This a rerun of an article written almost four months ago. I am adding it to this weeks articles because I just got done reading through administrative law Judge Kay Abramsohn's ruling and recommendation specific to when the issues underlying the above case #2012c-BHS-0338-DHS were presented to her at hearing on July 16, 2012. In sum, the judge chose to dismiss my concerns as unsubstantiated, this despite a substantial body of evidence that included lengthy testimony from a very experienced and highly reputable human rights advocate and expert witness, John Gallagher (now a doctoral candidate in ASU's social work program), and a reasonable amount of well founded documentation in support of my central allegations in the case. Hardly a surprise and only somewhat disappointing, this dismissal (for it only further confirms the unbalanced and grossly inequitable state of affairs specific to the grievance process that I am dedicated to reforming), but it is not over yet. I have at least three immediate options, and in the next few days, I will counsel the matter with my associates, and make a decision as to what comes next within a week or two.
SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2012 (RERUn)
Wherein, following over one full year of systematic suppression of my right to due process in relation to a criminally imposed sequence of administrative abuse of authority at The Arizona State Hospital, I prepare to go to hearing.
THIS IS AN ONGOING ARTICLE THAT BEGAN LESS THAN 24 HOURS AGO (SEE "RE: ADHS ADHS/DBHS OGA Docket #H090611S0009), AND RELATES TO AN APRIL 09, 2012, ARTICLE ("FACTS OF LIFE #1-4"), AND EVENTS THAT OCCURRED BEGINNING ON MAY 25, 2011, AND EFFECTIVELY CONCLUDING ON MAY 29, 2011.
I owe John Gallagher of the Arizona Department of Health Services Office of Human of Rights (ADHS OHR) an enormous amount of gratitude. His compilation of directly applicable statutory facts in terms of the numerous unlawful actions imposed on me in specific relation to this matter opened my eyes to the reality that The Arizona State Hospital is highly regulated by a fairly comprehensible body of easily accessible rules and regulations. Er, law and policy, that is, and given my background in law,John Gallagher inadvertently, yet directly, contributed to putting me back on track with my deepest convictions as a man in such a manner as to furthermore revive my familiarity with something that I put a fair amount of time and energy into, albeit in what seems to me as another life.
Long term chronic depression is a bitch no matter who you are. I skated along on the peripheral aspects of its worst impacts for well over 30 years, which doesn't say much about the given severity of the condition, as much as it does about my ability to dodge bullets, as it were. While still a preadolescent member of my family, which effectively went from being that- a family- to a residue of sorts in less then 2 years (for myself, between the age of 11-13), I began experiencing a sense of isolation even when in the thick of school and/or in other like social settings; a sense of isolation, or "otherness" (for lack of a better word), so intense that I began seriously pondering the meaning of existence when I was 13, or so. I had lost an older brother to accidental overdose by then, and my father had also died in unexpected fashion when I was ten; and I distinctly recall a sort of knowing, in the next couple of years, that all I had to do to reunite with them was direct myself to death on my own terms. As such, the fundamental reality that suicide is an option set in while I was pretty young, and I even came close to attempting suicide on at least one occasion, when I was 14 years old and experiencing severe psychological abuse imposed upon me by my alcoholic mother, who went through very tough patch of life in own right during those years. I never really concerned myself with the ramifications of these matters at the time, as I had no one to turn to, and had to rely instead on a developing resilience that eventually carried me on and well into my adult life with little to no critically alarming life events. Or so I thought, and it took my first psychiatrist, in May, 2010, to alert me to the simple fact that anytime a 14 year old child seriously considers suicide, something is critically amiss in the emotional and psychological realm of that kids' mind and body. So far as my vivid recollections of childhood go, particularly with respect for suicidal thinking, I have determined by now, after years (literally!) of formal hospitalization in certified insane asylums, that I possess a keen sense of self awareness, and that in direct combination with related observational skills, I recall these things as if not more clearly than most people do their own respective childhood years; this fact was affirmed and reaffirmed by several of my therapists between 2010-2012, and these residual memories have long fostered my deepest sense of identity as it stands even today.
