More and more research and counseling sources note that when something awful happens to a person, that person gets better a lot sooner if he or she can talk about it to family and friends. If not, then you find out who your family and friends really are, especially family. It takes a lot longer, if ever, to get over something traumatic, when they keep telling you to shut up when you try.
Whether it’s war, rape, fire, flood, assault, maiming injuries, tornado, torture, or whatever other violence man and nature can do to a person, if your family jeers at you when you try to get it out, they aren’t really your family. Not any more. They’re no better than the bully down the block. If just one of them calls you regularly to see how you are doing, then that person is your family. None of the rest matter.
There’s something basically and morally wrong about a family that has trained itself not to care about one of their own when the worst happens. And when they act like this is the godly thing to do, maybe your God dies, too. Along with all your religious holidays. You may find that whatever God is proud of that kind of caring, is not one you would want to spend an eternity with. From then on, you will have to find your own reasons for living. Nothing will ever be the same again, if it ever was.
That was one of the mortifications of high school, my father jeering that out when I came home and said that I had a date. Repeatedly. It wasn’t mortifying because I cared anything about skin color. We had lived in Hawaii with Asians and Polynesians. One of each had been my teachers in grade school. One of my best friends was half-Filipino. I was in love with Hawaiian mythology and religious legends, and read every book I could get my hands on.
In junior high, many of my classmates and some of my teachers were Hispanic. Some were Native American. We have a little Amerindian in our ancestry, which I thought was pretty cool. I didn’t have any Black friends or dates because I had never lived in a place where many of them did.
I don’t know why he picked that particular jeer, other than the fact that we were living in a place that had been segregated in both residence and school, and it was during the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. There were no Black kids in our high school. It hurt not because I cared anything about skin color. It hurt because I knew from long experience that he meant it to, because he was expressing his contempt and dislike, his disgust since early childhood that I was a member of his family. Something that he taught to my siblings.
It hurt to live with. A couple of times I almost didn’t, but failed to escape. So when someone lied and got me dragged off to the local loony bin, This Can’t Be Happening, where the keepers took any vile hearsay as justification for their actions, where they took that kind of childhood experience to claim that I am more dangerous than others, and made it their mission to make me believe so, for me it was just another set of bullies with another set of jeers.
Well, who wouldn’t find that state-sanctioned laying on of hands and psychiatric diagnoses to be healing? Maybe just those of us who don’t believe that Johnny-come-lately, fly-by-night witch doctors have any superior insight into long self-examined grief. The kind of white witch doctors who would take any mention or explanation of such grief, and convert it into psychopathy and deviance to justify their own existence and right-to-treat. Who would rub one’s nose into one’s misery just to create the kind of shock and pain that seem to fulfill the Oklahoma State Code Title 43A legal requirements for involuntary “treatment”.
Wow. Almost like family. Although I’m straight, I might have some understanding of the abandonment gay kids feel when their families kick them out onto the street. I wonder. Are they any happier or luckier if it didn’t start when they were five years old?
Of course, the way I hear it, anyone who tries to discuss this, even in private, is “just trying to bring down the family name”. The Favorite Son is not amused. As I’ve heard him say more than once, “It’s all about Me.” The right to all critical thinking is His alone, passed down from His Earthly Father. Happy Holidays.
When church people are sitting in church, pretending to be good Christians, they might possibly reflect that when they treat other people like crap, those other people remember. And if those other people don’t feel any need to pretend to be good Christians, they may not feel any obligation to forgive church people, whenever church people imagine they should. Bullies, after all, can dish it out. But they usually can’t take it.
Some might wonder why I bother to write so much. It’s not because I believe that I deserve or have any great following. That would be pretty conceited, and I’ve met too many, and grown up with a few, who are best men or women within the sounds of their own voices. No, it probably has more to do with the fact that for so many years, others enforced my silence with threats and jeers. It took me a long time and a lot of practice to find my own voice.
Now I intend to use it. If I do any good with this, it may be in helping others to find their voices, or at least give them some words and ideas when they, like I once was, are unable to find how to say what they feel.
The Christ I used to believe in was not afraid or ashamed to associate with the lowest classes of his day, the prostitutes and publicans, those who had little or no voice in their own society. From what I’ve read, he treated them with decency and respect, listening to what they had to say. He spoke up for them. Try getting that from most lawyers or judges or church people, many of those who claim to live in His image.
I’m not that good or charitable, and won’t even admit to being a Christian, much less a good one. Perhaps that comes from some, or one, who pretended or claimed to be the best kind of Christian, convincing me with jeers and contempt that I had no place in any heaven, back when I was a child. Unlike some I have known, I merely resist passing those jeers and contempt on to those who have done nothing to hurt me. For one thing, it’s a huge waste of emotion and productive energy, with which overly righteous people seem to be overly endowed.
So if anyone is actually reading this, who’s holding a gun to your head to make you? Not me. If you don’t like it, I figure your conscience has a mute button with a lot of wear on it. And if you like that line, feel free to use it. Of course, I may not wish to be implicated in your personal heresy. I’m having enough trouble with my own.
Draft of Questions for the Supreme Court of the United States
1. Given the subsequent horrific scams, scandals, deprivations of civil rights, and miscarriages of justice detailed in such articles as the Houston Chronicle “Profitable Addictions” series (App D, 5 of more than 40), as well as Congressional hearings and reports of the Government Accounting Office, and given the propensity for even innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves under interrogation (App E), and this Court’s dependence upon a long-since discredited psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, aka “Dr. Death” (App F), among other situations presented here, has this Court made ill-considered decisions involving mental illness, which should be thoroughly overturned and thoughtfully reconsidered, according to some of the arguments contained herein.
