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

THIS ARTICLE DIRECTLY RELATES TO AN APRIL 18, 2012, ARTICLE OF THE SAME TITLE, AS WELL MY JUNE 06, 2012: The Role Of State Ombudsperson At The Arizona State Hospital: "The typically mismanaged evolution of a patient grievance report at The Arizona State Hospital." (Sonya Serda, photo left)

Auditors find fault in behavioral health board.
                                                                                                           

September 01, 2012 5:00 am  •  HOWARD FISCHER Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX -- The board responsible for protecting the public from bad counselors and non-medical therapists is slow to handle complaints, state Auditor General Debra Davenport said Friday. In a report to the Legislature, Davenport said more than half the complaints closed by the Board of Behavioral Health Examiners in the last two years were not resolved within six months, the standard generally used to evaluate how all regulatory boards do their jobs. And she said the issue is more than academic.

        "Lengthy complaint resolution times can put public safety at risk because licensees can continue practicing unchecked until the board takes action," Davenport said.
        In a formal response to the report, Debra Rinaudo, the board's executive director, said her agency already is working to implement changes suggested. The board regulates and licenses counselors who work with individuals and families to treat mental, behavior and emotional problems, marriage and family therapists, social workers who provide services through various organizations and schools, and substance abuse counselors who specialize in addiction prevention, treatment, recovery support and education.

     Oh, man, oh man! You best hold on to your hats, Robert Washington, and all the rest of you bottom feeding ASH social workers, particularly the supervisors in that department (including Laura, or Lara, or whatever the hell your name is), because I have a record of very well founded complaints that I made to the AZ Board of Behavioral Health Examiners about your departments' staff-wide willingness to engage in graphic violations my constitutional rights when I was hospitalized at ASH from early January, 2011, to late February, 2012. 
     Upon reading yesterday's news report in the Flagstaff Daily Sun (cited above, in part) about the failure of the AZ Board of Behavioral Health Examiners (BBHE) to dutifully follow the provisional rules applicable to investigations of such complaints, I gained a far better idea of why it is that I have not, to date, heard back form the Board about my complaints, and any concerns I had about this delay have been put at ease. 

BACKGROUND

     The social workers at The Arizona State Hospital play a central role in any/all patients' relationship with the greater world outside of ASH, particularly with respect for discharge planning and other non-medical aspects of the patients status while hospitalized there. As such, they are the patients' direct line of authority in terms of processing one's life as discharge from ASH and entry back into society approaches, and the social worker therein has pretty clear obligations in terms of granting the patient as much practical hope as may be possible in this context. In my experience, however, the social workers at ASH that I interacted with most closely (including several supervisory staff) blatantly engaged in abusing the flow of procedure specific to my personal discharge planning and directly related efforts to establish my needs as this process evolved over a period of about 7 months. On more than one occasion, I was denied access to personal records, for example, in gross defiance of my rights as provided in The Hospital Information and Portability Act, a matter that is still being considered in an ongoing investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights. On another occasion, my assigned ASH social worker, Robert Washington, and a senior social services staff member named Veneranda Heffern, denied me the right to have a personal representative of my choice present at a very critical discharge planning meeting, also known as a "staffing," an act that was in gross violation of my most fundamental rights as a person, patient, and consumer; at the time, it was clear to me that their respective intent was to deny me full self determination and independent representation as a matter of conducting themselves however the hell they wanted to with no fear of oversight or accountability and in direct defiance of my clear requests in this context, and their behavior at the time made me feel as though I had no rights and was worthless and below them as a human being. Very serious stuff in terms of well established health care ethics, law, and policy. The full list of obvious social worker misconduct that I documented while hospitalized at ASH is quite a bit longer, and I am now in a position (thanks to the news report cited above) to delve a bit more aggressively into seeing that my concerns about such misconduct are addressed in a meaningful manner. 

     Likewise, when it comes to the role of the hospital "patient advocate," Sonya Serda, there are at least 9 unresolved patient grievances (complaints) that I filed in the latter months of my time at ASH, in good faith and in full compliance with standard protocol; issues that are only "unresolved" because they are grievance reports that Sonya Serda never responded to. The patient advocate at ASH is any patients' first and only direct avenue for seeking redress when they are subject to abuse or any other like form of staff misconduct; as such, Sonya Serda represents herself as being trustworthy and compassionate about patient wellbeing, a representation which I regrettably found to be false. And with the 9 aforementioned unresolved grievances in mind, the applicable time limits are far past, and the safety of the patients is at risk because the misbehaving staff who I reported have been allowed to "continue practicing unchecked…." As such, my right(s) to meaningful redress and relief in relation to these grievances have also been and are still being grossly violated in a manner that I feel is 100% consistent with the concerns that the State Auditor's office expressed about the risks associated with delays in such grievance and complaint responses, as follows (from above): "Lengthy complaint resolution times can put public safety at risk because licensees can continue practicing unchecked until the board takes action." It is obvious to me that Serda and her superiors have come to assume that because I am no longer a patient at ASH, I have chosen to leave those issues unaddressed. But nothing could be farther from the truth. I am not dead, after all, and that's pretty much what it is going to take before I back off on my dedication to seeing that oversight and accountability be applied in direct relation to all and any of my personal experiences at ASH. As always, I have full copies of all such grievance reports, and I am well prepared today in terms of knowing what to do about the fact that my rights in this context are still being violated by Sonya Serda and her cohorts in the administrative offices at ASH.  

