An Obituary for My Colonizer: Reflections on the Legacy of DJ Jaffe

briana gilmore
By
-
38
2008

Editor’s Note: DJ Jaffe, 65, died on August 23 from leukemia. He was one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for forced treatment, a founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and one of the leading proponents of Kendra’s Law, which allows the justice system to require “outpatients” to comply with treatment orders. The following is a reflection related to the legacy of that forced-treatment effort.

I remember the first time DJ Jaffe saw me. Not the first time we had interacted—we had been corresponding for years, exclusively within his sporadic and enraged reactions to my daily blog posts and my occasional brief, polite, unengaging responses—but the first time he sat across from me at a wide conference room table and, never having seen my face before, had to listen to me introduce myself.

As I stated my name and affiliation—at the time I worked as Policy Director for an advocacy association run by and for people with lived experience of serious mental health challenges, which he much loathed—I watched the recognition wash over his face and culminate with a pained wince. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, but I fixed my gaze on him until he managed to regain composure from the momentary poison.

I hate that I can’t get that face out of my mind today. When I heard this morning that DJ Jaffe was dead my face went through its own mutation; a moment of surprise and wonderment followed by swift elation, and then, very quickly and now for so many hours afterward, an enraged, frustrated, quick-breathed grimace.

I don’t know what to do with my colonizer’s death.

I’m left hating so many things today: first and foremost, that Jaffe still, even after death, has any power at all to make me feel hatred. And I hate my own colonized mind as an academic and researcher and policy wonk and white woman as it insists that I need to spend the body of this article proving to you, readers, that Jaffe was a colonizer. Okay, I’ll do it. No, I won’t.

(I did. 1500 words of it, that I then cut and pasted into another document. Proof of the foundational connections between the Treatment Advocacy Center and Jaffe’s furious, career-spanning obsession with compulsory treatment and the carceral state. About the lineage of deranged European men and their ability to fear-monger devastated families, merge a pitiful sympathy with villainization and then weaponize it against Black and brown people, people with disabilities, the neurodivergent, immigrants, people who are cash-poor, people whose ancestral lands have been stolen, women, queer and trans people, fat people, people with structural barriers to education and healthcare and housing and other trappings of power because of the physical, psychological, and institutional violence of people with that power over centuries. About the generations of work ahead of us unraveling the harm of Kendra’s Law in New York, Jaffe’s influence on which he was immensely proud, which effectively tracks and restricts the movement and autonomy of thousands of New Yorkers, the plurality of whom are young Black men. About psychiatric institutions being a necessary political home for abolition, about its function in the carceral state to confine and restrict and delegitimize thought patterns that threaten normative capitalistic ideals of validity. I won’t write this all. I did, but I won’t. If I have to prove it to you it’s not worth my time. I’m so tired today.)

But maybe I‘ll spend just a moment on his most barbaric and pure example of colonizer madness, Jaffe’s utter obsession with anosognosia: the theory that people who experience psychosis are so unable to know their own minds as to make them unreliable narrators of their own existence to the point where they deny their “illness” and therefore must be treated as hostile, unaware, and volatile in that defensive unawareness.

Anosognosia is the theoretical foundation of Jaffe’s life’s work, and it was spurred most viciously in praxis as retaliation against the peer services movement. Jaffe continuously, erroneously, devastatingly insisted that there was no scientific basis for the idea that a person in recovery can be helpful to a person actively struggling with mental health challenges. The cavernous depths of dehumanization and paternalism embedded in the anosognosia argument are darkly, inexhaustibly interwoven with our experiences as a colonized people.

And yes, the heart of the colonizer is also colonized, unto itself and perpetrated forever outward. How utterly traumatizing Jaffe must have known this idea was to individuals and groups of people who have, for centuries, systematically had their rights and personhood stripped from them.