2. And, given the vast array of medical and legal literature contrary to this Court’s thinking, going back to before the 1979 Addington v. Texas decision, have this Court’s decisions regarding mental illness been overly influenced by common fears and biases against people with mental illnesses, resulting in an unconstitutional legal double standard, much like that in the time of the Dred Scott decision.
3. Whether, considering the awful and widespread damage done by such things as psychiatric hospital scams and scandals, when civil commitment is done, especially when those involved in the commitment should have had the knowledge or skill to recognize the difference and/or violations of civil liberties, does this commitment consist of a criminal and/or false imprisonment and trigger the Sixth and/or Eighth Amendments when done: without adequate due process; and/or for corrupt or malicious purposes other than “treatment”; and/or without any means to treat the patient; and/or without intention to treat the patient; and/or without medically effective treatment for the patient’s real or alleged condition. In other words, if the standards for due process and commitment and review and damages set by this Court have been so wise and just, why have there been so many knowing and/or incompetent abductions and/or false commitments of innocent people without any mental illness, including children as young as one year old?
4. May this petitioner be allowed to present a petition for a writ of certiorari, delayed until after these reconsiderations are made, with sufficient and competent legal help to do the job right, so as not to be dismissed out of hand on any mere technicality or judicial dislike, disregarding all other violations of this petitioner’s civil liberties, due process and other Constitutional rights, as lower courts have done.
Yesterday, December 4th, after loosing a Presidential election in good part because they pissed off many of 31.8 million Hispanics (2010 U.S. Census), the Republican party embraced the opportunity to piss off another 38 to 57 million Americans, killing ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (based upon the Americans with Disabilities Act) in the U.S. Senate by denying the necessary 2/3 vote, 38 to 61. According to the 2010 Census (www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-131.pdf), about 56.7 million Americans of all ages (6 and older) have disabilities of all kinds, of which 38.3 million are severe.
The U.S. officials who worked on setting up the treaty to look like the ADA got a provision modified to specify that disability would be according to a country’s legal definitions. (see http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/12/04/1279921/senate-republicans-vote-down-international-disabilities-treaty/?mobile=nc; So it would have done no more in the U.S. than ratify the ADA, which the Supreme Court of the United States has significantly watered down from its original intent.
Well that’s another way to write off the senior vote. Disabilities increase with age, to 51.8 percent of all 65 and older, with 36.8 percent severely disabled. The way the Republicans in the U.S. Senate behaved, you’d think the Americans with Disabilities Act has something to do with Sharia law.
No parent should have to face the grief and horror of what happened at that grade school in Connecticut. For them there is no comfort in knowing that any particular school would have to wait thousands of years on the average for a similar event, or that most children who are murdered die outside of school.
But you can be sure of one thing – there will be no shortage of people, from the President on down, who will claim to have THE solution for ensuring that it will never happen again, without any way to prove that their solutions will actually work. For example, in one literature survey of 113 studies of violence prevention programs in healthcare and other settings, only 32, or about one in three, had any follow-up evaluation of any proposed solutions. Which is the same ratio of success that psychiatrists have in actually predicting future violent behavior in any one person. There are always many more “solutions” than results.
See Y. Cvitkovich, June 2005, Preventing Violent and Aggressive Behavior in Healthcare: a literature review, Occupational Health & Safety Agency for Healthcare in BC (British Columbia, Canada) 81p. http://www.phsa.ca/NR/rdonlyres/6C69D638-8587-4096-A8AA-7D2B0141C3B2/59709/ReportPreventingViolentandAggressiveBehaviourinHea.pdf This article surveyed literature from “peer-review journals, government and academic reports, PubMed database, books, reference lists, websites and journal “Table of Contents”.” [I like PubMed.gov; it's a good place to get sense of what science and medicine actually know.]
Use the scientific method to seek answers? These “experts” will draw mostly from their own personal, religious, political or profit-motive agendas, from the set arguments that they “know” are right, without ever having to test them and show that they work. Why bother with something that might not advance a cause? It's a lot of work.
For those who find the idea of using scientific and engineering methods to address this kind of problem intimidating, there's a nice, readable little book. See Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Crown Business (Random House), NY, 2011, 320p. In the context of this book on how to succeed in business by really trying, the top-down, so-called “expert” solutions fall into the category of “Build It and They Will Come” approaches, which usually fail. It instead advocates a continuous process of making constant tests and adjustments depending upon what works. If the theory (ideology) doesn't produce positive results according to independent, objective measures, then ask what went wrong to at least five levels, scrap or adapt the theory, and try something else.
That, after all, has made physical medicine so effective and nearly miraculous today. Too bad that approach hasn't been tried more often in politics and psychiatry.
That would be a Black President, with barrels of "collateral damage" blood on his hands, including children, demanding that a minority, even more disliked than his own, be shoved even farther away from first-class citizenship, in order to "make sure" that no child in a school is ever killed again in a mass shooting. As if anyone with a mental illness, who is 10 to 13 times more likely than the general population to be the target of crime and violence (source PubMed.gov), is more willing to kill children than he is.
What bigoted fool thinks that people with mental illnesses can't cry over dead children? Nobody knows exactly why such killings happen, but the Demoncrats are getting out their humanitarian white sheets and soaking their gun control crosses in politically correct gasoline. They're going to "do something!" I bet there are a lot of parents of collaterally dead children in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would like to ban Mr. Obama's drones. Aren't they something that is "only good for killing people"? Aren't their dead children the price of Mr. Obama's concept of freedom? Well, what better way to assuage one's conscience than to point the bigots at innocent people who never hurt anyone, but still "look suspicious". Kill children in the Middle East, pretend to save them in America. Ain't politics grand?
