Don’t Let Them Take Me There: Jessy’s Story
The large scale, systematic use of psychiatric punishment began in the late 1930’s in the Soviet Union, and greatly expanded under Khrushchev. No Westerner was allowed to visit a Soviet Special Psychiatric Hospital, but reports from former prisoners showed a stark resemblance to the experimental prison-clinics run by Himmler’s SS doctors, both in cruelties practiced and type of doctor in charge.
As with most past systems of totalitarian control, psychiatric punishment of homeless people was a precursor to labeling political dissent as a mental illness. On May 24, 1959, Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, quoted Khrushchev as saying “To those who might start calling for opposition to Communism… clearly the mental state of such people is not normal.” In Germany Hitler popularized American eugenic psychiatry in his book “Mein Kampf.”
And in the United States, somewhere between 3 and 4 million American children are on Ritalin!
Psychiatric drugs modify the brain and its neurotransmitters. The human brain is the most complicated and least understood organ in the human body and perhaps the most complicated organ on the earth. Anti-psychotics pollute the brain at far higher concentrations than anything anyone has ever been exposed to on earth.
These pharmaceuticals stop the brain from removing and destroying serotonin, and no research has ever been done to find out if this is reversible after the medication is discontinued. There are about 160 current lawsuits against Eli Lilly for murder or suicide induced by Prozac use, and that is only one drug from one corporation.
Sometimes I don’t see a homeless brother or sister for a long time. When finally I see them again, they don’t want to talk about where they’ve been, they can no longer look me in the eye, and life seems to have left them somehow. This is how I expect my next encounter with my friend Jessy to be.
Tuesday I witnessed Jessy being rounded up and taken to “Simpervirens” (a mental detainment facility) to get a dose or two of some drug, made by a corporation, of which George Bush Sr. or Donald Rumsfeld was probably once the CEO (they chaired three pharmaceutical corporations). He was rounded up by the new mental health outreach team, called “the police.” They claimed that somebody called and when they responded they did not know if they were responding to a 5150 “aide to sick,” or to a crime. The police claim Jessy was “conversing with someone who wasn’t there,” and “wasn’t making sense.” When Jessy asked “why am I was being arrested?” he was authoritatively reassured that he was merely being involuntarily institutionalized, drugged and detained for the next 72 hours, and not arrested.
Using Police as mental health outreach goes a little beyond “law enforcement” when we authorize them to make psychiatric diagnoses on non-violent and non-suicidal people on the streets. According to AB1421, “Laura’s law,” police can round up and detain a suspected mentally ill person for 72 hours if they “feel” that they are a danger to themselves or to society. This law was intended to protect us from the dangerously violent criminally insane. With policies designed to run homeless people out of the towns they reside in, police officers, like Arcata’s Officer Brent Chase use, these laws as “tools” to keep homeless numbers down.
Others and myself helped Jessy out quite a bit, taught him life skills, spent time with him, helped him with necessities and enjoyed his company. Anyone who knows Jessy knows that he talks to himself out loud. Jessy, who is actually quite nice, harmless and very introverted, is a victim of the whole neurosis caused by a system that rips your job, retirement, or freedom from you in a second, and then calls you a criminal when you become the only option left to you, which is homeless. He keeps to himself, but when he asks me for something he starts to express an internally rationalized shame verbally. The shame poor Jessy must of felt, just because he was stopped and arrested, showed most after telling the homeless/mental health/police officers that he (a) knew what Simpervirens was and (b) that he “did not want to go there.” And then he looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said “Don’t let them take me there.” Of course there wasn’t anything I could do.
A 2004 report, subcontracted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), written by the Urban Institute, called Strategies for Reducing Chronic Street Homelessness, speaks of a “paradigm shift” because of a “trigger event.” I won’t elaborate on how the Patriot Act was a paradigm shift because of a trigger event, but I will mention it.
This, which is called “problem, reaction, solution” or the “Hegelian Dialect,” is a way for social engineers to incite, justify and implement policies to improve a situation within their culturally narrow bias. The cultural differences between well-paid and housed doctors, law-makers, professors and police, called “experts,” and poor homeless people, is wide enough of a chasm. But then the “experts” advocate creating or utilizing a “trigger event” to force a “paradigm shift” to create “innovative outreach programs developed by and located in the… Police Department.”
Though the report claims, “Providers have to attract… the very resistant people they are trying to serve,” it also advocates to, “combine police and mental health expertise and authority” to be “the only outreach teams on the streets that have the ability to remove people either voluntarily or involuntarily.”
A San Diego city policy praised in the report is: “San Diego Police Officers arrest chronic street alcoholics… offer treatment plus transitional housing as an alternative to six months in jail… they [chronic street alcoholics] may first serve a full jail sentence or even two before they are convinced to try.”
There are many good ideas in the Urban Institute’s report, but they are inter-dispersed with cruel, unconstitutional, and human rights violating ideas. If these programs were so damn good for the chronic homeless they are intended to serve, then they would be flooded with applicants, not forcing people against their will to participate.
To involuntarily medicate, institutionalize, and case-manage people, based on controversial psychology theories, methods and pharmaceuticals, is the real criminal insanity. Social control through medications and internment is no different today then in Stalin’s, Hitler’s or Khrushchev’s days.
The law clearly states that a victim of Laura’s Law must be a threat to the safety of himself or others. The only threat to safety was the threat towards Jessy, of what the constitution and all pertinent resulting case law calls “the threat of loss of ones life, by loss of freedom.”