Can you imagine, reader, a man in 2020 being so effective at gaslighting tens of millions of people into questioning the soundness of their own lived experiences? Their own ability to conceptualize reality? Can you imagine that man quietly laughing off the suggestion that his implication is retraumatizing to people who experience marginalization over and over again? Can you imagine people that you once thought you could trust—policymakers, professionals, family members, acquaintances—starting sentences with “well, but what I think he’s trying to say is…”1

Oh, you can imagine? Our deep reckoning in the US, this season and for the past four years, with the depravity of a mindset illuminated as pervasive in our culture, is far from over (for those of you that needed a light shone on it which, I know, many of us did not).

And while we continue to fight against fascism and white supremacy, while newly activated people daily join us, with a revolutionary spirit, in an effort to firmly shake off the yoke of colonialism from our individual and communal lives and disentangle it from the structures that uphold our livelihoods and institutions, I am so often left with the question I am asking myself today: What do I do with all of this hatred for my colonizer?

That in his death Jaffe’s impact ignites my indignation, compels me to assert my humanity, forces pen to paper to claim my existence, burns at my throat; he isn’t worth this emotion. He deserves none of it. None of these colonizers do, dead or living. And yet…oh, but it is so vastly complicated, isn’t it? Here then: I will list my current hatreds specifically.

Jaffe, I hate everything you’ve made me fight for in my career: proving that we can recover, proving that we can know our own minds, that we can be valuable in society, that we are worthy of our successes, that we are capable of coming into community, of knowing love and family and sexuality and pleasure. How dare you make me prove myself to a world unworthy of me; make me prove myself in systems so toxic and putrid and yet necessary for my own survival.

I am so sick of proving, of watching the people that I love have to prove that they embody a multitude of identities and experiences that are worthy; that you are a proof point—a theory of mind and society that I must continuously degrade myself to counter—is evidence enough that we live in an entirely colonized, white supremacist dystopian reality. I am done showing up for your discussion. I am finished with your colonizer’s table.

Oh, but then also, I am just so sad for you, and I can’t describe how much I hate that I’m sad for you; that I feel sorrow for the colonizer’s heart. I hate that I am so sorry for you that you could never learn in this lifetime the beauty and sensuality of the full human experience. That you could never appreciate the richness of the human mind that includes wild, extravagant, other-worldly, terrifying, mysterious experiences.

I hate that I feel regret for you that, despite a 15 year battle with leukemia, you still somehow lacked the empathy and curiosity of mind to expand your experiences of illness into an appreciation for the experience of those of us whose power, autonomy, physicality, family, career, conception of self, and life trajectory is altered through diagnosis at no fault of our own.

I hate that I feel sorry for you that you needed so desperately to dedicate your life to paternalism, to the denial of the right of every person to experience themselves wholly and be loved and accepted and prioritized because of their madness, not in despite of it, and not only after the madness has been scrubbed and codified and ordered and restrained.

I hate that I am so thoroughly bound up with the work and legacy of my colonizer that, even as I articulate my hatred, I’m worried that I don’t deserve to write this, to have these experiences, that they don’t matter. I am filled with the pervasive, never-ending self-doubt and internalized misogyny that is rammed down the throats of every pathologized person, most often by hand-wringing smug white men. I hate that I have been made to feel this way over and over and that a life of resistance, a life of advocacy, a life of a person who knows discrimination is a life vastly interconnected with the lives of their oppressors. Oh, this hatred, it is so utterly complicated. I hate that you exhaust me.

Goodbye, colonizer Jaffe. If they make a statue of you, I will pull it to the ground, and I will weep for us both.

Editor’s note: Please keep any comments limited to the subject of DJ Jaffe’s efforts to legislate for compulsory treatment and his work at The Treatment Advocacy Center.

