Chapter One is below for free reading.
THE BAKER ACT CONSPIRACY
By R25288
This book is based on true events. Some names, dates, court cases, and docket numbers have been modified to protect innocent family members from the actions of the guilty.
I was just a building. I belonged to no religious organization.
This book is dedicated to Scientologists and concerned citizens of the world who understand the dangers of modern psychiatry, pharmaceutical industries, and governmental collaboration, and to Max’s family, friends and partner, D.j.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida and Amnesty International.
Chapter 1
The Manors
When I went to medical school, sixty years ago, there were only a handful of mental diseases. I think there were no more than six or seven. Now there are more than three hundred. And new ones are, quote, “discovered” every day. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment. I have long maintained that the child psychiatrist is one of the most dangerous enemies, not only of children, but of adults, of all of us who care for the most precious and vulnerable things in life. And those two things are children and liberty. Now I ask again, how can parents protect themselves from the therapeutic state? That is from the alliance of government and psychiatry?
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dinner Speech
(Used with permission of Dr. Szasz)
I saw you always within my walls. I felt you as you touched me. I could read your emotions and your thoughts. I never slept. I was made of bricks and mortar. I was the floors, the ceilings, the walls, and doors. I was five stories tall. I was The Manors. I was originally a public and later a private psychiatric hospital, located in Tarpon Springs, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1920s, I was built to be a golf resort, and I was gorgeous. Al Capone, in his drunken, syphilis-filled body, once shot me.
I became a public psychiatric hospital in 1953. I always attracted scrutiny for racketeering and patient abuse, but not even a federal grand jury investigation lasting over seven years could reveal my deepest and darkest secrets. No one saw the hundreds of millions of dollars obtained by my owners and their friends through Medicare, Medicaid, and private-insurance fraud. No one understood the extent of the abuse and manipulation of patients. No one, until now, knew the full extent of the abuse.
My dear gentle readers, lock your doors, close your curtains, and do not let them see you reading my book, or they will put you within walls like mine, to keep the truth from coming out. Walls like mine can be found only in psychiatric hospitals, and prisons. They are the walls you never want to live within. Is there a New World Order? Did President John F. Kennedy live on a Greek island in 1964 after his assassination in 1963? Did the thirty-two people who personally witnessed John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and saw men with rifles on the grassy knoll, die from mysterious and violent deaths within one year of their testimony? Did Bobby Kennedy ask the CIA Director in 1963, “Did you kill my brother?” Was there a Holocaust? Did the American government know of the events of 9/11 prior to 9/11? Some things I do not know; some things I do know. The Holocaust is history. 9/11 occurred. John F. Kennedy is no longer with us. I know what occurred within my walls. If the truth frightens you, if you do not believe that evil exists, if you do not want to read about man’s inhumanity to man, do not read this book. The truth is that evil exists. The truth is also that good men and women of conscience can overcome evil.
My dear gentle readers, you have no idea of what occurred within my walls. If you think of organized crime as the Mafia and the Sopranos then you still live in the I Love Lucy generation of mentality. The sole purpose of organized crime is making money, or, more accurately, acquiring it. I had observed organized crime operating within my walls for decades. It operated under the patronage of the pharmaceutical industry and through political donations to politicians in office. Vito Genovese would have been proud.
“Do no harm” is the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath, as sworn by new doctors at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine:
I do solemnly swear by all I hold most sacred:
That I will be loyal to my profession of medicine and just to its members
That I will lead my life and practice my art with virtue and honor
That into whatsoever home I shall enter it shall be for the good of the sick and the well by the utmost of my power and that I will uphold myself aloof from wrong and from corruption and from the tempting of others to vice
That I will exercise my art solely for the benefit of my patients, the relief of suffering, the prevention of disease and promotion of health, and I will give no drug and perform no act for an immoral purpose
That in the treatment of the sick, I will consider their well-being to be of a greater importance than their ability to compensate my services
That what I see or hear in the course of treatment or even outside the treatment in regard to the lives of persons which is not fitting to be spoken, I will keep enviably secret
That I will commit myself to a lifetime of continued learning of the art and science of medicine these things I do promise and in proportion as I am faithful to this oath, may happiness and good repute be ever mine, but should I trespass and violate this oath, may the reverse be my lot
I saw that oath broken daily by those who were entrusted to uphold it within my walls. Within my walls, psychiatric doctors were organized crime, working in concert with many others, from medical doctors to marketers, the pharmaceutical industry, and the government. They flourished off taxpayer’s money, concealed behind the walls of patient confidentiality, so cloaked with respectability that even law enforcement and courts were intimidated, and so they remained, through years of investigations, until now.