For those suffering long-term emotional damage from the Sandy Hook shootings, the shootings themselves are not the last obscenity they will have to face. Current psychiatric models hold that anyone who has a history of trauma and mental health issues is more likely to be violent. Current legal models and practices in many state mental health codes and courts hold that anyone with such a history is dangerous until proven otherwise, if that person is merely accused by another claiming to have a "reasonable fear" of threat from the person with a mental health issue. So any baby involved in and affected by a school shooting will in the future be suspected as another potential babykiller. And in order to keep itself safe from such people, society has set up a mental health judicial system whereby no one who is so accused can be assured even of zealous legal counsel, or the right to remain silent when examined.
This is hardly new. Soon after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the EEOC's March 1997 Enforcement Guidance one the Americans with Disabilities Act and Psychiatric Disabilities, businesses and news editors started opposing it on the basis that the ADA would require crazy people, such as ax murderers according to one cartoon. See http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/psych.html, Part 30, Example C and Part 31. See http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch5.htm
It all had an effect. For example, in the 2000 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law [Vol. 21, page 248], in their article on workplace violence and psychiatric disabilities, Laden and Schwartz cite a report that, "in 1998 a postal worker was fired merely for telling co-workers about his nightmares that involved a shooting at work—a shooting in which he, himself, was a victim." Footnote 10: "10. See generally Georgia Pabst, Man Fired over Dreams Presaging Shooting, Postal Service says his Dreams, Gestures Threatened Others, MILWAUKEE J. SENT., Dec. 15, 1998, at A1. Ironically, the dreams turned out to be correct; another worker did in fact attack that office." See https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=21+Berkeley+J.+Emp.+%26+Lab.+L.+246&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=7277eddb51fc6910b1014f5921cc3320
It's a bit like some Kluxer afraid that black will rub off on him. Or that a black male whistling at a white woman is a sure sign of an eminent sexual assault. Ain't political correctness grand? It's amazing what even liberals can rationalize when they have assured themselves of its righteousness, the unpopularity of the target group, and their inability to organize and fight back.
In one of the NPR.org forums, a loud and obvious gun-control Obama liberal wished he could have an ATF swat team knock on my door in the middle of the night. What is it about liberals that makes them think that if they have people with guns and badges violently suppress those who disagree with them, none the violence and hatefulness attaches to them? That they are civilized humanitarians if they just get someone else to do their dirty, violent work, under the color of law. As ALF said when he watched a toilet flush, "Interesting concept."
Mr. Wayne LaPierre, Exec. V.P. Mr. Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA Exec. Dir. American Rifleman Letters Editor National Rifle Association 11250 Waples Mill Road Fairfax VA 22030
RE: Your December 21, 2012 Press Statement on recent school shootings
Gentlemen,
As a Life Member of the NRA since about 1982, I want to express just how much your statement sickens me. Oh, not the part about protecting school children. I agree wholeheartedly with that. No, it’s the part where you state:
“A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”
Excuse me, but instead of being put into a national list of undesirables, couldn’t we just wear those six-pointy yellow stars? Then everyone would know who to spit upon, and round up along with all the usual suspects, when some other person with some superficial resemblance commits some god-awful twisted and terrible act. And then there’s all those innocent people over the years who have a mental health record because psychiatric hospitals had them dragged off to be falsely committed, so their medical insurance could be drained. Not to mention anyone who sought help for nightmares, PTSD or depression, because of abuse, death threats, assaults, maiming injuries by drinking drivers, cancer surgery, natural disasters and other things. Or anyone with a mental illness who was falsely accused of making threats, and then committed by state psychiatrists willing to suppress and fabricate medical information to achieve the commitment and force someone into their care to justify their jobs.
And let’s not forget war. Are you aware that many of the psychiatric hospital scams were directed at military families because of their relatively rich medical benefits? Isn’t that all just a terribly special way to treat those whom you send off to be damaged in wars, fighting for you.
I note with irony your concern for creating soft targets for evil people to exploit. I’m sure you are aware the BATF has opined that anyone with any record of commitment at any time for any reason, no matter how transitory, is saddled with a permanent disability in the civil right to possess firearms and ammunition. And that Congress has refused funding to process appeals (at least for felons, who get even more legal protections for due process rights than anyone in a civil commitment hearing). Under your recommendation, any criminal can create soft-target prey by simply setting up a trauma or assault so bad that the target has to seek help, thus becoming ineligible to use self-defense in the future.
I can tell you that living with a legacy of repeated violence and trauma is quite difficult, especially when one has to turn any temptation to commit violence inward upon one’s self. But who would ask for help if they know that they will be made permanently into second-class citizens, and subject to suspicion, hatred, contempt and bigotry in their society? Even handcuffed in front of their neighbors and friends and locked up in the local loony bin for saying the same things about self defense that anyone else may say? A place where, if one protests false charges, one will be kept for months longer than those who actually assaulted others, fought with or threatened police, or attempted suicide.
If I had known that this would be the price of asking for help, I would have kept my mouth tightly shut, even if it meant my death. The same way that liberals create a run on gun shops every time they start blaming people and tools that had no direct participation in or intention to perpetrate evil tragedies, you and they create barriers to any kind of help for mental illness when you make a public and permanent loss of civil liberties and social acceptance the price of asking for it. Small wonder so many kill themselves rather than ask for the kind of help you would prescribe.
