan bickering and divide. About as able to produce justice as Congress is to produce a workable budget. When we have no choice but to go to them without lawyers, asking for justice, and they tell us they are not obliged to make our cases for us, it’s not that much different from Congress refusing to govern. Only with judges, that attitude often comes with a lifetime appointment.
No sense of noblesse oblige there. Tell me again about term limits.
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Having heard that cognitive behavioral therapy is evidence-based, I went looking to find out what it is. According to the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists,
http://www.nacbt.org/whatiscbt.htm:
“1. CBT is based on the Cognitive Model of Emotional Response.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel / act better even if the situation does not change.”
Move over Pollyanna. Could it be that none of these therapists has ever been maimed, raped, threatened with death, or tortured, or has killed people in a war? Perhaps if one goes and slaps one in the face, one can tell the therapist if he or she feels angry or hurt, it’s their own fault for thinking that way. “Well, I’m just sorry that you feel like that.”
Now I see where TCBH LPC Julie King got her spiel. “If you had trouble with all those people, who’s the common denominator? It’s you.” Tell that to your friend or wife who’s been raped and then has to go back to work with a bunch of sexist yahoos. See how long your relationship lasts.
Maybe it works for some people in some circumstances, but it seems to me that even then it has to be applied with some sensitivity or it just defeats itself. The counselor or psychiatrist who tries force it on someone, and then claim they are “just not self aware” if they don’t buy it, does more harm than good. Rather like the husband who berates his wife a month after she was raped, because she didn’t get over it and service him in the manner to which he was accustomed.
I use the example of rape because most people in this country have understood it better and longer than things like schizophrenia, PTSD and depression. Women, after all, form a majority of the electorate and have a better union than people with mental illnesses. If you go to PubMed.gov, the online journal abstracting service of the National Library of Medicine, and do some research, you will find that many if not most people with serious mental illnesses reported seeing or experiencing abuse or abandonment when they were children.
Now we are noticing that Veterans experience the same effects. Someone on the Diane Rehm show noted that when they lose control in the service and get a dishonorable discharge, they lose all the mental health benefits they would otherwise have had. The commentator recommended that (for the benefit of society as a whole) whatever else they lose, they should not lose this.
Now imagine if State of Oklahoma institutions like TCBH weren’t falsifying medical records and evaluations, just to lock people up involuntarily and keep themselves running. Imagine if they fired the corrupt staff and went back to the original model of Mental Health Courts; supplying an alternative for mentally ill people who had actually been charged with a crime due to mental illness, instead of just accused. Imagine if they provided proactive, but voluntary and non-coercive programs for the mentally ill, including Veterans dishonorably discharged due to mental health issues. Imagine how much more good they could do if they weren’t stuck on feeding their own importance, no matter what the cost to their inmate patients.
Now try to get that through our State Legislature during its annual silly season. If they are afraid of Sharia law in our courts, imagine their terror of people with mental illnesses who actually exist. It’s hard to get rational discussion on a difficult subject into or out of some men; the opening in a penis is very, very small. I’ve met women like that, too. Maybe they envy all the wrong penises.
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An interesting thing about U.S. Supreme Court decisions involving mental health issues; even though one can develop a basic understanding of the consensus of knowledge about mental illnesses just by reading the abstracts on PubMed.gov, the Court absolves judges from knowing anything about them, as if they are the unquestionable mysteries of God, which only the psychiatrist-priest may interpret. Apparently with a psychic dowsing rod, when it comes to civil commitments.
Too bad the Court doesn't give the rest of us the same break on the byzantine Federal Rules of Procedure. The judges just pick out something they don't like about a case, and hang the dismissal on that, ignoring all other rational argument and violations of civil and constitutional rights. Imagine if teachers flunked students on that basis. “No, Billy Stillborn, this was a three page assignment and you handed in four. I have to throw it out.”
And the Constitution says nothing specific about the right to an education, much less a just and effective one.
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Re: Letters
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CEEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ocdlaoklahoma.com%2Fsites%2Focdla2%2Fuploads%2Fdocuments%2FGauntlet%2F2009%2FJuly_09_Gauntlet.pdf&ei=GkCuUMLSO8ab2QWDmoGYCA&usg=AFQjCNGWqQuzMQ6TZCENjTdX4SiLvlhf8Q
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According to one commentator on NPR, a huge majority of Pro Se petitioners (those who can’t afford lawyers and try to file their own lawsuits) get thrown out of the courts, not necessarily on the merits of their case, but on their technical construction. In Federal Courts, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require those judges to give Pro Se petitioners a break. Federal Judges then get around the rules by quoting them and stating that they are still not obliged to make the petitioner’s cases for them. This gives them the excuse to pick any one small technical error and pronounce that the petitioner has not “stated a case” or “made a claim”. And ninety times or more out of hundred, the petitioner doesn’t know enough either to correct the alleged error or to dispute the judge.
Problem solved. One more case the judge doesn’t have to deal with, especially one that will take more time because the petitioner is not particularly skilled in making legal arguments or sticking to rules and formats. Or perhaps even so traumatized by an experience that just dealing with abusive lawyers from the other side is nearly impossible. Did the petitioner suffer massive and unjust deprivations of civil liberties and rights? Not the judge’s problem.
Wait a minute here. We have got massively complicated computer software that helps people to figure taxes, make medical differential diagnoses, put icons on your computer screen and fight computer-graphic alien monsters. It can’t be that impossible to create software that would guide a Pro Se petitioner through all the laws, case laws, evidence and witnesses to fill out court documents that would comply with all the applicable rules and standards. Not to mention save the poor, beleaguered judges all their precious time deciding how to scotch a case.
Of course the lawyers will object. That’s what they do, and don’t we all love them for it. Just remember the last time you tried to find a lawyer who would fight for you when you had almost nothing, and write your Congressional Representative and Senators tomorrow. If someone can start a company like YouTube or Google with a few thousand dollars and a garage, imagine what could be done with just a few million in government money (chump change to agencies like NSA or DoJ or DARPA) to develop that kind of software. Even better, a modest continuing budget to make it supported freeware, like Linux, along with U.S. Government certification of its correctness and effectiveness.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
References:
Nash: Genius with Schizophrenia or Vice Versa?, By: Tevita Funaki, PACIFIC HEALTH DIALOG 2009, VOL. 15, NO. 2, p 129-37.
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash.html
Mathematician John Nash and family advocate for mental health care, By Susan K. Livio/Statehouse Bureau (http://connect.nj.com/user/sklivio/index.html), New Jersey Messenger-Gazette, Published: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 10:00 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/peopleevents/p_jnash.html
These are five references found on the Internet regarding mathematics Prof. John Nash, inaccurately portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind”. One portrays him as having been nasty almost to the point of psychopathy, and might or might not be a hatchet job. It’s the Internet, after all. Taken together, they depict a brilliant but deeply flawed man who became delusional in his adulthood with schizophrenia, starting about 1959.
Nash was forcibly committed several times, a practice he never enjoyed or appreciated. He was never again committed after 1970, and stopped taking medication. He cured himself of his delusions through his own determination and the love and support of his family and friends. He and his wife had a son with schizophrenia and have advocated for treatment in the community, instead of commitment, and the healing dignity of productive employment.
Just because people have mental difficulties doesn’t mean they don’t notice when they are being used and manipulated without just regard for their civil rights. Research at PubMed.gov shows that patients who are involuntarily committed in situations where, as here in Tulsa, due process is denied or manipulated, tend to become embittered with psychiatry, and are less likely to maintain any medication or contact with counseling agencies.
The flawed process defeats the purpose.
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The Judges see to it.