Show 1 footnote

  1. If you have it in your heart right now to comment on this article or to reach out to tell me a story about “so-and-so family member or friend,” or your “experience as a professional in xyz healthcare setting” with a pathologized person, kindly explaining to me that “people who experience psychosis often don’t know their own minds, that the throes of psychosis are so sad, so violent, so devastating that you/we absolutely must protect a person, absolutely must protect everyone else, that if I only knew…” I invite you, now and forever, to never speak to me. Then spend the next decade in serious, critical meditation on the effects of colonization on your own heart and the way you perpetuate harm in your community. And then after that decade of reflection you can then ask yourself if you truly believe that I do not know what you know, and if I really need to be convinced with your anecdote. If the answer is still “yes,” please start again at the beginning of this footnote. ↩

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

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38 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Briana, I haven’t been on MIA much, but came here and saw this, read it, and a big thanks for honestly laying out the impacts of Jaffe here. People should have to answer for their legacies, living or dead (through their adherents). Years ago in Vermont, I can remember the Treatment Advocacy Center calling into conference calls at the legislature, aghast that the forced treatment laws weren’t strangulating enough. They were relentless, clean cut, number-mongerers. And organized. It must be truly exhausting to continuously take on folks like Jaffe, who are on speed-dial from major media and who flaunt polysyllabic words to the public that must be true because they can’t be pronounced. Appreciate you speaking passionately from the inside.

    • so happy and the absolute opposite of surprised to see your voice on here old friend. Thank you for reminding me that public culpability and answering for the the sins a legacy of oppression are critical components to restorative justice necessary for any authentic honoring of human dignity

    • More than 35 years ago, after the hearing with Voc-Rehab that would rule in my favor, the Commissioner would still fault the hearing and I did not realize the nature of how contextual law is to shaping image and my well being, if not the role by which advocacy attempts to effect change. Understand the small amount of time being spent to enter this log, to try and “see” how a layered conversation is perceived and read is puzzling.

      Back then I would discover some stickers, “Research takes Brains” that would appear in mental health events. I didn’t know of Fuller Torrey nor was aware of how he was even caught removing the brains from people without the legal authorizations. To understand the degree and depth of hurt that has been inflicted into us, on us by others is beyond words.

      At that time, my healing and advocating response/rebuttal would be spent making a diploma type of piece that made the ruling of Hearing Officer important to me. The frame shop that cut the matte though misspelled the term, Citizen, which I purposefully had written under my name.

      This concept by from which the power flows forth needs to be held and understood on different planes of being, in how the magic of the I becomes the WE.

      In this way, can We/I awaken others, too? Have a Great Labor Day! (And keep on posting, discussing and thinking about one’s purpose in LIFE!)

  2. Thanks, this was really illuminating on Jaffe and the TAC.

    I am from the UK and although we have similar organisations and individuals here they are not so rabid or bombastic.

    I have recently been reading and thinking about how psychiatry is mainly about controlling the distressed working class. This article illuminates that thought very clearly.

  5. I must admit, when I read that Jaffe had died, I thought that was good, which I really shouldn’t say. But when an industry is based on scientific fraud, is destroying the lives of millions and millions, and is killing “8 million” people every year.

    https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2015/mortality-and-mental-disorders.shtml

    Those who advocate for more power for that very destructive and ungodly disrespectful industry; they are the enemy, and that’s who I thought Jaffe was. As a Christian, I do hope he is judged fairly by God. My condolences to his family, hopefully the family members Jaffe’s been neurotoxic poisoning can heal some day. And, absolutely, I believe forced or coerced medical treatment, of any sort, should be illegal.

    But I do stand 100% against the propaganda he spewed, like “But as an advocate for the 4% who are seriously ill, I highlight that the seriously mentally ill who go untreated are often more violent than others.”

    This is BS, since the antidepressants, and supposedly the antipsychotics have blackbox warnings, right on their boxes. Pointing out that the drug classes the psychiatrists prescribe, actually cause akathisia, which can result in the violence they blame on their clients.

    And over 80% of the “mental health” workers’ clients are actually child abuse survivors, victims of crimes, not “violent” people.

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
    https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo

    But I hope you can overcome your hate for Jaffe, Briana, since I am of the belief hate is a very destructive emotion for any person who hates another. However, I too, am completely appalled by the magnitude of the psychiatric industry’s crimes against innocent humans, and humanity as a whole.