I’m enclosing a CD with a set of references describing the Supreme Court’s poorly-reasoned decisions on mental illness issues, and how they created the moral hazards that allowed psychiatric hospitals to engage in scams. With reportage of their acts to entice and drag innocent people off the street into false commitments, and the resulting cost to society. Perhaps you should read it before making any further pronouncements in this area of your unexpertise, sacrificing innocent people on the alter of ugly, bigoted and expedient politics.
I may not agree with everything AndyB believes, but at least he stepped up and said something. I've been uncomfortable with my "monopoly" in these pages and wish others would make use of this space. The people at TCBH with medical and counseling training do not so much lack training as they are trained is a system of belief as to who needs their help and intervention. To a people with a Diagnostic Manual, everyone looks like someone who needs their help. In the same manner as a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.
I don't think you can paint everyone at TCBH with the same brush. Many of those who serve in a technical capacity were once inmates themselves, often with prior substance abuse problems. They appear to have honestly found some salvation in the system and have returned to help others. Their motivation seems much less questionable than those higher up who will go so far as to falsify medical records and evaluations to assure that they have involuntary patients.
By what procedure does one redress grievances against the Court itself, without appeal of a lower court case? When the Court makes a series of god-awful bad calls, which damage tens of thousands of innocent lives, particularly military families, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars in waste and abuse, and lead to Jim-Crow-like laws against a significant minority of people who will never be a realistic threat to anyone or become criminal, how does one ask the Court to review its own decisions?
The 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision in particular raised psychiatrists up to a near-infallible priesthood and set up a moral hazard for the subsequent insurance scams by psychiatric hospitals that did all of that. All to kill just one prisoner. Witness the 1990s "Profitable Addictions" series by the Houston Chronicle, and other sources.
When no lawyer will take on such a case, how does one Pro se, in forma pauperis petitioner get the Court to take responsibility for the bad and perhaps unintended consequences of its own actions and decisions? If the only answer is a terse "follow the Rules", then one gets the idea that the Court has abandoned any pretense of justice and accountability. That it simply does not care what kind of hell it wreaks upon the rest of us.
Getting such a petition thrown back in one's face certainly makes that point. This problem has festered for decades up to this day. Did the Founding Fathers and their Constitution really intend for a Court to be so haughty and arbitrary that no one can ever ask it directly to reconsider the horrendous results of its own bad decisions, in the face of such continuing suffering and injustice?
"Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 1927
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 89 S.Ct. 1827, 23 L.Ed.2d. 430 (1969): The Supreme Court established the modern version of the "clear and present danger" doctrine, holding that states only could restrict speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action."
from http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/firstamendment/courtcases/courtcases
Ah, the joys of Christian family values. My Mother had a heart problem while visiting my brother and his family for Christmas, and ended up in St. Francis. They took her to Warren Clinic Urgent Care first, and my brother tried to keep me from going to be with her, telling me that they would take care of it and let me know what happened. I told him, "Thanks for the attitude", and went anyway. I forget just how many days she was in the hospital, but I went to stay with her every afternoon. Which was better than I usually get when she's in town - just one afternoon.
Last weekend, I had called to ask her if she wanted me to visit. I heard her tell my brother and his wife that she wanted me to come visit and asked when they weren't doing anything. So I said I'd come over that afternoon, after lunch. That afternoon, I walked in, found her, set up dominoes on one of the dining tables, and played quietly with her for maybe four hours. I left before dinner that evening so as not to impose in a place where I'm not exactly welcome.
This morning, Saturday, I called her there at the same time we usually talk on the phone every week, and asked if she wanted me to visit. This time I heard her say that I wanted to come over and ask when it would be convenient. Apparently, an entire afternoon playing dominoes was too much for them - I could come between 2 and 4 PM. Somehow I didn't take well to rationing my time with my own Mother, and told her to ask them what they wanted to do. I would call her back.
The next I heard, she was going to come over to my place. And climb a flight of stairs to my apartment with bad knees and a leaky heart valve. I thought about that a while and left a message on their phone asking what kind of people would make her do that. Then went out for groceries.
When I got back, I found a message on machine, my dear Christian explaining how the problem was with me being a poor "guest", coming in without knocking, "any time you want, to spend as long as you want". I could come visit her, but I had to let them know ahead of time when I would come and when I would leave. I really have no interest in their silverware, just playing dominoes and visiting with my Mother.
I may not have the sequence of events just right, but at any rate called my brother to remind him that I had been invited that last time, and listened to him play the aggrieved and put-upon involuntary host. Whereupon I suggested that we could discuss in in family court and hung up while he was still ranting.
That is the mentally stable and Christian part of my family. As opposed to me, who takes medication for depression and doesn't go to church anymore. It might have something to do with the way I've been treated. So tomorrow Mom is coming over to climb my stairs and spend an afternoon with me. As opposed to the rest of the week with my betters. The ones with the Christian family values.
She thinks that she can climb the stairs. But then she didn't want to bother anyone about her arrhythmia until she started to collapse, and no heart doctor or G.P. has released her to climb stairs. I hope she's right, and am ready to call 911 if she isn't. I really hate this nonsense. I think that one of us is so full of himself, it's a wonder he can get it back out to take a leak. The Jesus I recall reading about wasn't like that.
Before this problem with Mom's heart came up, my brother and his family were pushing her to move to Tulsa into an assisted living complex. A lot more expensive than just renting an apartment, for someone who still did her own laundry and meals. Why they didn't want her to live with them, I might not be able to say. Now that their own kids have families, they don't lack for space. And their house is a lot nicer than anything I've ever been able to afford.
