"We are aware of Jacob's Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and we do take this into account in his treatment." Or so said Kate Hill, a social worker at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene Oregon, where Jacob was staying for 3 months.
Ms. Hill went on with an impressively detailed statement, as if to make certain she covered very specific issues. Or was it to repeat details that for some particular reason needed repetition?
She made statements like "His condition is chronic and is unlikely to improve in terms of cognitive function. I believe that Catherine, Jacob’s mother, has been told this repeatedly, but she does not accept this answer. When he jumped off that building he did irreparable damage to his brain much of which cannot be reversed. Jacob seems to understand this, although he finds it discouraging. Some facts must be faced, and it will benefit him if he is not constantly reminded that he is not who he was before."
So the ongoing frustration and tribulation of Catherine continues as she wages her one-woman battle against the mental health system in this country. In her case, it is in Oregon, where the system itself apparently needs medical attention. Let’s look at what seems to be going on.
For the past 8 years, Catherine has been trying to get the minimum proper TBI treatment for her son, never mind the state-of-the-art treatments and clinical trials that no one in the mental health system seems to know anything about.
Instead, it appears facilities are eager to take the extra money allotted to TBI treatment from the Federal and State budgets, by mentioning TBI treatment plans in their license applications. Any actual treatment of TBI though is another story entirely, and apparently fiction.
Catherine’s best efforts seem to confront her with double jeopardy. As she tries to reason with the various treatment centers that take turns caring for Jacob, at least until the funds run out, they begin to attack her mental condition. Whenever she loses patience and becomes more animated, vocal, and impatient and angry with them, they go so far as to suggest that she might understandably be suffering from her own form of mental condition as in “delusions!”
Looking at it objectively, here’s the situation: Everyone in the mental health profession knows that the last treatment you would administer, especially with TBI, is the traditional series of psychotropic medications used to treat schizophrenia. Yet Jacob is routinely dosed into a stupor, and pickled with the worst meds for TBI. It is well-documented that schizophrenia is a mental illness and TBI is a medical condition. Treating Jacob for schizophrenia in the traditional way greatly reduces his ability to recover from his TBI.
Treatment centers pretend not to know this when confronted by someone who does, for example a trouble making mother of one of their patients. Rather than admit ignorance or selective disregard of the current state of knowledge, they choose to cover up their practice by deflecting Catherine with insinuations about her need for medical attention.
In many instances, if anything goes by the wayside or goes wrong, the psychiatrist, psychologist, conservator or social worker likes to blame the patient or the mother for the cause of all the problems, sui generis for this industry, first written about by psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in 1948.
And treatment plans for patients are themselves evasive schemes. Patients stay only a few months at one location under a particular doctor’s care before they are shuffled to another facility, taken off their medications, and then restarted again when their behavior begins to emerge. They are basically passed from one drugged-up encounter to another.
Treatment centers, psychiatric units and staff follow a methodology reminiscent of “Cognitive Abuse". Isolation, social exclusion, and control of almost every aspect of Jacob's day-to-day life are all part of the plan to create the very kind of patient they can demean and control. That is the type of patient they want and apparently need to continue business as usual. The result is a carefully orchestrated practice, using a well-designed script that specifically ensures that Jacob does not get better. In fact, he is relegated to remain under this dehumanizing care indefinitely.
When confronted with Catherine's demand that her son be properly treated for TBI, facilities get nervous. They know the problem with their lucrative practice and nearly perfect crime is that Catherine knows more about TBI than they admit. She is onto their welfare scam. Her tireless pursuit and continued demands are growing louder and louder with each passing day. It is only a matter of time, before Catherine and Jacob will finally be free of this mental tyranny.
Although institutions may be eager to protect the income stream that a patient like Jacob provides, the inhumanity and fiscal greed underlying the current treatment of TBI must be uncovered and eliminated.
Jacob is primarily treated by the attending psychiatrist at each facility. He has been manipulated by either being over or under medicated, according to the different psychiatrist’s whims.
The total denial of Jacob’s brain injury is remarkable; it is in fact the argument most overlooked by Jacob’s caretakers. Jacob suffers from a medical disability, namely his traumatic brain injury, as well as schizophrenia. His schizophrenia has always been well controlled by his medication.
This can only be defined as an almost patent and institutionalized denial of Jacob's human and civil rights by a process, an entire system stacked against the individual, a person that their very charter is defined to serve.
Psychiatry:
“There are no diagnoses in psychiatry. Only umbrella terms for observed patterns of complaint, groupings of symptoms given names and oversimplified, and assigned what are probably erroneous causes because those erroneous causes can be medicated.
And then both the drug and the supposed disease are made legitimate and thus the profession as well as the patient, legitimized too, by those medical words going hand in hand to the insurance company: ‘Diagnosis’ and… it’s not your fault.
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