  6. “I hate that I feel regret for you that, despite a 15 year battle with leukemia, you still somehow lacked the empathy and curiosity of mind to expand your experiences of illness into an appreciation for the experience of those of us whose power, autonomy, physicality, family, career, conception of self, and life trajectory is altered through diagnosis at no fault of our own.”

    But you see, it is that “lack of insight” that they talk about so much. Their “diagnosis” really are a way for them to see into their own lives, repressions and deranged thought. It never is about the subject, it is about them and one of the main reasons so many “disorders” came about. A man knows himself and protects himself, and sometimes he can illuminate the world about himself through blaming and shaming others.

    Hopefully we can educate people that it is not about themselves at all, as individuals. It is up to us to educate, for safety and freedoms from the sickness that psychiatry employs and pays for.

    Briana, thank you SO very much for being enraged and not accepting of these hateful privileged pretenders.
    Illness and death is not something that calls to closed minds. They are too self absorbed, perhaps it would be too painful for them to even think on it. I understand the regret feelings, I have had them, it is a sorrow that this person could never see people for who they were and chose to not just see them only from a prejudiced biased place, but then hold the power to sway others. Hold the power to denigrate people to a piece of garbage. Like stonings in public but it seems our politicians are also involved, for they are also ignoring what is being said.

    Your words are true and you are carrying an important message to people. We have to educate people to protect themselves and shore each other up against psychiatry. Educate them about the harmful beast that psychiatry is.

  7. This piece was one I knew I would love, and still I’m stunned by its passion, variety, and spirit of defiance toward everything Jaffe profited from and, possibly, stood for. I was one of the MANY Mad people who heard about Jaffe’s death and knew I would, for the foreseeable future, breathe more freely. Lobbyists as evil as he was come along, maybe once in a generation. Ms. Gilmore is right about the DECADES of work ahead of us to end Jaffe’s reign of terror. But, his death will make our journey to progress that much more attainable.

    • J, I have to agree, and the spirit of defiance is the strength and resolve that stood out when I read it.
      It is liberating on so many levels. It gives strength.
      And it strikes me that Jaffe did not give “strength” to those family members. The sad thing is that his kind of message rips families apart, makes families partake and engage of deeply hurtful controlling behaviour.
      I feel bad for the unsuspecting families who see the legacy of this barbaric partaking. It is first done
      by families as acts of desperation (which psych cashes in on) and then they tell themselves it is because of love. It is a very confusing place for everyone except those who shove this stuff down people’s throats.
      And as families age, they look back on the mess they became involved in.

  8. I would like to update my first comment, which compared to some of the more impassioned ones since seems equivocal, almost stodgy.

    Especially I don’t want to minimize or seem to invalidate briana’s hatred of all things jaffee and all things psychiatry, in fact she should nurture it, until eventually the energy can be directed into some form of concrete resistance.

  10. I am absolutely gobsmacked to hear of Jaffe’s passing. His pervasively poisonous presence felt to me immortal infinite and eternal in it’s force. In honesty my original reaction to the post was the presumption the piece was meant in a figurative sense in a I cast you out of my psyche and thus your death to my sphere of existence in this temporal plane kind of obituary (as if any survivor could ever erraticat his presence and power to promulgate the supreme need to stomp out our life force at all costs and by any means necessary for our own good).

    His legacy and the absolutely ruthless colonial efforts of his and his cohorts efforts are tantamount to an assault on humanity that I fear may be a string that may actively have the potential to ultimately manifest in an existential threat to all lives and specifically result in the violent suppression of non-normatives and normatives alike. My heart is screaming and my soul is grieving for all of ours who’s life was cut short as a result for all of the families well intended or actively abusive who found solace and validation in Jaffe’s words who became complicit partners in the murder of their kin. Who would be destroyed to know that when they had the chance to know they chose to know that knowing our truth was too much a bridge to cross tand that knowing the colonizers truth was safer warmer guiltless in fact it was a comfort because it wasn’t their fault that we were suffering from too much life suffering from spiritual emergence in a world increasingly devoid of the spirit after generations seeking to know the secrets of what we once understood as the creator and the ancestors. That there is so very little hope the damage can be repaired the horrors of these atrocities can be reconciled and healed yet try we must, lower ourselves to the arena of oppressors we might have to but accept our unworthiness to sacrifice our truth and voice we must never.

