Malignant Do-Gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry

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My personal struggle to stop my friend’s court-ordered psychiatric deterioration has reached the Supreme Court of the United States. We’ll soon know whether involuntary mental health patients are protected by the rule of law. If the Justices deny my petition, I will take this to mean the mental health industry can get away with anything, including lying to the federal court.

My friend was much more functional taking care of herself with methadone, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol than she is under the modern psychiatric standard of care.

Judge gavel with scales, books and american flag on wooden table

SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States – SCOTUS – is the country’s court of last resort. One only gets to file at SCOTUS if they’ve already filed in the other courts that also have jurisdiction. My petition, In re James Joseph Knochel, was docketed by the SCOTUS Clerk on November 29, 2021, was distributed to the Justices on January 13, 2022, and is scheduled for discussion on February 18, 2022.

Most of the petitions filed at SCOTUS are petitions for writ of certiorari – where the petitioners ask the justices to reconsider the rulings of the lower courts. Mine is a petition for the extraordinary writ of mandamus: I’m asking SCOTUS to order the United States District Court to hold the evidentiary hearing that is required by the case law.

My petition to SCOTUS is not about mental health per se: it’s about how one is supposed to establish that fraud was perpetrated on the United States District Court. The district court insists that the informal letter that it uses to justify dismissing my petitions filed on my friend’s behalf is genuine, and does not consider the possibility that it was duped. My petition tells the SCOTUS Justices that my evidence of the fraudulence of this letter is overwhelming: I have videos, witnesses, police reports, subsequent state court records, court filings notarized by my friend, etc.

I also used this filing to tell the Justices the standard of care implemented by modern allopathic psychiatry is no better than the bloodletting that was used to accidentally finish off President George Washington. President Washington might’ve survived his 1799 cold, if only his doctors were aware the theory justifying bloodletting was falsified with the publication of William Harvey’s book about the circulation of the blood in 1628.

Background

I met the friend who is the party to my petitions to the state and federal courts in March 2015. After 45 minutes of listening to her stream of thoughts, I realized she was metaphorically ‘high as a kite’. At that first encounter I gave her a little trinket.

As she invited me into her world, I realized she really was self-medicating with the street pharmacy. I also recognized that she is quite intelligent, when she had a little food in her and wasn’t whacked out on cocaine and heroin.

By September 2015 my friend was doing quite well with her substance abuse problems: she was going to quit everything. Then she ran out of alcohol, became psychotic and was captured by the mental health industry. I visited her at that first hospitalization. After about two weeks in that emergency room, she was ready to check herself out. But they wouldn’t let her leave.

I was almost able to throw a Constitutional monkey wrench into Arizona’s involuntary mental health system’s standard operating procedures. But on our animal farm, established systems are more important to protect than someone trying to exercise the US Constitution’s most fundamental protection of liberty. I was arrested for thinking my granted court order was enough to liberate my friend from unlawful confinement. My court order was no defense against being falsely accused by the hospital’s security guards. My friend was hauled off to be formally misdiagnosed and mistreated by the involuntary treatment industry.

The affidavits from my friend’s first 2015 involuntary hospitalization found their way into my possession. The psychiatrists said, essentially, “patient expects us to believe that she was psychotic because she was drinking 2 bottles of liquor a day, and using crack cocaine and methadone. She can’t explain why the hospital was treating her with Haldol. We know she’s a chronic mental patient who requires palliative medications for the rest of her life because we got her stabilized with orders for treatment in 2008 and 2010. After those orders expired, she promptly discontinued services. She must’ve been psychotic the whole time since she disappeared on us in 2011.”

After almost a month of refusing anti-psychotics while being involuntarily evaluated, my friend had mostly recovered from her alcohol withdrawal. The psychiatrists recognized that she’s quite intelligent. They made her a ‘deal with the devil’: if she agreed to take haloperidol (Haldol) voluntarily, they’d drop their prosecution.

She was released to my apartment. That afternoon I had to go to my first court hearing for my own persecution. When I returned my friend had bought herself a 24 ounce can of beer. I was dismayed, but had no authority to do anything about this.