Later in life, when I was a full on teenager, my bouts of depression occurred almost subtly; I was also an active user of marijuana by the time I was 17, which definitely served to lessen the impact of my lows; and straight out of high school I pursued such goals as dedicated ski bumming and long distance trail running in the northern Rockies (which is basically a really fun lifestyle); while all through my twenties, I was a committed high level bicycle racer, which also immersed me in so pleasurable a day to day existence that my depression was almost like a relative sleeping in the guest room of my mind. Again, I recall these periods of my life quite clearly, and through it all, I always knew that the time would come in my life when I would be faced with the "hunger" that I had first experienced at the age of 12 or so. For depression is something akin to hunger, in my opinion today, a wanting of sorts that exists on the basis of unavoidable interests in things not defined by commonly understood lines of self awareness.
My most seriously debilitating encounters with major
depression began kicking in when I was in my mid-thirties, married, attending college on a full time basis, and addicted to alcohol for the first time in my life. I was married to a very nice woman, and throughout all of it, I managed to do exceptionally well in school, which I basically attribute to my given maturity and related experiences in the blue collar working world. But I was also falling into marked patterns of withdrawal from my immediate surroundings, and at least on of my ASH psychotherapists, a very nice young man named Dr. Holmes, concluded that I may have experienced minor to moderate schizoidism (which is characterized by emotional aloofness and solitary habits). It was a strange period in my life (1995-2006), at times intense and satisfying, at times very difficult and almost crippling, but I tried to hang in there, and was far too proud to ask for help. The marriage crumbled and finally imploded entirely in 1999, and by the time I was in the second year of my scholarship funded legal education at The James Rogers College of Law in 2003 (University of Arizona, Tucson), I had lost the bulk of whatever tenacity I'd once had in terms of managing my emotional/mental well being in the face of chronic depression. It was seemingly rapid, my eventual collapse into madness, but I know now that all I was really up to for all those years was dancing around and away from my inevitable return to suicidal ideation. And I did, finally, give up avoiding the depths of my inner self in 2006 (during the spring of which I seriously attempted suicide for the first time), finally arriving at the terminus of a long, slow burning process of coming home, as it were, to my preadolescent desire to go, go, go away, and never look back.Hence, my arrival in the shit hole known as ASH. When I had first settled into my new "life" as a possibly long term mental patient in Tucson, May, 2010, I was both cynical to a point of feeling that no man would ever be able to convince me of why I should choose life over death, as well as vastly departed from the sentient realities of my professional training and other life experiences. But these specific traits of my disorder subsided somewhat over the course of my first six months in-hospital (an acquired state of balance that I attribute to the good doctors and and staff at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, as well as to my therapist as St. Mary's Hospital, Shari Healey); and when I arrived at ASH on January 11, 2011, I was feeling relatively centered, at least in terms of what I felt I needed to do as a patient, with both my own treatment goals in mind as well as what I fairly felt I could expect from my caregivers.
These aspects of my progress as a patient to that date evaporated just about as soon as I arrived at ASH, however, in part due to the theft of my personal property as soon (literally) as I got there (see May 02, 2012 "Summary"), but more significantly due to the meanness of Ash staff, including a really nasty old white haired nasally voiced bitch of a charge nurse named Peggy, who tried to sink her psychologically abusive talons into my sense of peace and mind as a new patient on the Paolo Verde East unit on my third night there. It was as though all of the earlier assurances of the mental health community had been pissed on, and the hand offered to me through months of good faith therapeutic interaction had been jerked way, encouraging me to fall back into the despair of my mental illness' worst manifestations. Therein, my experiences at ASH from the get go were pretty much downhill; over my first 2-4 months in that accursed facility I increasingly found myself in conflict with abusive staff technicians and nurses and the related incompetence of my first primary attending physician, Dr. Laxman Patel, (who chastised me for voicing concern over the patient abuse that I was witnessing and experiencing first hand), and I also began to learn about the extent of administrative shortcomings at ASH. It was disturbing and unsettling to such an extent that my relative stability obviously deteriorated as a direct consequence of the substandard practices at ASH. 