I felt his compassion as he pushed open my large front door in 1994. He recently had graduated with a degree in political science from the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. Most lawyers in America obtain the degree prior to their doctorate in law. He had been sent to destroy me, and he did, and I thank him for finally giving me relief from all of the suffering and abuses I had witnessed for too long.
He stepped alone onto my floor, so I knew he was not being committed to me. I felt his strength and his reserves of energy, but I could not read his mind completely, nor could I ever. I still do not know why because I was able to read all the others. He was an enigma to me, one whose purpose I never fully determined. He was Caucasian, muscular, and I felt 190 pounds standing on me, carried at a height of five feet eleven. He was forty-four years young and looked much younger. Whosever genes he had inherited he wore well. He had a protruding Adam’s apple, was clean-shaven, and wore wired-rimmed glasses. He had blue eyes and a Roman nose. His short-cropped hair was slightly greying at the temples. Why he was single, I at first could not understand.
He walked to the receptionist desk and said he had an appointment with the director of nursing. Max Hardt was the name he gave the receptionist. He had chosen a deep-undercover name to accompany the fabricated family history and background that he had memorized so easily. I never learned his real name.
Mrs. Simpson, the petite woman whose obsessive-compulsiveness demanded that everything always be in its place, was director of nursing. She introduced herself formerly, and led the way to her office. The perfect director of nursing, she was never one for petty chitchat.
From the moment he entered me, I observed that Max was recording everything. He noticed the lilies in the vases on my walls, positioned every eight feet throughout me and replaced every Thursday. They were excellent window dressing, and he knew it. Families visiting on weekends for Family Therapy always admired them, too, and bought into the concept of what a professional and caring facility I was. They did not know what went on within me, Monday through Friday, twenty-four hours a day, year round.
I did not know when he first stepped onto my floors that the press had described him as former Army Intelligence or CIA. They did not know that he was more than that.
He looked for video or audio equipment and observed that there was none. What went on within my walls no one wanted recorded.
His alleged resume was impressive. He had applied for the job of psychiatric technician that had been advertised in the St. Petersburg Times. His deep-cover father had been a doctor of psychology, an author, and a peace researcher. Max’s credentials claimed he had won a U.S. Supreme Court case, setting the precedent for student rights in America. He had certificates and awards that signaled a bleeding heart. Perfect to add more credibility to me, Mrs. Simpson thought. His resume even listed experience as a psychiatric technician supervisor, and phone numbers provided for each job would verify his assertions, the voices on the other end calling him an asset, a treasure. “We have a position as a case manager that might be more in line with your experience,” said Mrs. Simpson. “At a higher salary. Would that interest you?” Knowing it would get him inside information on me quicker, Max accepted the offer humbly. He knew he was in me, now, but I did not know then what a friend I had in him.
Mrs. Simpson took him to meet the director of social services, the plump, jovial extrovert, Mrs. Thorp. She and Max hit it off. Max would be the case manager of my New Directions wing, home to my most psychotic and violent patients. Another of my wings was called Rainbow wing, home to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patients. Gay and lesbian employees staffed it. Its services were advertised nationally in gay magazines, and patients flew in from around the country, some believing they were coming to a resort. It did not take long for them to realize that I was no resort. Once locked behind my steel doors, a patient had no way out, none but through death or insurance expiration. For those born to the very rich, the Kennedy or Rockefeller types, even insurance expiration provided no exit. Their families paid the $1,000 a day to keep them within my walls. Family peace of mind: a steal at $365,000 a year. The patient’s mind was a different matter: drugged daily for years, it was obliterated by mind-altering regimens of doctor-prescribed medication. Not even those who had committed themselves were allowed to leave. In the 1970s, the Florida legislature passed a law that stopped them: The Baker Act legalized involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Once deemed a threat to themselves or others, those who sought to leave were Baker-Acted and kept within my walls against their will.