A few days later I took her liquor bottle away, in spite of my lack of authority. Over the ensuing 12 hours, I personally witnessed what ‘alcohol withdrawal’ does to a person whose metabolism depends on alcohol (7 calories/gram).

My friend was subjected to an order for involuntary mental health treatment by the Arizona Superior Court in November 2015. She was promptly cornered by the psychiatrists, who injected her with haloperidol. Then they released her to her mother’s house. A day and a half later my friend had to be taken to a real hospital, for having poisoned herself. She told the real ER doctor that she wasn’t suicidal.

She told me the psychiatrists’ haloperidol injection had ‘hit her like a truck’, and that she had tried everything she could think of to counteract the agony that resulted from this prescription. I don’t think she told the real doctors why she’d accidentally poisoned herself: she already knew that the involuntarily treated are not allowed to complain about the actual effects of forced medications.

Animal Farm Justice

After six months of forced treatment, I was certain the evidence was clear that my friend was being harmed by her involuntary treatment providers’ efforts to pretend her symptoms were not caused by substance abuse.

I filed again in the state court. My intention was to bring my friend’s treatment into compliance with the requirements of state law. That judge blew me off. After the third identical dismissal I noticed the difference between the statute as quoted on my dismissals and the statute as listed on AZLeg.gov. The quote on my order of dismissal used mismatched quotation marks to insert a few extra words into the Arizona Revised Statutes.

The state court of appeals recruited one of their retired judges to dismiss my appeal (presumably so none of the actives would have to put their name on this justice-travesty). The dismissal did not comment on the superior court judge’s misquotation of the Arizona Revised Statutes. The Arizona Supreme Court denied my petition for review without comment.

I next filed in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona. I made the mistake of using the business office of my friend’s probation-court-ordered treatment center as her mailing address. A few days later I received electronic notification from the district court about a “motion to dismiss” being filed in my case. I downloaded the filing, and promptly replied to point out that the informal ‘motion to dismiss’ was obviously fraudulent. The United States District Court granted the fraudulent motion to dismiss anyways, without holding the evidentiary hearing required by the cited case law.

The United States Court of Appeals apparently did not read my filings.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”
–George Orwell, Animal Farm

To paraphrase Agent Smith (The Matrix), “What good are rights, if no court will help you enforce them?”

A Simple Explanation for a Supposedly-Chronic Condition

In the summer of 2018 (after the fraud on the District Court), when my friend was in the third year of her mistreatment by allopathic psychiatry, she became annoyed that all the new clients at her dual diagnosis (drug abuse/mental health) treatment center were being cheek-swabbed. She herself had not been cheek-swabbed when she’d been sent there two years before, and asked for this test for herself.

She told me the genetic test revealed that she is a “poor methylator” who cannot turn the shelf-stable food fortification folic acid into a human-usable form of vitamin B9. Furthermore, adding L-Methyl-Folate (vitamin B9) to her routine was like flipping a switch from “Depressed” to “Not-Depressed”. Maybe this is why she’d been depressed all her life, and why she’d had substance abuse problems for most of her life.

Some people are able to use alcohol and recreational drugs ‘recreationally’. My friend used drugs because they allowed her to feel normal. People who self-medicate compulsively always have physiological reasons behind their compulsions.

Rather than re-evaluate their misdiagnosis, the allopathic psychiatrists forced on my friend by the State of Arizona added vitamin B9 to my friend’s cocktail of palliative psychiatric drugs.

I emailed a biochemist I’d corresponded with previously. He said even people with this particular genetic mutation can get enough vitamin B9 from an adequate diet, as there are many plants and other foods that are good sources of methylated forms of folate (vitamin B9).

Various websites on the internet say that people with the MTHFR mutation need to avoid all sources of folic acid for optimal health. In our crazy modern world, it takes special effort to avoid fortified flour.

My friend escaped from that treatment program in July 2019. She did well for a month, then resumed drinking alcohol as soon as she was released from probation in September 2019. She was re-captured by the mental health industry in October 2019, and was subjected to guardianship proceedings.

