RE: HB1386
Environmental Psychologist
RE: HB1386
Thank you for supporting the citizens of Colorado, Dr. Tenney! Here is my letter to my state’s elected officials:
Amy Smith
PO Box 6
103 South Main Street B Up
Eckley, Colorado 80727
April 23, 2014
Via email
An Open Letter to the Colorado House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee
RE: HB1386
I am writing to protest the expansion of civil commitment criteria in Colorado, and HB136 in particular, which I view as a direct and clear threat to my personal civil liberties as a Colorado citizen. I know that the data do not exist that show that incarcerating people with behavioral healthcare labels increases public safety, nor that it is therapeutically beneficial. These are policies on the wrong side of history. This year, the Special Rapporteur on Torture of the United Nations declared forced psychiatry to be torture. Even on a strictly pragmatic level, Colorado does not have the infrastructure to treat the people clamoring for mental health care and substance abuse interventions now. Why are we expanding criteria in the face of a looming workforce crisis as we expand Medicaid and outreach to at-risk populations? Even as just a consumer of mental health services in Colorado, I can see that this entire process has been controlled and has been made to happen, after years of back room deals and a solid wall of defiance to Colorado’s traditional culture of transparency, honesty and fairness.
In 2008, I was the director of the statewide mental health consumer organization in Colorado, and I & a staff member spent a day at CMHIP interviewing patients with no staff present. Not only were all the patients hungry, including the tiny little old ladies, there was a general lack of medical care available to patients to the point of criminal neglect. Patients were not allowed access to the outdoors for weeks at a time and there were very few activities including therapeutic rehabilitation, group therapy or recreation. Everyone felt over-medicated, but that is common to nearly all locked facilities in the USA. In addition to writing up my findings, we supplied the organization with audio tapes of the all the meetings. I left that position for a different job soon after, and the new director suppressed my findings and wrote “the consumers of Colorado are happy with their care”. Since that time, a number of patients have died preventable deaths, including from constipation, unobserved prone restraint, and most recently, an infected leg wound. I returned in 2012 to interview patients again under a different authority and found much the same.(more food was available, but it was inedible to me- disgusting) In addition, we found patients with traffic tickets housed in maximum security, barbaric sex offender treatment modalities, (whether that was why they were incarcerated or not) and a general inability to progress as is a person’s civil right. The morale was so bad at that time, the institution had to hire 1.7 FTE for every 1.0 FTE expected on the floor at any given moment. What a gross waste of state and federal dollars, even if you could imagine that such interventions as this can possibly be considered therapeutic.
I have a somewhat clearer understanding of how behavioral healthcare policy-making in Colorado is crafted than most. As the ‘director’ of Colorado’s then-consumer network, WE CAN! Of Colorado, I was a member of the Mighty Mental Health Coalition. Other members included the Executive Directors of MHAC, NAMI, Federation of Families, CBHC, CPS & CPA. I knew how the back room deals go down, how the answers are decided before the questions are posed and how and who decided who got the funding. Colorado consumers were taught for decades not to listen to the national voice of the Consumer/ Survivor/ Ex-patient (CSX) movement, and that “advocacy” meant to beg for more beds & more meds. I appeared at every event, microphone in hand, reading the bullet points provided to me by the state and the industry. I was Patrick Kennedy’s poster child for parity & testified at a House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions with him and Rosalind Cater in 2007. As long as I kept my hand clenched around that microphone and read the bullet points provided to me by the industry, I was treated like a queen. Long story short, when I began to question some of the obviously immoral practices I was observing around me, I was removed from my many positions of power on various councils, boards and advisory groups and although I have been literally begging to be allowed to participate again for over seven years, to the most powerful people I could access, I have not only not been given a seat at the table but have been denied at every turn, save Colorado’s Protection and Advocacy system. No matter that I am considered a subject matter expert on peer services, public policy and behavioral healthcare trends under the ACA internationally, I am not welcome at most policy tables in Colorado today. I asked many times to participate on the civil commitment task force and was denied, clear up to last week when Rep. McCann denied me once again. Coloradans civil rights would have been more carefully looked after on my watch.
The eyes of the world are on Colorado as we mimic the punitive and groundless fear-based policies of New York State with no vibrant, informed and engaged peer community as they have. Our policy-makers and elected officials are mocked as they buy into the fictional junk science of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Informed Coloradans gasp as our rights are written out of our law books and we weep with frustration and fear as one after another advocacy organization that are charged to protect us sign off with their organizational logos on the task force letterhead.
