April 18, 2012: Corrupt Social Worker Staff At The Arizona State Hospital: Wherein I Again Initiate Contact With The The AZ Board Of Behavioral Health Examiners

       It occurs to me from Arizona State Hospital Chief Executive Officer Cory Nelson's Personal web page (www.crazycorycorner.weebly.com) and the letter that ASH Chief Operating Officer, Donna Noriega, wrote to me in relation to the woman who attacked and struck me with a metal and plastic chair (see April 10, 2012) that the lives and general welfare of the patients at ASH are somewhat of a joke. The patients, mind you, and the day to day life experiences of the patients, are somewhat amusing to these two, but not the security that comes with their jobs. As with the lower tier staff at ASH, Cory Nelson and Donna Noriega will go to great lengths to protect the reputation of their duty to the public that pays their salary, while somehow not being to comprehend the sanctity of patient dignity. Take Cory Nelson's description of the conditions at ASH, for example: 
       "People getting whacked right and left, patients having wild sex all over the hospital..." (Cory Nelson)
      All of it, a comedy of errors in terms of what the families of patients and the greater public expect when it comes to persons granted the privilege of caring for the lives others.
      This is a hospital that has upwards of 300 patients, all of whom are seriously mentally ill and 100% protected under applicable vulnerable adult statutes, and these two individuals have virtual control over the day to day operation. One, a man who writes a personal statement reflecting the mentality  of a fifteen year old kid, the other a woman who is currently being censured by state regulators due to her inability to conduct herself in a manner consistent with the terms of her professional license.
       The problem, of course, with administrative lapses of this sort, lies in the fact that the same attitudes trickle all the way down through the ranks of staff at ASH, leading the worst hospital technicians and nurses- who, without a doubt, have more close interaction with patients than any other form of staff-  to perceive that the lives of their wards are a somewhat of a joke, or at best, worth little more than the slightly above poverty wages that they earn.
       As exhibited by the recently exposed unlawful conduct of Donna Noriega (see "News Flash: Donna Noriega- Busted!" April 17, 2012), there are a variety of ways that ASH administrative staff abuse the responsibilities of their positions. It is classic ineptitude and greediness at the state level, and there is no better place for people like Donna Noriega to try and get away with their crap than within the administrative construct of ASH, where oversight and accountability is practically nonexistent (I am really curious about who exactly reported her in relation to these new revelations about her activities at ASH). In any case, it is my theory that I must unloosen one or another of the various staff persons that I interacted with at the Arizona State Hospital from their ingrained allegiance to the corrupt standards of practice at ASH, this if I am going to create any momentum on behalf the interests of the patients still at ASH. I was reluctant to go to far with certain aspects of my advocacy while still a patient at ASH because I had very real concerns for my safety, but I also did not want to compromise the well being of the staff members who had the good conscience at least offer their moral support of my efforts. But I am not a patient at ASH anymore, and the situation is no less critical today than it was prior to my discharge.  I am thus compelled to begin naming as many staff names as I can find in the documented records of my experiences at ASH.        
       As I have sated already, there is an endemic state of fear amongst the staff at ASH and throughout the Department of Health Services (ADHS), whereby individual employees have less faith in the system that they work in than I do, this in the sense that despite knowing that they are protected by federal whistle blower statutes and so on, and in spite of the fact that the terms of their employment contracts with the state require them to report unprofessional and/or criminal conduct, ASH staff are as a rule unwilling to come forward with any meaningful reports of wrongdoing. ADHS runs a tight ship in this context, and while I am certain that my accounts don't always seem to hold much water, anybody with employment experience in the Arizona system knows how things work. In the trenches, as it were, all of the mission statements and official dicta means little to nothing, and the consequences of this reality lands directly on the heads of the most vulnerable clients, especially those behind the fences and security manned gates of the Arizona State Hospital.    
       As stated already, I did come into contact with several ASH employees who were willing to go about covertly assisting me in patient advocacy when I was still hospitalized at ASH, but only to a very limited extent, and the bottom line was that they were afraid for their jobs, and of the opinion that no established provisions of administrative law and policy would protect them even if they did report misconduct in good faith. I have already attempted to enlighten the above state licensing board in relation to social worker misconduct at ASH that, due to graphic unreliability and deceit, both detrimented my state of mind, as well as contributed to a very clear waste of taxpayer money, but I fear that the correspondence that I tried to mail from ASH in this context never made it out of the hospital. And while it is generally the case that a patients' individually assigned social worker holds direct responsibility for their own conduct, at ASH there is a very clear chain of command through which the individually assigned social workers administer their duties, and the misconduct that I identified was always dealt out by the supervisory social worker staff, and my assigned social workers would try to hide behind the nefarious authority of "management."
     I am in the process of filing formal complaints about the following ASH social worker staff:

