After I got my records from James Garrett, in the hope to speak to Jenness Clairmont, Clinical Director of Samaritan Counseling, about it (she told me she’d speak to me after I got those records)…minutes later, while I was driving home from James Garrett’s office, I got a call from her saying that ‘your clinical relationship with Samaritan Counseling is over’. She said Samaritan would not be communicating with me anymore. I asked if I could send a letter, and she said I could, but that they would not respond to it.
I was effectively a non-person to Samaritan Counseling from that point on.
It is not clear what James Garrett told her, but records show that he told my therapist Oona Edmands to keep ‘clear boundaries’ because I was ‘not following [my] side of the contract’, and ‘confirmed’ my “Axis 2″ behavior [Axis 2 means ‘personality disordered or mentally retarded’]. Interestingly, though, he was at the time charged with five felonies by state police for fraud, and it has since become clear that his whole career is based on the ARISE Intervention, which involves the social network of an ‘addicted individual’ to create ‘consequences’ for not going to a (often very expensive) 12-step rehab or attending 12-step meetings, supposedly for their own good. In these programs, the individual is advised to publicly ‘admit’ problems with honesty, character defects, powerlessness, insanity and selfishness, and to ‘surrender’ to a ‘higher power’. In my opinion, it is not a personality disorder or mental retardation to question this kind of arrangement.
Any use of aversive conditioning, such as this intentional infliction of ‘consequences’ such as total shunning (which could also be considered willful neglect), has been recognized by NYS OMH as abuse, and is supposed to be reported to the NYS Justice Center. Social shunning is a form of psychological torture and Samaritan Counseling “the relationship specialists” are well aware of this. I still don’t understand why licensed mental health workers do not see the AA program as psychologically abusive in itself, or why forcing someone to go to those programs as a condition of therapy is not considered in itself an egregious mishandling of transference.
Samaritan Counseling has not responded to any communications since then, except to tell me that my complaints aren’t ‘technically’ a part of my clinical record, despite my HIPAA request for amendment of them to my records. They have, in fact, contacted Yelp to remove my reviews citing ‘privacy concerns’. Jenness Clairmont still practices at http://forestclinicalservices.com/ and is a board member of the NYS Office of Professions.