    Reading that his physical form has expired and thus his spirit has shifted from this plane in a literal sense left me reeling in a visceral panic like response of disbelief veiled in a fear that his death might leave me liable to a poltergeist-like phantom now liable to take to terrorizing all survivors intermittently from the grave. In a very real and utterly devastating sense his ghost will continue to haunt and terrorize all of us who have been so unfortunately designated as a diagnostically determined lunatic. I feel like my entire being is crying and sobbing and screaming but I have yet to shed a tear I’m still expecting to hear and see and feel his vitriol and disempowering delusional diatriabes behind every other than survivor operated and protected space. Is this real…am I dreaming wasn’t he just on C-SPAN isn’t he due for a livestream huffington post to remind us how NAMI doesn’t take SMI seriously so lock them up restrain them hard and for goddamn sake’s don’t let that shit happen in my back yard. I think I just realized my decision to follow his social media and closed groups for the past few years under the guise of keeping up with knowing the devil you know may have been simultaneously served as a self-appropriated punishment and figurative flagellation by way of shame as much as a genuine feeling that at the threat to my life I needed to remain informed and abreast to know what brand of my life must be eradicated by any means necessary were we selling today…but I guess that’s over now.

    I guess this comment is to say I need a timestamp to believe this is real that i have to suit up for the long haul living in the enemy’s camp but this time his voice is little less violent a little less powerful and if nothing else his ability to degrade dehumanize and disempower the peer community’s ongoing efforts isn’t possible at least not in real time and at least we know that he died trying but we haven’t all died yet and despite all their efforts our kind will always emerge in some manner in some way and in some place and maybe one day in this life or the next the lights of our can warm the world the way the universe intended.

  11. “Jaffe’s utter obsession with anosognosia: the theory that people who experience psychosis are so unable to know their own minds as to make them unreliable narrators of their own existence to the point where they deny their “illness” and therefore must be treated as hostile, unaware, and volatile in that defensive unawareness.”

    Exquisitely poisonous.

    “Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy… the fear to attack.” Dr Strangelove.

    Not only this but also creating in the minds of enforcers the fear of being attacked. Work their paranoia with horror stories, shoot first, tamper with evidence later. Hey, wasn’t it Jaffe who suggested ‘setting up your loved ones’ by turning the furniture over before calling the cops? Which in my State has got to them enabling ‘spikings’ with benzos [which later becomes your regular medication with a bit of fraud from a doctor] and the planting of knives on ‘targets’. Not really necessary as the person charged with protecting the public doesn’t know what the protections are, and is allowing citizens to be referred for being asleep as a result of being ‘spiked’ with date rape drugs. I suppose it saves the ‘suicide by cops’ narrative from the planted knife if they can arbitrarily detain any citizen because they ‘suspect’ (and require no reasonable grounds to be met aka suss laws with forced drugging).

  15. When I first read the post yesterday, I would experience confusion in response to my history in advocacy. I did not know of Jaffee until now, and I would discover the association with Torrey. So, I had to look at their website, and read, to understand the whole, bias and all. The journey though rerouted me into a different reality and to read/understand this page, with a title “An Obituary for My Colonizer: Reflections on the Legacy of DJ Jaffee” along with the Editor’s note to “Keep DJ’s effort to legislate for compulsory treatment”. The question I ask if it were possible, would An Obituary for “Our” Colonizer serve the community from a different perspective? “Colonizer” has another meaning and not to deflect from writing through the keyboard, but to keep on, keeping on in learning seems to be a essential for our ability to converse in and away from the struggle for social justice. Locally, the issues of “No Justice, No Derby!” are playing out in the press. Another question might also address the nature of science, as framing and applied to the issue of mental health care from “our” perspective. I realize and respect the discourse around the role of science as currently being framed in these discussions. The discourse may also need to examine the law, the creation of law and what forces that shaped a reality to exclude and diminish our potential to recover from abuse. Even to see through false arguments of Jaffee and Torrey without being destroyed.