           1) Veneranda Heffern, LCSW; who came off as though she has authoritative qualifications at ASH,  but who may not even be licensed in Arizona yet, although I am in touch with the Texas licensing board, where she was located prior to 2012. She willfully denied me the right to have a representative (a patient advocate) of my choice attend a very critical treatment planning conference on February 09, 2012, which is in violation of state and federal law specific to such conferences, and flies in the face of basic human rights. As such, her conduct reflects the grossly unlawful abuses of authority and power that I encountered at ASH, and she was clearly unwilling to abide my these standards at the time, despite the fact that I very clearly informed her of my express desire to have this person attend the conference via phone.    

            2) Robert Washington; this poor sap became a member of my clinical treatment team at ASH in late October, 2011, and he inherited an ongoing process of mismanaged treatment and discharge planning that had been absolutely mangled by my three  previous primary attending doctors and four previous assigned social workers. I tried to advise him of how messed up the picture was in order to try and make things easy for him (as it were), and that I was in the process of seeking formal redress through every available channel of authority in regards to my case at ASH, in the hope that he would avoid the pitfalls employment at ASH. But he didn't listen, and by the time I left ASH in February, 2012, Mr. Washington had willfully engaged in the same sorts of lying and related misconduct that I had been putting up with for over 12 months at that point, including being present at the February 09, 2012, treatment planning conference described above, and as such, being party to the abuse on that date.        

           3) Laura (or Lara); a rail thin social services supervisor who was always very careful to not disclose her last name, but who did in fact appear several times in support of the misconduct of her staff. I will establish her identity before long, and presuming she hasn't left ASH, will follow through accordingly in submitting specifically documented reports of her misconduct.
           4) Megan Mitscher; did leave ASH, right in the thick of my efforts to expose unlawful conduct in direct relation to her role as my assigned social worker, in complicity with Dr. Perviaz Ahkter, and she may have left the state, I hear she is Louisiana, and I intend to report her through that licensing board. I have a good friend in Louisiana, too. It is the least I can do.

     The administrative misconduct at the Arizona State Hospital occurs at all levels and in every departmental office. The Office of Social Services at ASH functions in direct relation to the care needs of patients while they are hospitalized and beyond, and the staff of that office works directly under the authority of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Steven Dingle. 

In closing on the day: The insidiousness of these systematic shortcomings flows outward into the greater community, too, where the inflexible schedules of case managers with 80-90 client-patient case loads can't accept the arguably fluid schedules of mentally ill persons, and clinic physicians charged with managing the medical wellbeing of mentally ill clients are unwilling to allow for even a 10-15 minute tardiness in term of 90 day appointment times. The client-patients end up being hammered by the worst elements of these circumstances, and then wind up back in the acute wards of psychiatric hospitals simply because an overworked (or inept) social worker can't stay ahead of the curve of her assignments. The fact is, people die every day because of systematic shortfalls in the mental health professional community, including in state hospitals such as ASH. It is my contention that it all begins at the level of the human heart, but it is also an enormously challenging task, and arguably a body of requisite that eludes the cognitive skills and conscientiousness of people like CrazyCoryCorner Nelson and Donna Noriega LCSW 10959.
        You can't teach love and compassion in college, in other words, and the state of Arizona is going to have to look beyond the standard resume process if these matters are going to be meaningfully resolved. 

paoloeed@gmail.com