I offered once to let Mom move in with me, if she could help me get set up with a home and mortgage I can afford. She has credit and I don't, having gone through bankrupture after surgery looking for cancer. And her reply was that she couldn't, because "then some people wouldn't come to visit", and she wants to see all her family. And these are all professing Christians who regularly attend church. Go figure. Must be those Christian family values. They sure make an impression on me.
So my dear brother in Christ now agrees that Mom shouldn't be climbing my stairs. Unlike the stairs at his home, they aren't padded and are open between the treads. If she slipped and a leg went through, you could almost guarantee a broken one. So he generously offers to let me spend two hours with her this afternoon at his house, or drag he out of his comfortable home to a mall or library to play dominoes.
Christian family values. I've never to my recollection put any condition on how the rest of my family can see her. I'd be ashamed to be that kind of jerk. I don't think that's what Jesus meant us to do. Nice guy, Jesus, to most accounts. If you weren't a money changer or a Pharisee. Not to proud to associate with prostitutes and publicans. Unlike some of his professed followers.
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COMMENTS
Posted by: Don B
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
More and more research and counseling sources note that when something awful happens to a person, that person gets better a lot sooner if he or she can talk about it to family and friends. If not, then you find out who your family and friends really are, especially family. It takes a lot longer, if ever, to get over something traumatic, when they keep telling you to shut up when you try.
Whether it’s war, rape, fire, flood, assault, maiming injuries, tornado, torture, or whatever other violence man and nature can do to a person, if your family jeers at you when you try to get it out, they aren’t really your family. Not any more. They’re no better than the bully down the block. If just one of them calls you regularly to see how you are doing, then that person is your family. None of the rest matter.
There’s something basically and morally wrong about a family that has trained itself not to care about one of their own when the worst happens. And when they act like this is the godly thing to do, maybe your God dies, too. Along with all your religious holidays. You may find that whatever God is proud of that kind of caring, is not one you would want to spend an eternity with. From then on, you will have to find your own reasons for living. Nothing will ever be the same again, if it ever was.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
That was one of the mortifications of high school, my father jeering that out when I came home and said that I had a date. Repeatedly. It wasn’t mortifying because I cared anything about skin color. We had lived in Hawaii with Asians and Polynesians. One of each had been my teachers in grade school. One of my best friends was half-Filipino. I was in love with Hawaiian mythology and religious legends, and read every book I could get my hands on.
In junior high, many of my classmates and some of my teachers were Hispanic. Some were Native American. We have a little Amerindian in our ancestry, which I thought was pretty cool. I didn’t have any Black friends or dates because I had never lived in a place where many of them did.
I don’t know why he picked that particular jeer, other than the fact that we were living in a place that had been segregated in both residence and school, and it was during the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. There were no Black kids in our high school. It hurt not because I cared anything about skin color. It hurt because I knew from long experience that he meant it to, because he was expressing his contempt and dislike, his disgust since early childhood that I was a member of his family. Something that he taught to my siblings.
It hurt to live with. A couple of times I almost didn’t, but failed to escape. So when someone lied and got me dragged off to the local loony bin, This Can’t Be Happening, where the keepers took any vile hearsay as justification for their actions, where they took that kind of childhood experience to claim that I am more dangerous than others, and made it their mission to make me believe so, for me it was just another set of bullies with another set of jeers.
Well, who wouldn’t find that state-sanctioned laying on of hands and psychiatric diagnoses to be healing? Maybe just those of us who don’t believe that Johnny-come-lately, fly-by-night witch doctors have any superior insight into long self-examined grief. The kind of white witch doctors who would take any mention or explanation of such grief, and convert it into psychopathy and deviance to justify their own existence and right-to-treat. Who would rub one’s nose into one’s misery just to create the kind of shock and pain that seem to fulfill the Oklahoma State Code Title 43A legal requirements for involuntary “treatment”.
Wow. Almost like family. Although I’m straight, I might have some understanding of the abandonment gay kids feel when their families kick them out onto the street. I wonder. Are they any happier or luckier if it didn’t start when they were five years old?
Of course, the way I hear it, anyone who tries to discuss this, even in private, is “just trying to bring down the family name”. The Favorite Son is not amused. As I’ve heard him say more than once, “It’s all about Me.” The right to all critical thinking is His alone, passed down from His Earthly Father. Happy Holidays.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
When church people are sitting in church, pretending to be good Christians, they might possibly reflect that when they treat other people like crap, those other people remember. And if those other people don’t feel any need to pretend to be good Christians, they may not feel any obligation to forgive church people, whenever church people imagine they should. Bullies, after all, can dish it out. But they usually can’t take it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Some might wonder why I bother to write so much. It’s not because I believe that I deserve or have any great following. That would be pretty conceited, and I’ve met too many, and grown up with a few, who are best men or women within the sounds of their own voices. No, it probably has more to do with the fact that for so many years, others enforced my silence with threats and jeers. It took me a long time and a lot of practice to find my own voice.
Now I intend to use it. If I do any good with this, it may be in helping others to find their voices, or at least give them some words and ideas when they, like I once was, are unable to find how to say what they feel.
The Christ I used to believe in was not afraid or ashamed to associate with the lowest classes of his day, the prostitutes and publicans, those who had little or no voice in their own society. From what I’ve read, he treated them with decency and respect, listening to what they had to say. He spoke up for them. Try getting that from most lawyers or judges or church people, many of those who claim to live in His image.