ANALYSIS

     The patterns of failure to meet their basic obligations that I witnessed in terms of the social worker staff I closely interacted with at ASH were directly condoned by executive staff such as former Chief Medical Officer Dr. Steven Dingle during this time; on at least three specific occasions, members of the social services staff, including Megan Mischer, Robert Washington, and a social services supervisor named Laura (or Lara?), immediately deferred to Dingle when I pointed out the fact that their conduct was in direct violation of hospital rules, as well as provisions of the Arizona Administrative Code and the Arizona Constitution. Robert Washington, (my last assigned ASH social worker) made clear statements to this same effect at the very end of my time at ASH, when I lawfully requested copies of my personal medical records just before I was scheduled to discharge on February 21, 2012; at that time, I filled out and submitted a standard ASH/ADHS form request for these records, but Washington later advised me (on the day before my actual discharge) that "They refused to do so….('Who? I asked.') Administration, that's who. They told me that they were not going to provide you with any of your records at this time." It was an astoundingly clear expression of ASH administrations' willingness to look me in the eye and say: "You and your claim of fundamental rights to dignity and self determination mean nothing to us. We don't care, and there is nothing you can do about it." I experienced that same basic theme of utter disrespect and disregard for my fundamental human rights as a patient and person at all levels of interaction with ASH staff for over 13 full months of time. I attest to this fact, and I look forward to stating my ongoing concerns about these people when the time comes in a formally convened court of law. 
     Dr. Steven Dingle, meanwhile, has been promoted within the ADHS system of behavioral health care (a very disturbing thought, in my opinion, and a fact that I intend to address as my advocacy in defense of patient rights in AZ evolves); and my one time social worker, Megan Mischer, left ASH at just about that time that I filed a formal report with The AZ Board of Behavioral Health Examiners about her engagement in criminal abuse of my rights as a patient, person, and consumer in the state of Arizona. I have always suspected that Mischer heard me when I told in her in no uncertain terms: "You have been doing this for some time, and you know as well as I do that you are tending to my discharge affairs in direct violation of law and policy". I went so far in those conversations to show her the specific statutory laws that applied to my concerns at the time, and she always deferred her unwillingness to offer me comprehensive response about these matters to "her bosses." She saw it, I feel, that the one's behind the criminal misconduct at ASH were far behind their due consequences, so she split.  
     That is the way it goes at The Arizona State Hospital: 

Substandard mental-medical health care and blatant disregard for well established law and policy specific to patient rights, all as a matter of standard practice at all levels of staff.  

IN CLOSING: You can be sure that I'll be in touch with Debra Rinaudo of The Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners as soon as I possibly can. But where does this end? Are the realities of criminal conduct and substandard mental-medical care and practice at The Arizona State Hospital so deeply embedded in the state system that nothing short of absolute revolution in terms of reform in the behavioral health care network will suffice as a matter of cleaning things up? ADHS' Director Will Humble has made it clear to me that he is not going to respond to these concerns. Clearly, federal oversight and intervention is necessary, and my ongoing work in this context has increasingly led me into conversations with federal agency workers who are, in effect, bound to take action once they have to. But, I am still falling short in certain terms of what it will take to get the Fed fully on board with my cause, but that is ok. The time will come, and anyone familiar with federal agencies knows that everything takes an inordinate amount of time. 

     That said, I will just have to keep it up. The rat bastards at ASH and in the administrative offices of the department of health, and so on, seemingly anoint themselves with the stink of corruption and criminality at every turn in the road; this is exemplified quite clearly by these ever emerging news reports in relation to just about every high ranking official in the Arizona state government. So we will just allow them- the ranking officials most responsible for seeing to the deepest needs of Arizona's citizens- continue to self implode as a matter of their fundamental ineptitude and related incompetence; and I will be there to expedite the process as best I can, as it all goes down. 

     Professor Joseph "Smokin' Joe" Livermore (UA Law) once told me: "Criminals tend to be pretty stupid as a rule. That's why they can't follow the rules." And as I continue to embark on seeking humane reform in relation to my defense of the rights of the patients at The Arizona State Hospital, running as I do into roadblocks at every juncture which seemingly highlight the unwillingness of affiliated state employees to simply do their jobs, I am increasingly reminded of Prof. Livermore's words in this context. Consistent with the presence of immoral and unethical mental-medical care at ASH, I recognize an insidious lack of common sensibility in the practices of Joel "the mortician" Rudd (of the Arizona Attorney Generals' office), as well as in the characteristics of ASH supervisor Cory"crazycorycorner" Nelson (illustrated no more clearly than by the home page of his personal website), and Arizona Department of Health Services Will Humble (as exemplified by his blatant unwillingness to openly communicate with the public- people like me, his actual clientele). It is freakishly unrepresentative of what I know to be the well established standards of modern American society and culture, an aberration of decent and humane behavior that may, indeed, meet the definition of socially sanctioned psychopathy: People in power doing whatever they have to preserve their selfish and socially immoral ways, and to Hell with the impacts of this behavior on the one's relying on their authority, etc. Please come to the aid of ASH' seriously mentally ill patients today. The administrators and clinicians at ASH operate at a level of graphical substandard mental health care, and they are getting away with it lock-stock-and barrel. Patient abuse is inhumane, cruel, and unacceptable in every sense of the word.

paoloreed@gmail.com