    In some ways, unique to healthy discussions, (though typing silently and pasting is a different way) I miss the space in which an in-time conversation can be realized. These article and comments seem to be seeds, so to speak. Tks for the contribution.

  17. Thanks for this powerful piece Briana. It boggles the mind the media chooses to describe DJ Jaffe as an “honorable advocate” and a “strong campaigner of forced treatment” – in the same sentence. As if there could ever be any honor or advocacy in stripping people of their rights, dignity and humanity. I am hopeful that everyone is held to account for their misdeeds, if not on this earth then in the next.

  18. His death brings me sorrow. Leukemia is an awful way to go.

    Sadly it won’t undo the harmful policies passed through his activism. He was more of an advocate for annoyed family members and psychiatrists who made a killing off crippling and defaming through quack treatments than the “consumers” themselves.

    What Briana describes in her encounter with him, his refusal to make eye contact or acknowledge her humanity is what I remember during my 25 years in psychiatry. Numbed and dumbed down as I was, I felt it keenly.

    In dehumanizing others they dehumanize themselves.

    It’s sobering that Jaffe will never have another chance to make amends to those he–more or less–unwittingly harmed. To undo his TAC policies is up to others.

    Rest in peace Jaffe. May Heaven have mercy on your soul.

    • I do NOT defend that by any means Oldhead.

      Our opponents would (probably) argue that it’s different because it’s not punishment, but “help.”
      Peter Breggin points out how calling random brain damage, pharmaceutical torture (that is a thing) and imprisonment “treatment” instead of punishment enables psychiatrists to treat law abiding citizens worse than convicted felons.

      Would D.J. Jaffe have given the cootie treatment and avoided eye contact with some cancer victim he was trying to organize a fund raiser for? Interesting how the pro-psych force can rationalize what they do so easily.

      “I have the right to force these drugs on Blanche.” TAC Dude
      “Blanche doesn’t like them. She says they upset her stomach and give her terrors. I see her seize on them.” Friend of Blanche
      “Blanche is ‘mentally ill’ so if she doesn’t like them that’s just her illness talking. Lol. If she seizes or throws up she’s faking it for attention.” TAC Dude

    • “If (as alleged) Jaffee encouraged family members to upend the furniture to help get the cops to commit their relatives, this would constitute conspiracy to falsely imprison, surely a felony. Hard to see many “sides” to that.”

      Oh I don’t know oldhead. I’ve seen a video on youtube of a Private Investigator instructing women to pour pasta sauce all over themselves when making domestic complaints to police to ‘enhance’ the image (ie it looks a lot like blood and gets the pulse rate of officers up).

      In my instance the planting of a knife for police to find is being encouraged to enable the ‘weaknesses’ of our Mental Health Act (read legal protections for citizens) to be overcome. I know when I spoke to a friend about the knife I found in my pocket (surprise Boans) my wife was listening intently to find out what actually happened in the bedroom when her little plan was put into effect (she would be aware that police didn’t find the knife, but not aware the police lied on the record and I now have ‘history’ Still, not like our police to accept any proof when it doesn’t suit the false narrative they prefer). If anyone ever wished to find proof of the knife being planted, there’s the witness right there. But for now they prefer to utter with what they know to be fraudulent documents, and neglect their duties under various laws. 9 years seems a long time to be sitting on ones hands, particularly when I have offered to show them how they are doing these killings (perhaps they think that is an illness too? Not unlike the illness fabricated by the hospital by retrieving the proof of the ‘spiking’? Quite clever calling speaking the truth an illness when it’s a truth you don’t like due to your criminality)

      Police where I live prefer set ups in many ways. This confirmed by the large number of people who have been wrongly convicted of murders etc they haven’t committed.