I’m not that good or charitable, and won’t even admit to being a Christian, much less a good one. Perhaps that comes from some, or one, who pretended or claimed to be the best kind of Christian, convincing me with jeers and contempt that I had no place in any heaven, back when I was a child. Unlike some I have known, I merely resist passing those jeers and contempt on to those who have done nothing to hurt me. For one thing, it’s a huge waste of emotion and productive energy, with which overly righteous people seem to be overly endowed.
So if anyone is actually reading this, who’s holding a gun to your head to make you? Not me. If you don’t like it, I figure your conscience has a mute button with a lot of wear on it. And if you like that line, feel free to use it. Of course, I may not wish to be implicated in your personal heresy. I’m having enough trouble with my own.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
1. Given the subsequent horrific scams, scandals, deprivations of civil rights, and miscarriages of justice detailed in such articles as the Houston Chronicle “Profitable Addictions” series (App D, 5 of more than 40), as well as Congressional hearings and reports of the Government Accounting Office, and given the propensity for even innocent people to falsely incriminate themselves under interrogation (App E), and this Court’s dependence upon a long-since discredited psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, aka “Dr. Death” (App F), among other situations presented here, has this Court made ill-considered decisions involving mental illness, which should be thoroughly overturned and thoughtfully reconsidered, according to some of the arguments contained herein.
2. And, given the vast array of medical and legal literature contrary to this Court’s thinking, going back to before the 1979 Addington v. Texas decision, have this Court’s decisions regarding mental illness been overly influenced by common fears and biases against people with mental illnesses, resulting in an unconstitutional legal double standard, much like that in the time of the Dred Scott decision.
3. Whether, considering the awful and widespread damage done by such things as psychiatric hospital scams and scandals, when civil commitment is done, especially when those involved in the commitment should have had the knowledge or skill to recognize the difference and/or violations of civil liberties, does this commitment consist of a criminal and/or false imprisonment and trigger the Sixth and/or Eighth Amendments when done: without adequate due process; and/or for corrupt or malicious purposes other than “treatment”; and/or without any means to treat the patient; and/or without intention to treat the patient; and/or without medically effective treatment for the patient’s real or alleged condition. In other words, if the standards for due process and commitment and review and damages set by this Court have been so wise and just, why have there been so many knowing and/or incompetent abductions and/or false commitments of innocent people without any mental illness, including children as young as one year old?
4. May this petitioner be allowed to present a petition for a writ of certiorari, delayed until after these reconsiderations are made, with sufficient and competent legal help to do the job right, so as not to be dismissed out of hand on any mere technicality or judicial dislike, disregarding all other violations of this petitioner’s civil liberties, due process and other Constitutional rights, as lower courts have done.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Yesterday, December 4th, after loosing a Presidential election in good part because they pissed off many of 31.8 million Hispanics (2010 U.S. Census), the Republican party embraced the opportunity to piss off another 38 to 57 million Americans, killing ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (based upon the Americans with Disabilities Act) in the U.S. Senate by denying the necessary 2/3 vote, 38 to 61. According to the 2010 Census (www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-131.pdf), about 56.7 million Americans of all ages (6 and older) have disabilities of all kinds, of which 38.3 million are severe.
The U.S. officials who worked on setting up the treaty to look like the ADA got a provision modified to specify that disability would be according to a country’s legal definitions.
(see http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/12/04/1279921/senate-republicans-vote-down-international-disabilities-treaty/?mobile=nc;
So it would have done no more in the U.S. than ratify the ADA, which the Supreme Court of the United States has significantly watered down from its original intent.
Well that’s another way to write off the senior vote. Disabilities increase with age, to 51.8 percent of all 65 and older, with 36.8 percent severely disabled. The way the Republicans in the U.S. Senate behaved, you’d think the Americans with Disabilities Act has something to do with Sharia law.
Re: Love Letters and Hate Mail
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
No parent should have to face the grief and horror of what happened at that grade school in Connecticut. For them there is no comfort in knowing that any particular school would have to wait thousands of years on the average for a similar event, or that most children who are murdered die outside of school.
But you can be sure of one thing – there will be no shortage of people, from the President on down, who will claim to have THE solution for ensuring that it will never happen again, without any way to prove that their solutions will actually work. For example, in one literature survey of 113 studies of violence prevention programs in healthcare and other settings, only 32, or about one in three, had any follow-up evaluation of any proposed solutions. Which is the same ratio of success that psychiatrists have in actually predicting future violent behavior in any one person. There are always many more “solutions” than results.
See Y. Cvitkovich, June 2005, Preventing Violent and Aggressive Behavior in Healthcare: a literature review, Occupational Health & Safety Agency for Healthcare in BC (British Columbia, Canada) 81p.
http://www.phsa.ca/NR/rdonlyres/6C69D638-8587-4096-A8AA-7D2B0141C3B2/59709/ReportPreventingViolentandAggressiveBehaviourinHea.pdf
This article surveyed literature from “peer-review journals, government and academic reports, PubMed database, books, reference lists, websites and journal “Table of Contents”.” [I like PubMed.gov; it's a good place to get sense of what science and medicine actually know.]
Use the scientific method to seek answers? These “experts” will draw mostly from their own personal, religious, political or profit-motive agendas, from the set arguments that they “know” are right, without ever having to test them and show that they work. Why bother with something that might not advance a cause? It's a lot of work.
For those who find the idea of using scientific and engineering methods to address this kind of problem intimidating, there's a nice, readable little book. See Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Crown Business (Random House), NY, 2011, 320p. In the context of this book on how to succeed in business by really trying, the top-down, so-called “expert” solutions fall into the category of “Build It and They Will Come” approaches, which usually fail. It instead advocates a continuous process of making constant tests and adjustments depending upon what works. If the theory (ideology) doesn't produce positive results according to independent, objective measures, then ask what went wrong to at least five levels, scrap or adapt the theory, and try something else.