By the time I met the human rights advocate, John Gallagher, in late spring, 2011, I was neck deep in an unexpected recurrence of a seemingly permanent state of despair that had settled in when I first entered the psyche wards in 2010, (a "recurrence", or backward plunge, that I fully attribute to the close mindedness and related incompetence of administrative staff at ASH, such as the patient advocate, Sonya Serda), a phase of time wherein I actively compromised my absolute willingness to allow suicide to settle my affairs by opting, instead, for a dedicated and good faith exploration of whatever the mental health professionals in the psychiatric hospitals could offer someone like me. At ASH, my sense of choice (vs. my appreciation for my treatment) began to dictate the situation, and to someone like me, suicide is always an option; I was thus led into reconsidering my initial commitment to remain honest with my caregivers at all costs. There is a thing in the psyche wards known known as "contracting for safety", wherein a patient such as me is asked to promise the staff that I won't commit suicide (or otherwise hurt myself) on the basis of good faith trust. But at ASH, I encountered staff who made it very clear to me that my diagnosis as a chronically suicidal patient was not something they gave a rat's ass about, individuals who overtly suggested through their actions that I would do them all a favor if I were to crawl into a hidden corner and die. So the merits of contracting for safety sort of petered out on the basis of me learning the hard way that ASH staff can't be trusted in any sense of the word.
I felt duped, for I had clearly been lied to more than once by staff, and I had been demeaned, graphically insulted, and verbally abused; and in seeing brutal forms of psychological abuse imparted on some of my most vulnerable peers, my cynicism about my own species flared up so strongly that I began developing the first signs of deep distrust for the ones assigned to care for me. Why would any reasonably sound mind want to "contract" with people like them? This, the gist of ASH' most depraved staff members, people who quite clearly don't value the primary objectives of standardized mental health care and treatment.Below are several key pages from the grievance document that John Gallagherof the ADHS Office of Human Rights assembled on my behalf, pages that represent the sorts of training I had been involved with as a legal professional, and which, as such, served to point me in the direction I am in today, fighting as I am for the rights and needs of ASH patients as they stand today. Note, if you will, that there are at least six specific violations of law cited, statutory law relating to my fundamental rights as a client and human being that directly flows from the text and and language of theArizona Administrative Code, Article 9, Chapter 21, sections 201 and 202. The incidents of wrongdoing evidenced by these violations are broad, and yet well detailed, for as I said at the outset of this article, there is an easily accessible body of comprehensible rules and regulations applicable to this matter. Unless you are a patient at ASH, that is, are they easily accessible.
Finally, on the last page below, please see the suggested Solution that John Gallagher carefully crafted in order to bring about a reasonable resolution to the matter at hand. This is an especially important aspect of the document, for therein one sees nothing more complex than a straightforward and good faith request for reasonable oversight of the issues raised in this matter. Especially important today, because of the basic fact that ASH' and ADHS's blatant refusal(s) to cooperate in this matter graphically represents the endemic problems underlying the administrative abuses that I have worked to make clear in my writing. These people have no interest whatsoever in meaningfully responding to patient concerns, particularly not if and when those concerns directly involve allegations of patient abuse and staff misconduct. As follows:
IN CLOSING: I hope that tomorrow I will see a response from the administrative law judge in this case about my motion to have Joel Rudd formally removed as representative counsel in these proceedings, which I submitted to the court on Friday (see June 15, 2012, "RE:"). This is increasingly becoming a search and destroy sort of campaign, in the sense that as my acquisition of more and more evidence in terms of the ongoing abuse of patients and related abuses of clinical and administrative abuse of authority at The Arizona State Hospital, I am increasingly willing to target the specific representatives who do, at this time, need to be held fully accountable under the law. At this time. Not tomorrow, not in three or six months. Now.
What a great time this is to get on board with this cause. A moderately deep increase in cash flow to the needs of Arizona's mental heath clients in the outpatient community came about in recent months, and the attorney generals' office is taking quite a bit of heat in relation to their own lawlessness right now. A great time, indeed, for anyone with a sense of conscience to do their part in fighting the abuse of patients at The Arizona State Hospital, and beyond. Please, get involved, take action, help make a difference today.
(NOTE: This is an October 6, 2012, rerun of an article published in June, 2012)
paoloreed@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
I would really love input of any kind from anybody with any interest whatsoever in the issues that I am sharing in this blog. I mean it, anybody, for I will be the first one to admit that I may be inaccurately depicting certain aspects of the conditions
at ASH, and anonymous comments are fine. In any case, I am more than willing to value anybody's feelings about my writing, and I assure you that I will not intentionally exploit or otherwise abuse your right to express yourself as you deem fit. This topic is far, far too important for anything less. Thank you, whoever you are. Peace and Frogs.