Insight was my wing for the hearing impaired. New Life was my wing for those under the age of eighteen, some as young as ten. Sunrise was my wing for those over sixty-five years of age, my largest wing. Giving Life was my wing for women, always managed by a female case manager. New Hope was my wing for those who struggled with alcohol or drugs. In all, there were one hundred and thirty beds within my walls. Each room consisted of one or two beds and one or two dressers, depending on if the room housed one or two people. Each had an attached bathroom. They were similar in structure to college dorm rooms, except for what went on within them. One was a stimulating environment of growth and learning, the other a well of despair.
When I was not full, the marketers were sent to nursing homes or group homes for the elderly called adult living facilities, often hundreds of miles away from me. There they would pick up some unsuspecting, confused elderly person to fill an empty bed. It did not matter whether or not they were a threat to themselves or others, because once within my walls the documents would be created to prove they were. The best candidates naturally were those with no surviving relatives. These were called the No Questions patients: No one would ever question what was going on.
My dear gentle reader, what was going on was systemic violence perpetuated by psychiatric doctors in the name of patient care upon the least among us. Think of it this way: If I were paid $1,000.00 a day to cure you and $0.00 a day if you were cured, what is in my best economic interest?
A similar logic explains the treatment of the elderly within my walls: Benefits from Medicare will pay for exactly one hundred and ninety days of treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Max was always amazed that doctors could manage to cure their patients on exactly the one hundred and ninetieth day of treatment. As for those that the doctors had medicated into actual sickness during their time here, Max was instructed to transfer them to a public facility, on their one hundred and ninety-first day.
As the administration grew to trust Max, he became their inside hit man, the one who delivered their directives to the doctors. While I never could truly read his mind, I could read his heart, and it was breaking more and more each day. He began to see what I had seen for years.
As he did, Max always searched for one good doctor, for one physician who, recalling his Hippocratic Oath, would refuse his directive. He looked for a reverence for life within my walls, but he never found it. The closest he would ever come was the day he handed a patient’s chart to Dr. Nelson, a doctor Max liked. “Mrs. Simpson said to tell you that this patient needs his medication changed,” Max said. Dr. Nelson looked at him and said, “I hate this.” He then took the chart from Max’s hand, opened it to the medication section, and wrote in a new medication for the patient. Max turned his back on the doctor and walked away. I saw a tear swell in his eye, as he swallowed hard.
As Max continued to prove himself and the administration grew more and more confident of his trustworthiness, the day arrived when Mrs. Thorp introduced her protégé to a portly, well-dressed man in a tailored blue three-piece suit. “Mr. Steinberg,” Mrs. Thorp said, “I’d like you to meet our new case manager of New Directions, Max Hardt. Max, I’d like you to meet Anthony Steinberg, the CEO of the Manors.” Max extended his hand. A picture of Mr. Steinberg and President Carter hung on a wall of Mr. Steinberg’s large office. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Steinberg,” Max said.
Soon Max was asked to serve as quasi bailiff to Judge Thomas Newton, who conducted Baker Act hearings at The Manors on Tuesdays. By the end of a hearing, it was rare for the judge to refuse a request to hold a patient within my walls. Judge Newton was a fair, good, and decent man. He was a veteran of World War II, and he and Max would often talk before hearings. Mr. Steinberg was pleased that the two hit it off so well. So was Max. It was in his position as a member of the Baker Act hearings that he gathered his most valuable evidence against me.
One day Max walked out with a briefcase full of the evidence he had compiled, and he never looked back. His feet never again crossed my floors. Instead the authorities closed me and then tore me down. I never had the opportunity to thank Max. I still do not know who he really was, what organization or organizations he worked for, or where he is today. I hope he moved on to shut down another corrupt psychiatric hospital. I hope he helped people to understand the dangers behind the manufacture of madness by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, with the collaboration of the American government. I was just a building, and this was my story. Max, if you are still alive, and read this, I want to thank you for giving me my freedom.
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin
(Used with the permission of Dr. Szasz)