      The Machiavellian attitude of the ends justify the means primary with mental health services. They really have no idea of the damage they are doing to families, and honestly believe that they are helping (which it is best to have them believe, because you wouldn’t want them ‘helping’ to repair any damage they do. As i stated to Dr Hickey, it’s a bit like being shot in the face by a shop keeper for asking if they have given you the correct change)

      The issue with the conspiracy would be the need for the person to admit that they turned the furniture over to create a false belief, and linking that to the reasons the police made referral to mental health. I know in my instance the knife they didn’t actually find was documented by police as justification for ‘lawful detain’ and then the fact that i was asleep was seen as being “reasonable grounds” to suspect I had a mental illness (and nothing to do with the Community Nurse lying to them. THAT would be a crime of “Create a False Belief” [like shouting Fire in a crowded theatre]). Of course they are not going to do anything about a guy who is allowing them to torture citizens and then have a doctor sign prescriptions for the ‘spikings’ post hoc to pervert the course of justice on their conspiring to torture and kidnap. They have support in these offences.

      For example, a police officer kicked a young man to death in the cells here, and the dozen witnesses to that killing refused to testify on the grounds that they would incriminate themselves [aka not doing anything to stop the killing] (fair enough it’s a right) but, this has had a flow on effect. When people are being assaulted in our hospitals, police know that they will maintain their silence and not testify and so never bother to investigate these assaults. You need to bring civil action and of course your lawyers family can be threatened by police soooooooo. You can be assaulted and have 20 witnesses to that assault, and even make application for the video via FOI but that evidence will be destroyed as soon as you apply (they can “edit” documents and any other evidence that doesn’t suit, see the “memo” I have authorising fraud to conceal torture), and your witnesses will not testify as to what they witnessed. case closed.

      Shame really that for 9 years now I still haven’t seen my family and all because the State wants to cover up a really bad cover up of the torture and kidnapping of a citizen, and then of course what they tried to do in the ED to conceal those matters. Happy Fathers Day Boans, for doing what would be considered the right thing [what does one do when you come across public officers torturing citizens? I now know the last thing you do is show them the proof, they simply send out police to retrieve it before committing serious criminal offences that will be authorised post hoc by the Minister [through a dereliction of duty], you get ‘fuking destroyed’.

      Hope they all enjoyed their time with their families, especially the Operations Manager and her supporters in their ‘fuking destroying’ me for nothing more than proving public sector misconduct with our police and mental health getting together and torturing, kidnapping and well negatively outcoming citizens.

      Here’s me thinking they would want to know about public officers getting involved in such conduct but ……. what they care about is ensuring no one knows what they are doing to conceal it. Distributing fraudulent documents despite the public right to access their medical records under the FOI Act, and having police threaten and intimidate peoples families.

      They have no defence so (I have a large number of nonsense letters form police and mental health where they simple don’t address the allegation of torture and kidnapping, and of course that means their criminal negligence that resulted in deaths will never be addressed whew)…. well they have been literally killing anyone who dared complain about their misconduct till now. Why change a model that works?

      And I wish them good luck with that. They say those that fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it, so lets hope they learned from the National Socialist forefathers. Their failure may be the reason they succeed this time around.

      • Three people get together and conspire to stupefy and commit an indictable offence namely kidnapping. The plot. Drop him with benzos, procure a police referral by planting a knife and some cannabis on his person (breach of s. 68 e of Criminal Code allowing detention by police) and then lie to police and claim he is a “patient” and obtain a s. 195 Police referral for examination by an Authorised Mental Health Practitioner (on the “reasonable grounds” they suspect the person has a mental illness as a result of the lie they have been told by the very same Community Nurse) who just happens to be waiting in the next room. Hey look, the law doesn’t protect citizens from arbitrary detentions and torture with a little bit of preparation. (cause acute stress reaction whilst stupefied with benzos administered without knowledge, and then force the target to talk lest they be assuaulted by police. The two DO NOTs of acute stress reaction = torture due to the assault with benzos.) [Imagine I had a police officer tell me he couldn’t see why being spiked with benzos was a deprivation of liberty. I mean when your going to plant a knife on someone for police, you can’t have then leaving so the ‘spiking’ was justified. I explained to him it was as good as putting hand cuffs on a person but ….. he threatened to arrest me for complaining so……]

        Community Nurse calls police and lies to create a false belief (crime). Procures the apprehension or detention of a person not suffering from a mental illness (crime) via the production of a fraudulent From 1 (crime) (and Form 3 [crime]). Allows police to torture the person once in their custody by allowing a citizen he knows has been ‘spiked’ with benzos without their knowledge be interrogate (breach of the Convention against the use of Torture acquiescence of duty).