The roundup is underway. Homeland Security Department roundups, like Operation FALCON, round up the “fugitives”-remember fugitives are wanted, not necessarily guilty. The Chronic Homeless Initiative rounds up mentally ill homeless people with police using culturally biased standards and goals. It’s not a question of whether they will ignore their promise to “just go after the fugitives and mentally ill” and go after the activists, the communists, the unions, the gays, the Jews, and the real Christians, but a question of when. Just as was done with the racketeering laws and the SWAT teams, the roles of homelessness and mentally illness policies will be revised to include social engineering of a fascist order.
I went to Jessy’s hearing. The hearing was not to win his freedom, though 72 hours is all they are allowed to hold him (he has been held against his will for six days as of this writing). The hearing was about forced medication, whether Jessy should be court ordered to take pharmaceuticals, which he does not want. This-what I call the “bag ‘em and tag ‘em” policies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the California Department of Mental Health-gives a better understanding of their logic. Extremely evil logic, but their rationalization nonetheless.
As I have already pointed out, Jessy was in no way, shape, or form, a “5150,” “a danger to himself,” at the time of his non-arrest, apprehension and incarceration. In court it was testified that Jessy was sleeping at the initial contact with the police.
A doctor from Simpervirens mental health detention center testified for the prosecution. I initially thought the extremely pale doctor with the thorazine shuffle and drug induced glazed eyes was just another defendant in a hearing of Jessy’s type, so imagine my surprise when I discovered it was none other the Dr. John Sommers, the pill pushing psychiatric doctor of Simpervirens.
Dr. Sommers testified that when poor Jessy was brought to Simpervirens he was resistant. Asked if he witnessed the resistance he claimed, “No, I observed him resisting the restraints.” Jessy testified that he wasn’t restrained. He said that the nurses and staff at Sempervirens threatened to, “Strap me [Jessy] down if I didn’t take the medicines they were trying to give me.”
The doctor claimed that in his opinion, from less then half an hour talking to Jessy, Jessy suffered from what the DSM-IV (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, no. 4) calls “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified or Psychosis NOS.” I was pretty sure that this “diagnosis” was really a classification, since Judge Wilson seemed very familiar with the term, though if it weren’t so sick, it would be funny.
The DSM-IV is a book about four inches thick with a 10 page list of categories of mental disorders. Each category has mental disorder diagnosis within them. At the very end of the “Psychotic Disorders” category is this Psychosis NOS. Under the description for Psychosis NOS it reads: “[NOS] is included for classifying psychotic presentations that do not meet the criteria for any specific Psychotic Disorders defined in this section or psychotic symptomatology about which there is inadequate or contradictory information.” Talk about a catchall law!
If I understand the professional opinion correctly, then a person who is not a danger to himself or others, but who denies a mental illness that is accused by a mental health “professional,” needs to have the court “make him feel better” by forced medication.
The doctor authoritatively proclaimed from the witness stand-as grounds for Jessy’s not knowing that he should be strapped down and force-fed anti-psychotics, mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, anti-depression medication and a whole cocktail of drugs to combat the many potential side-effects-that Jessy’s “thinking was not based on fact.” He showed “resistance to taking the medication,” he was “speaking in ‘word salad’ (Sommers’ word for incomplete sentences),” he “can’t answer questions” and that Jessy “can’t hold a rational conversation.”
When Jessy took the stand he was perhaps even more articulate than the doctor wanting to experiment on him. He answered all of the questions asked of him as well as most I’ve seen in courts, and I’ve seen a lot. He figured days, times, and people involved when asked to. He did kind of confuse the court audience when he was asked if he knew why he was in court and he replied “to fight for my life.” Everyone, though, seemed to understand him fine when he said “I don’t feel alive when taking those drugs.”
Here’s the theory: A homeless person is reported sleeping in the bushes.
Brent Chase, an Arcata police officer, ex-park ranger (a position created to prevent homeless people from sleeping in Arcata parks), implementing a “run the bums out of town” policy, from the mayor and city manager, shows up on the scene. Statements by the police department indicate that Chase was not sure whether it was trespassing or a “5150, a danger to him or her self,” call.
The police made no indications that Jessy did not cooperate in any form. I showed up right after the initial contact, at about the same time as the second officer. Jessy was very coherent and articulate by the time I arrived.
Officer Chase, having the “authority” to diagnose and take into custody anyone he “believes” a danger to themselves, or any other behavior he deems “5150,” takes Jessy and then incarcerates him in a mental detainment institution.
Though an arrested person has to, by law, be brought before a judge in 72 hours of arrest, Jessy spent a week being threatened, coerced, intimidated, and pestered into voluntarily taking pharmaceuticals that he “didn’t want to [voluntarily] take.”
Dr. Sommers claimed that for a week he “tried several different tacks to try to get him to give informed consent.” Since Jessy was not crazy enough to fall for the pharmaceutical dope dealers’ manipulation, he was finally brought to court, not to secure his lawful release, but to try to force lifetime maintenance drugs on him. Even Judge Wilson was trying to get him to consider a pharmaceutical life.
If there is a moral to this story, it is Jessy was victim of the “rope ‘em and dope ‘em” terrorism that is happening right here, right now. He needs alternative, empowering mental health models and he needs the security to know he is safe in his own person.
With anti-homeless police implementing a whatever-it-takes policy to run homeless people out of town, how safe will any of us be when $800,000,000 of Prop 63 money is used to enforce procedures that don’t require probable cause, speedy trials, and proof beyond a doubt?
With so many ties between the current administration and the pharmaceutical corporations-as well as ties between the pill makers and the psychiatric professional organizations-profits and social control have become the obvious goal of forced medication.
tad in Arcata