My friend’s new doctors are probably not aware of her genetic condition of requiring food with vitamins, instead of the worthless-to-her provitamin (folic acid) used to fortify flour. Her guardian’s most recent public filing in her guardianship case reveals that the medical professionals think my friend’s ‘behavioral’ symptoms are entirely separate from her substance abuse problems.

‘Malignant Do-Gooderism’: The Tragedies of Good Intentions

A do-gooder is “a well-meaning but unrealistic or interfering philanthropist or reformer.”

“Malignant Do-Gooderism” describes my observations of the futility of punishing people for hurting themselves, and of the modern mental health industry’s efforts to help people with obsolete treatments that arguably cause the deterioration they supposedly treat.

Involuntary psychiatry is when do-gooderism becomes malignant (in the sense of ‘cancerous’):

“These medications make us suffer. We’re all in hell. It’s no wonder this place is speed-infested: Speed is the only way to feel”.
–Emily Mihaylo, January 2016, after being discharged from a mental hospital to a de facto drug house.

When I searched for variants of ‘Malignant Do-Gooder’ I learned of an academic who wrote a book titled Pathological Altruism. This gentler term describes “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm”.

Referring to the missteps of conventional psychiatry as pathological altruism is giving them a pass. There is no excuse for modern psychiatry not realizing patients’ mental health symptoms actually have causes that can be easily treated with interventions that directly address those causes.

Allopathic psychiatrists are malignant do-gooders.

Obsolescence of Harmful Medicine

The physicist Max Planck observed that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This quote is often summarized as ‘Science advances one funeral at a time’.

Medicine advances much slower than reproducible Science, as every patient is unique.

Harmful medical practices seem to pass through four stages:

  1. Standard of care.
  2. Obsolete, but still commonly used by doctors who are not yet aware that the technique doesn’t work. George Washington’s cause of death should be listed as ‘exsanguination’ [bloodletting]. In recent decades, arthroscopic knee surgery was studied and found to be no better than a placebo, but is still commonly performed anyways. Anti-cholesterol drugs (statins, etc) have been found to be mostly worthless for preventing heart attacks, and cause massive collateral harm.
  3. ‘We don’t commonly do that anymore’. A medical text recommending bloodletting was published around 1928 – presumably because the last of the doctors who routinely bled out their patients had not yet died out.
  4. Use of the old medicine is prosecutable (‘bloodletting’, blister agents, calomel, mercury, etc).

While bloodletting is still occasionally used therapeutically by modern medicine, this is usually when a person has a genetic condition resulting in too much iron in their blood. Leeches are useful when re-attaching limbs, as blood tends to pool in the reattached limb before the veins finish re-attaching themselves.

The use of bloodletting as a general palliative treatment is now in stage 4: if a modern person went to their doctor for a headache, and the doctor took two pints blood to balance the patient’s blood humors, the doctor ought to be prosecuted.

The use of most psychiatric prescriptions is currently in stage 2: allopathic psychiatrists don’t realize their go-to drugs don’t actually work, and that there are much better treatments.

Doctors seem to only abandon ineffective treatments when they have something else to do instead. It takes decades/centuries of coordinated effort to remove the most popular harmful interventions from the practice.

Constitutional Governance: Fundamental Principles

“A constitution is an aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed.”

In the system of government defined by the United States Constitution, the legislatures make the rules, the executive branches implement/enforce the rules, and the judiciary adjudicates legal disputes/disagreements. The judiciary is responsible for protecting all people’s fundamental rights.

Civil Commitment

In an effort to help people who have supposed ‘mental disorders’, various governments created involuntary treatment programs to allow treatments to be forced on persons who don’t understand they need treatment. These are classified as “civil commitment” programs.

The Supreme Court has written that it’s a significant deprivation of liberty to be subjected to “civil commitment for any purpose”:

  • “This Court repeatedly has recognized that civil commitment for any purpose constitutes a significant deprivation of liberty that requires due process protection. […] “The state has a legitimate interest under its parens patriae powers in providing care to its citizens who are unable because of emotional disorders to care for themselves; the state also has authority under its police power to protect the community from the dangerous tendencies of some who are mentally ill.”
    –Addington v. Texas, 441 US 418 – Supreme Court 1979

I am making the case to SCOTUS that it is also a significant deprivation of liberty to be forced to take medications that cause the deterioration the doctors believe they’re treating.