That, after all, has made physical medicine so effective and nearly miraculous today. Too bad that approach hasn't been tried more often in politics and psychiatry.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
That would be a Black President, with barrels of "collateral damage" blood on his hands, including children, demanding that a minority, even more disliked than his own, be shoved even farther away from first-class citizenship, in order to "make sure" that no child in a school is ever killed again in a mass shooting. As if anyone with a mental illness, who is 10 to 13 times more likely than the general population to be the target of crime and violence (source PubMed.gov), is more willing to kill children than he is.
Ain't politics grand?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
For those suffering long-term emotional damage from the Sandy Hook shootings, the shootings themselves are not the last obscenity they will have to face. Current psychiatric models hold that anyone who has a history of trauma and mental health issues is more likely to be violent. Current legal models and practices in many state mental health codes and courts hold that anyone with such a history is dangerous until proven otherwise, if that person is merely accused by another claiming to have a "reasonable fear" of threat from the person with a mental health issue. So any baby involved in and affected by a school shooting will in the future be suspected as another potential babykiller. And in order to keep itself safe from such people, society has set up a mental health judicial system whereby no one who is so accused can be assured even of zealous legal counsel, or the right to remain silent when examined.
This is hardly new. Soon after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the EEOC's March 1997 Enforcement Guidance one the Americans with Disabilities Act and Psychiatric Disabilities, businesses and news editors started opposing it on the basis that the ADA would require crazy people, such as ax murderers according to one cartoon.
See http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/psych.html, Part 30, Example C and Part 31.
See http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch5.htm
It all had an effect. For example, in the 2000 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law [Vol. 21, page 248], in their article on workplace violence and psychiatric disabilities, Laden and Schwartz cite a report that, "in 1998 a postal worker was fired merely for telling co-workers about his nightmares that involved a shooting at work—a shooting in which he, himself, was a victim." Footnote 10: "10. See generally Georgia Pabst, Man Fired over Dreams Presaging Shooting, Postal Service says his Dreams, Gestures Threatened Others, MILWAUKEE J. SENT., Dec. 15, 1998, at A1. Ironically, the dreams turned out to be correct; another worker did in fact attack that office."
See https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=21+Berkeley+J.+Emp.+%26+Lab.+L.+246&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=7277eddb51fc6910b1014f5921cc3320
It's a bit like some Kluxer afraid that black will rub off on him. Or that a black male whistling at a white woman is a sure sign of an eminent sexual assault. Ain't political correctness grand? It's amazing what even liberals can rationalize when they have assured themselves of its righteousness, the unpopularity of the target group, and their inability to organize and fight back.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
An open letter to:
Mr. Wayne LaPierre, Exec. V.P.
Mr. Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA Exec. Dir.
American Rifleman Letters Editor
National Rifle Association
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax VA 22030
RE: Your December 21, 2012 Press Statement on recent school shootings
Gentlemen,
As a Life Member of the NRA since about 1982, I want to express just how much your statement sickens me. Oh, not the part about protecting school children. I agree wholeheartedly with that. No, it’s the part where you state:
“A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”
Excuse me, but instead of being put into a national list of undesirables, couldn’t we just wear those six-pointy yellow stars? Then everyone would know who to spit upon, and round up along with all the usual suspects, when some other person with some superficial resemblance commits some god-awful twisted and terrible act. And then there’s all those innocent people over the years who have a mental health record because psychiatric hospitals had them dragged off to be falsely committed, so their medical insurance could be drained. Not to mention anyone who sought help for nightmares, PTSD or depression, because of abuse, death threats, assaults, maiming injuries by drinking drivers, cancer surgery, natural disasters and other things. Or anyone with a mental illness who was falsely accused of making threats, and then committed by state psychiatrists willing to suppress and fabricate medical information to achieve the commitment and force someone into their care to justify their jobs.
And let’s not forget war. Are you aware that many of the psychiatric hospital scams were directed at military families because of their relatively rich medical benefits? Isn’t that all just a terribly special way to treat those whom you send off to be damaged in wars, fighting for you.
I note with irony your concern for creating soft targets for evil people to exploit. I’m sure you are aware the BATF has opined that anyone with any record of commitment at any time for any reason, no matter how transitory, is saddled with a permanent disability in the civil right to possess firearms and ammunition. And that Congress has refused funding to process appeals (at least for felons, who get even more legal protections for due process rights than anyone in a civil commitment hearing). Under your recommendation, any criminal can create soft-target prey by simply setting up a trauma or assault so bad that the target has to seek help, thus becoming ineligible to use self-defense in the future.
I can tell you that living with a legacy of repeated violence and trauma is quite difficult, especially when one has to turn any temptation to commit violence inward upon one’s self. But who would ask for help if they know that they will be made permanently into second-class citizens, and subject to suspicion, hatred, contempt and bigotry in their society? Even handcuffed in front of their neighbors and friends and locked up in the local loony bin for saying the same things about self defense that anyone else may say? A place where, if one protests false charges, one will be kept for months longer than those who actually assaulted others, fought with or threatened police, or attempted suicide.
If I had known that this would be the price of asking for help, I would have kept my mouth tightly shut, even if it meant my death. The same way that liberals create a run on gun shops every time they start blaming people and tools that had no direct participation in or intention to perpetrate evil tragedies, you and they create barriers to any kind of help for mental illness when you make a public and permanent loss of civil liberties and social acceptance the price of asking for it. Small wonder so many kill themselves rather than ask for the kind of help you would prescribe.