I have looked the other way over the years as I have identified state budget “errors”, contractual fraud, kickbacks, billing fraud, employee abuse, EEOC issues and much, much more. When Colorado turned back the contracts for Recovery Innovations I knew nothing would ever change, and frankly, that was the last straw in my book. We use the most archaic, expensive, disabling treatment modalities available on Earth. The expense to the state pales next to the human suffering and waste. Colorado legislators must awaken to the dirty sinkhole the Colorado behavioral healthcare system has become, and question these people in a more informed manner, rather than trusting them to inform lawmakers to the best course of action to protect the health, safety and welfare of our citizens.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions or for further comments or citations.
Amy Smith
Good for you! Someone referred to these people as the city shadows. What the “normal” and “well behaved” people keep repressed pops up in these who must be hidden away on a low budget. As some one recently put it we are living now in post-legal American where if your social rank is high enough crime no longer exists. Bankers, high public officials, the very wealthy . . . But those in lower ranks must be the whipping boys. Punish them severely so that the amount of punishment will cover their betters. While Obama eats half his $300 sushi these must be put on half rations to make for justice. Temperance.
What these primitive types who legislate as well as the even more primitive types behind the scenes pulling the financial strings fail to realize is that this behavior is more than expensive. There is a very subtle accounting system that measures these things and the penalties for fraud are very high. If only they knew before they are given the task of undoing the harm they have brought about.
Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.
You guys don’t know how lucky you are. Up here in BC, the legal standard for forced treatment is as low as “has a mental disorder” and “is capable of deterioration.” If there are more rubbery concepts possible, I don’t know of them.
That sounds like what Torrey and his minions are going for – “may deteriorate without treatment.” And of course, we know what “treatment” means…
—– Steve
RE:
“survivors of psychiatry are silenced”
“Of grave concern is that this silencing extended to people who were reporting abuse of people who were involved with the public psychiatric service delivery system.”
Not cool.
Ripoff Report® is a worldwide consumer reporting Web site and publication, by consumers, for consumers, to file and document complaints about companies or individuals.
Search engines will automatically discover most reports, meaning that within just a few days or weeks, your report may be found on search engines when consumers search, using key words like for example a hospital name relating to your Report.
Anyone who read the Millennium Trilogy or watched the Swedish films knows that even in a rather more enlightened state like Sweden psychiatrists have way too much power. In fact while we ridiculed and criticized how psychiatry was used in the Soviet Union the same sort of thing was occurring and continues to occur in the USA and most places in the EU.
In Colorado the judiciary has a little trick it can use on prisoners awaiting trial who complain about their attorneys. They can have them examined by someone resembling a second rate vet who will pronounce them incompetent to stand trial; they then will be sent to the State Mental Hospital (for the criminally insane, etc.) in Pueblo where they will be drugged as a matter of course and kept confined until they become compliant to stand trial. A judge there will always give the doctor permission to drug against their will and never listens to the defendant. The machine rolls on.
As Princeton and Northwestern Universities informed us recently the USA is an oligarcy, not a democracy or some other benign form of government. So the question is which oligarchs see a profit in this legislation? That is the only relevant question. All the proof in the world will be nothing unless it shows clearly how the profit will not be forth coming. Or the power.
Of course it is barbaric or worse as the barbarians were not generally psychopaths or under their influence. What the term is I do not know. America has become increasingly primitive and violent. The Fed gov is so arrogant it is almost impossible to deal with it without having a gun shoved in one’s face. We are not far from a full scale tyranny which will be arranged for our safety. The world is too dangerous for freedom. Sorry.
Agreed. One of the best examples is the infamous Otto Wagner Spital in Vienna, Austria. It has a very dark history from the Nazi times :
http://www.gedenkstaettesteinhof.at/
(in German) to more recent scandals and abuses:
http://kurier.at/chronik/wien/die-kinder-vom-steinhof-in-der-psychiatrie-zu-tode-vernachlaessigt/15.817.743
(in German) In the 80s kids were subjected to institutional neglect ending in many deaths.
to even more recent including a big scandal in 2005-8 with staff member accusing the hospital of abuse and neglect of acute patients including letting them lie in restraints in feces, patients dying in restraints and other (easy to find if you know German, unfortunately there are no reports in English I know of). This practices have not stopped and continue to this day with abuse being covered up, medical documentation fixed with lies and medical errors and wrong-doing denied. The legal protections that are theoretically in place are a joke and are completely dysfunctional.
So yes, EU is no better. I can also mention similar affairs in Poland (patients humiliated and made to hear underwear over their heads, kids being punished by saline injections) and Germany (e.g. Gustl Mollath case). Probably a tip of the mountain.
Involuntary “treatment” is torture. Plain and simple.
I’ve got to quit reading this stuff when I’m in withdrawal; I either want to die or leave the country-O yeah, that takes $$$