Supreme Court Procedures

SCOTUS consists of eight associate justices and one chief justice. Each is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Each of the justices has a few law clerks. These are recently-graduated lawyers who have already spent a year assisting judges in one of the US Courts of Appeals. The law clerks are responsible for reading all the petitions that are docketed at SCOTUS.

Seven of the nine justices participate in the “Cert Pool”, where one clerk reads each petition and writes a summary for the seven cert pool justices. Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch do not participate in this pool – their clerks separately read all of the petitions.

Three law clerks should have read my petition by now.

The justices only discuss the petitions that they think are possibilities. Most of the petitions to the Supreme Court are never actually read by any of the justices.

One criticism of the Cert Pool is that the leanings of the justices are reflected in their clerks. The summary of each petition is highly affected by the clerk who reads it. For example, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’ clerk might think highly of my petition, but another justice’s clerk in the Pool, perhaps one who is more ‘practical’, might think my petition is not worthy of the Supreme Court’s attention.

Some Supreme Court clerks are said to not recommend a single petition to the justices.

I think my petition’s best chance is with Associate Justice Alito or Associate Justice Gorsuch’s clerks.

The justices get together on certain Fridays at their conference to discuss the various petitions they think are interesting. Most of the thousands of petitions filed at SCOTUS are not discussed at the conference – they are denied without comment.

I’m hopeful the Justices will agree that they should not participate in the lower courts’ use of the Animal Farm treatment on my petitions.

Getting Extra Attention for a Petition

I read that it can be useful to file for an “application” on a SCOTUS petition, so that it gets a little extra consideration from the justice who’s in charge of your circuit. Applications are where a petitioner to the Supreme Court asks for injunctive relief while their petition is pending.

I haven’t filed an application, or sought amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs, because I’m exhausted with my legal odyssey. Every filing I’ve made, since 2015, has been made with the expectation that the judge considering it will rule favorably. I have had many of my filings to the Clerk of the Supreme Court returned to me with letters explaining why the filing was not accepted.

My accepted/docketed petition, #21-6444, is clear as can be. I shouldn’t need a bunch of people to vouch for it to get the Justices’ attention.

Possible Outcomes from the Conference

Four justices have to vote to grant a petition for certiorari. I think five justices would have to vote to grant my petition for mandamus.

As best I can figure, there are five possibilities for what I’ll read in the Court’s 2/22/22 order list:

  1. Denied – the vast majority of SCOTUS petitions end up denied without comment. This would indicate that my petition did not resonate with any of the three law clerks who read it.
  2. Relisted – This either means that one of the nine justices wanted to talk about my Petition at the conference but they didn’t get to it, the justices need more time to compose a ruling on my petition, or one or more of the justices want to say why they would grant the petition even though there aren’t 4 or 5 votes to grant the petition. A relist means that at least my Petition got to the justices’ attention, and is still in contention. I would consider this a very good sign.
  3. Granted – A simple grant of my petition would probably be something like “The district court shall conduct an evidentiary hearing on the authenticity of the supposed ‘motion to dismiss’”. Sometimes petitions are granted for only some of the ‘questions presented’.
  4. Special Master Appointed – A special master conducts a proceeding sort of like in a district court, but compiles their findings and makes recommendations to the nine Justices as to what the Supreme Court should decide. This would be unusual, but I think it’s a possibility. If the Justices appoint a special master, that would mean that they intend to get to the root of the problems presented in my petitions, without forcing the other victims of our mental health system to wait for years for my case to wind through the District Court and the US Court of Appeals.
  5. Response requested – Not especially likely. The respondents to my petition are the “United States District Court” and the “United States Court of Appeals”. Most of the “response requested” in the Supreme Court’s docket are issued shortly after the file has been distributed to the justices, so this would have been done by now.

Special Masters are usually appointed when states sue each other in the Supreme Court.