I’m enclosing a CD with a set of references describing the Supreme Court’s poorly-reasoned decisions on mental illness issues, and how they created the moral hazards that allowed psychiatric hospitals to engage in scams. With reportage of their acts to entice and drag innocent people off the street into false commitments, and the resulting cost to society. Perhaps you should read it before making any further pronouncements in this area of your unexpertise, sacrificing innocent people on the alter of ugly, bigoted and expedient politics.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
The people at TCBH with medical and counseling training do not so much lack training as they are trained is a system of belief as to who needs their help and intervention. To a people with a Diagnostic Manual, everyone looks like someone who needs their help. In the same manner as a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.
I don't think you can paint everyone at TCBH with the same brush. Many of those who serve in a technical capacity were once inmates themselves, often with prior substance abuse problems. They appear to have honestly found some salvation in the system and have returned to help others. Their motivation seems much less questionable than those higher up who will go so far as to falsify medical records and evaluations to assure that they have involuntary patients.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
By what procedure does one redress grievances against the Court itself, without appeal of a lower court case? When the Court makes a series of god-awful bad calls, which damage tens of thousands of innocent lives, particularly military families, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars in waste and abuse, and lead to Jim-Crow-like laws against a significant minority of people who will never be a realistic threat to anyone or become criminal, how does one ask the Court to review its own decisions?
The 1983 Barefoot v. Estelle decision in particular raised psychiatrists up to a near-infallible priesthood and set up a moral hazard for the subsequent insurance scams by psychiatric hospitals that did all of that. All to kill just one prisoner. Witness the 1990s "Profitable Addictions" series by the Houston Chronicle, and other sources.
When no lawyer will take on such a case, how does one Pro se, in forma pauperis petitioner get the Court to take responsibility for the bad and perhaps unintended consequences of its own actions and decisions? If the only answer is a terse "follow the Rules", then one gets the idea that the Court has abandoned any pretense of justice and accountability. That it simply does not care what kind of hell it wreaks upon the rest of us.
Getting such a petition thrown back in one's face certainly makes that point. This problem has festered for decades up to this day. Did the Founding Fathers and their Constitution really intend for a Court to be so haughty and arbitrary that no one can ever ask it directly to reconsider the horrendous results of its own bad decisions, in the face of such continuing suffering and injustice?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 1927
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 89 S.Ct. 1827, 23 L.Ed.2d. 430 (1969): The Supreme Court established the modern version of the "clear and present danger" doctrine, holding that states only could restrict speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action."
from http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/firstamendment/courtcases/courtcases
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Last weekend, I had called to ask her if she wanted me to visit. I heard her tell my brother and his wife that she wanted me to come visit and asked when they weren't doing anything. So I said I'd come over that afternoon, after lunch. That afternoon, I walked in, found her, set up dominoes on one of the dining tables, and played quietly with her for maybe four hours. I left before dinner that evening so as not to impose in a place where I'm not exactly welcome.
This morning, Saturday, I called her there at the same time we usually talk on the phone every week, and asked if she wanted me to visit. This time I heard her say that I wanted to come over and ask when it would be convenient. Apparently, an entire afternoon playing dominoes was too much for them - I could come between 2 and 4 PM. Somehow I didn't take well to rationing my time with my own Mother, and told her to ask them what they wanted to do. I would call her back.
The next I heard, she was going to come over to my place. And climb a flight of stairs to my apartment with bad knees and a leaky heart valve. I thought about that a while and left a message on their phone asking what kind of people would make her do that. Then went out for groceries.
When I got back, I found a message on machine, my dear Christian explaining how the problem was with me being a poor "guest", coming in without knocking, "any time you want, to spend as long as you want". I could come visit her, but I had to let them know ahead of time when I would come and when I would leave. I really have no interest in their silverware, just playing dominoes and visiting with my Mother.
I may not have the sequence of events just right, but at any rate called my brother to remind him that I had been invited that last time, and listened to him play the aggrieved and put-upon involuntary host. Whereupon I suggested that we could discuss in in family court and hung up while he was still ranting.
That is the mentally stable and Christian part of my family. As opposed to me, who takes medication for depression and doesn't go to church anymore. It might have something to do with the way I've been treated. So tomorrow Mom is coming over to climb my stairs and spend an afternoon with me. As opposed to the rest of the week with my betters. The ones with the Christian family values.
She thinks that she can climb the stairs. But then she didn't want to bother anyone about her arrhythmia until she started to collapse, and no heart doctor or G.P. has released her to climb stairs. I hope she's right, and am ready to call 911 if she isn't. I really hate this nonsense. I think that one of us is so full of himself, it's a wonder he can get it back out to take a leak. The Jesus I recall reading about wasn't like that.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
I offered once to let Mom move in with me, if she could help me get set up with a home and mortgage I can afford. She has credit and I don't, having gone through bankrupture after surgery looking for cancer. And her reply was that she couldn't, because "then some people wouldn't come to visit", and she wants to see all her family. And these are all professing Christians who regularly attend church. Go figure. Must be those Christian family values. They sure make an impression on me.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Christian family values. I've never to my recollection put any condition on how the rest of my family can see her. I'd be ashamed to be that kind of jerk. I don't think that's what Jesus meant us to do. Nice guy, Jesus, to most accounts. If you weren't a money changer or a Pharisee. Not to proud to associate with prostitutes and publicans. Unlike some of his professed followers.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.