        Once the victim has been transported against their will to the hospital, Community Nurse arranges for the Senior Medical Officer to compound or conceal evidence of a criminal offence (crime) via the production of a fraudulent prescription (crime) and conspire to pervert the course of justice (crime). He knowingly assaults me (crime) when I deny the right to physically examine me, and then disposes of the written complaint I complete and which alleges misconduct and may be required by the Corruption and Crime Commission (crime). They later request a copy of the copy I have to conceal that particular serious offence. The Senior Medical Officer then prescribes a “chemical restraint” to make the victim very ill and allow them to be diagnosed with a mental illness and start treatment with the very same drug that is making them sick.

        Okay, I get it that they would have looked and decided that providing thew documents of these events to lawyers might not be such a goof look, so ….. they pretended that I was someones “patient” (because I certainly wasn’t theirs. I had only ever had the status of “referred person”) and conspire to pervert the course of justice by first concealing the evidence/proof of the offences, and then when documents were lawfully requested by the Law Centre, providing fraudulent documents not requested by lawyers, and which gave the impression that I had been a “patient” for ten or more years. They call this fraud “editing”. And of course there was in my instance the problem of me having redacted copies of the documents proving the ‘spiking’ which was rather inconvenient to the torturing police. So they had motive for not finding the Criminal Code while the original conspirators arranged an alternative outcome.

        And how fortunate for them that the police can’t find their copy of the Criminal Code while they do all this.

        These people are extremely dangerous and my community is quite prepared to allow them to engage in this criminal conduct because …….? Because if you don’t, they will neglect their duty to report the matters while they kill you in an Emergency Dept and there isn’t a thing the police can do about it. They can’t find their copy of the Criminal Code so …. and of course we can’t start holding one doctor to account. What next?

        Long and the short of it Oldhead, there is only one preferred outcome, and they simply don’t care how that is achieved. The person who has the finger pointed at them is going to swing.

        And when I was told by the Operations Manager who threatened me for pointing out her duty to report (lest she add to the offences), her claim was they were trying to save my marriage. Now I laughed when I heard that because imagine that the concealment of all these crimes was done with such a “good faith” defense.

        We tortured and kidnapped you Boans, but your lack of insight and complaining needed to be dealt with, so we arranged to retrieve the documented proof you had and then kill you to save your marriage. And to do that we needed to engage in further conspiracy with your wife to have her assist in gaslighting you to suicide. Not our fault she started wavering and sought advice from someone who doesn’t have the stomach for it.

  21. I see this writer caught in a very difficult state of mind. This is the fate of the victim who depends for their meaning on a victimizer.

    Consider the possibility that Critical Theory, with its Colonizers and Deconstruction and all the rest of it, might come from a similar place as Jaffe’s theories. Consider if you can that Jaffe’s obsession might in fact have been his own illness. If you have never met someone who seriously lacks self-awareness, you might not credit it as a human possibility. I have met a few such people.

    I will not burden down this comment with further imaginings. Here we see the fierce proponent of a devastating evil meet his maker, while the evil quite certainly lives on. Obviously, the two are not the same. If you wish to understand more about these things, I suggest you leave the traditional boundaries of academia and explore, at least for a while, elsewhere. There is much to learn beyond the sweet safety of the ivory tower! And that goes for both the colonizer and his critics.

    • Consider if you can that Jaffe’s obsession might in fact have been his own illness.

      If we adopt the metaphor of health and illness to explain his actions. But why would we ever want to do that, seeing all that has been wrought as a result of psychiatry’s reification of that metaphor?

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