If my Petition is denied, I have options. I have until March 21st to file a petition for writ of certiorari for my latest snubbing by the US Court of Appeals, or until March 10th to ask for an extension of time.

I’ve already petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for an extraordinary writ, so I’m set up to file for an open-ended extraordinary writ at SCOTUS.

I also have a bunch of unfavorable rulings from the Arizona Supreme Court that I can petition for mandamus on. While petitions for writ of certiorari have to be filed within 90 days of the lower court’s ruling, there is no strict time limit for asking SCOTUS for mandamus.

But I think my best Plan B is to ask for Congressional oversight of the Supreme Court, using one of the most inconvenient allopathic psychiatry ‘Truth Bombs’ (to be revealed at a later time).

I’m cautiously optimistic. But stay tuned: I might need your help to motivate Congress to exercise its oversight authority.

Conclusion

The tragedy of our modern mental health system is the common use of palliative drugs instead of looking for causes behind patients’ symptoms.

Science knows exactly how stimulants harm the metabolism. Other published science reveals how the symptoms of ‘mental illness’ can often be explained as metabolic problems: sometimes caused by substance abuse, sometimes by diet, sometimes treatable with nutrients or other physiological interventions.

Patients’ symptoms are always exacerbated by stress. Emotional stress is the most important drain on the body’s metabolism. I have references from old books at the ASU science library about how various types of stress cascade into ‘behavioral’ symptoms.

The term ‘allopathy’ was coined by the founder of homeopathy to describe his competition, who used primitive medicines from the Materia Medica and other ‘heroic’ treatments to directly counter their patients’ problematic symptoms. This was around 1800. No matter what you think of homeopathy, at least homeopaths didn’t routinely bleed their patients to death.

Modern psychiatrists who medicate ‘behavioral’ symptoms without concern as to their cause are ‘allopathic psychiatrists’.

Some modern doctors are aware of the origins of the term ‘allopathic’. I’m hopeful that psychiatrists who currently practice allopathically will get it, and make an effort to figure out their patients’ conditions rather than just medicate symptoms haphazardly.

Every patient who could have been helped by a psychiatrist implementing a holistic framework, but is instead treated with palliative drugs, is a tragedy of allopathic psychiatry.

We can do better.

Further Reading

I’ve populated the most important of my filings in the District Court into the Recap project:

18-cv-8004: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18212672/mihaylo-v-russell-jenkins/
19-cv-8086: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15069969/mihaylo-v-fackrell/
19-cv-8137: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15084417/mihaylo-v-knochel/

Most legal citations can be read through Google Scholar (search on scholar.google.com – select ‘case law’).

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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.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Good luck. This court as dominated is so conservartive and seems to prefer cases that appeal to its politics, so I feel the case will likely be denied, as you seem to be prepared to hear, but hope I am wrong.

    I am not sure I followed all the twists and turns in the legal story. But fighting for justice after harm is certainly part of psychiatry. You are asking SCOTUS to make Arizona listen, I understand. Though I am not sure what would be next. A civil case regarding harm caused?

    Meanwhile, I wonder about the person behind this mess. Hope she has found better forms of healing.

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  2. What people should be terrified of is the fusion of the Born Again Movement, the Recovery Movement, and the Mental Health System:

    Rick Warren, Hope For Mental Health Ministry
    https://hope4mentalhealth.com/

    Materials made up to promote discussion groups, free counseling hours donated to the public, and a very close relationship with the people in the new 8 Story Integrative Psychiatry building at UC Irvine.

    Joshua

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  3. from Mind Freedom, looking at this WA proposed involuntary treatment legislation

    JOIN MFI IN OPPOSING SB 5720
    https://mindfreedom.org/front-page/join-mfi-in-opposing-sb-5720

    SB 5720 “Involuntary Treatment Act”

    https://www.wsha.org/articles/bulletin-changes-to-the-involuntary-treatment-act-ita-part-1-key-changes/#:~:text=Effective%20January%201%2C%202021%2C%20SB,)%2C%20excluding%20weekends%20and%20holidays.

    https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5720&Year=2019&Initiative=false

    So it says the Governor signed it, Effective date 6/11/2020.

    Joshua

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