Category Archives: Junk Science

10 years later

(I’m not using “preferred pronouns” because I think that is confusing.)

It’s ten years later and I figured I’d give an update.

Samaritan Counseling has still not acknowledged any of my complaints or the criminal conviction or death of James Garrett, LCSW

In 2016, after being banned forever from Samaritan Counseling, I got a message that a girl named Frank wanted to be my friend. That was the beginning of a strange journey. S/he is dead now, but I met and had many conversations with Frank/Ava about Oona Edmands’ therapy and David Olsen’s (executive director) strange behavior.

It started to make me very uncomfortable. After all, I wasn’t even allowed to talk to a therapist and I was becoming this person’s “therapist” about the same state licensed therapist.

Frank/Ava would text me all the time to tell me how unprofessional Oona was acting and even though s/he had been in therapy for decades; s/he had never seen anything like it.

Obviously there is a lot more to the story, most of which I don’t know, but I can say, based on my interactions with Frank/Ava, Samaritan is a shit show to this day, and it’s not getting better.

But the reality is there will always be scam artists. Watch the shows about Twin Flames and other cults. Samaritan Counseling will get away with it too, for now.

David Calvin Olsen PhD makes over $175K/year at Samaritan Counseling

David Olsen, the 12-step sex therapist/pastor who has banned me from any contact with a nationwide network of state-licensed therapists, makes more money than any other Samaritan Counselor. It is not clear that his subordinates are even aware that his 12-step partner and ARISE Network founder James Garrett was charged with multiple felonies and pleaded guilty to a crime. Jenness Clairmont, the Clinical Director of Samaritan Counseling, who now works as ‘Forest Clinical Services’ and Oona Edmands LCSW seem to have no awareness of the crimes as David Olsen has forbidden all communications.

davidolsen income

Guidestar 990

New Anti-AA Video Podcast: Not Powerless #1 – Regulatory Capture and 12-Step Extortion

Here is a key document (that I couldn’t find during the live podcast). In my post Social Work Licensing in New York, I question whether the Capital Tonight interviewee was referring to this document when she said “2002 was the first time we tried to regulate the spoken word as treatment”. I have never got any verification about what specifically she was referring to when she said that.

Local Services Bulletin No. 2002-05: Impact of Recent Federal Court Decision Concerning Alcoholics Anonymous
On Government Funded Providers
(broken link) It appears that this bulletin has been relocated here where it doesn’t mention that this happened in way back in 2002.

Deceased Patient Records – HIPAA Concerns and Rights for Substance Abuse Treatment

1

I am sure many parents whose children have died after drug rehab become curious to know what exactly happened. I am concerned that dissent in rehab is not being correctly documented, perhaps even censored. I know this is possible because I have unsuccessfully attempted to get my complaints amended to my therapy records from Samaritan Counseling Center of the Capital Region (which is a HIPAA right). These included detailed accounts of my own experience which did not necessarily put all the professionals in a very positive light. Instead, I found that without these complaints, it looks like I was no more than tragically non-compliant and personality disordered due to ‘untreated alcoholism’. The two letters he sent me was the one telling me I could resume therapy if I went to 12-step programs, and the termination letter saying that I was no longer under any circumstances to contact anyone at Samaritan because I hand-delivered my complaint.

“Q: Is access to a deceased person’s psychiatric or substance abuse records treated any differently than access to other medical records?
A: HIPAA governs most healthcare providers and the records they keep; however, a different federal law governs many substance abuse programs (42 CFR Part 2). A substance abuse program can be covered under one, both, or neither regulation, depending on how it is funded.”

“In your complaint, you allege that on or about July 18, 2015, the Center denied your request that your medical records be amended to include complaints, the content of which are available on your online blog”

Accessing Deceased Patient Records—FAQOCR

New MedScape Article on Important 1st Amendment Case – Appeal Being Made to Massachusetts Supreme Court

New details have emerged in the apparent refusal by the Mass Board of Medicine to fairly settle OR prosecute a case involving clear evidence of forensic fraud and Establishment Clause / human rights violations, and professional extortion.

The patterns are clear and have been widely ignored by professionals and state-related authorities who are themselves subject to these patterns of regulatory capture. It is likely that adequate resolution will need to involve the US Supreme Court and or an FBI RICO investigation.

Embattled Doc Suffers Another Setback in PHS Fight (Medscape Jan 2017)

Physicians Health Programs: More Harm than Good? (earlier Medscape article by Pauline Anderson, Aug 2015)

“Dr Recupero also notes that “almost without exception,” Dr Langan’s test findings have been below the minimum level to declare a test positive and that positive findings “are not a sign of relapse.”

“Dr Langan said that since it suspended his medical license, the board has “engaged in a persistent pattern of ignoring my every reasonable effort at trying to be reinstated” and has “abused the administrative law process to accomplish this.”

“A memorandum to the Supreme Judicial Court, filed May 13, 2016, proposed a settlement between Dr Langan and the board. In return for the immediate reinstatement of Dr Langan’s license, he would be monitored for a maximum of 3 months by Dr Recupero and Timothy E. Wilens, MD, codirector of the Center for Addiction Medicine at MGH.”

“That memorandum was accompanied by letters from Dr Recupero and Dr Wilens agreeing to the terms, but according to Dr Langan, it has been “ignored.””

“The board did not acknowledge or address the proposals in any way,” said Dr Langan.”

Disrupted Physician

Disrupted Physician is one of my favorite whistleblower sites. Michael Langan is exposing nationwide fraud in Physicians Health Programs, and his work has inspired many other doctors and nurses subjected to medical license extortion to speak up and speak out against irrational authority — a pretty hot topic these days!

His case involves fraudulent drug test results and suppression of evidence in addition to the clear Establishment Clause violation described in this document: BRM_and_PHS_Must_Offer_Secular_Alternatives_to_AA_NA_in_Disciplinary_Contracts.pdf.

Marty Mann and the Disease Theory

Here’s a really interesting article in The Atlantic about how Marty Mann promoted the disease concept of addiction in order to get doctors to promote AA.

“Mann’s reply to Armstrong was both fascinating and revealing. She agreed with Armstrong regarding the inefficacy of conventional medicine regarding alcoholism; she also vouchsafed her commitment to AA and its less-than-generous opinion of conventional treatment enterprises. “Not that I, as a dyed-in-the-wool AA,” she wrote to Armstrong in reply, “believe that clinics, or any other medical or psychiatric means can straighten out very many “alkies” (although I know it can in some instances, here and there) but I do believe that the average individual will more readily go into a clinic to find out what to do for what ails them than they will investigate a layman’s organization such as ours [AA]. And also I believe that the very presence of a clinic will emphasize and advertise to the uninitiated that alcoholism is a disease which is to be treated, not hidden or punished.”

And here is a fascinating intellectual history of addiction as disease, Addiction as Accomplishment: The Discursive Construction of Disease by CRAIG REINARMAN —

“In 1942, the Alcoholism Movement was founded by Marty Mann, a public relations executive and former ‘‘drunk’’, and others. By 1944, she joined with Dr. E.M. Jellinek at Yale to create an organization whose purpose was to popularize the disease concept by putting it on a scientific footing. Note the chronology: science was not the source of the concept but a resource for promoting it. This organization later became the National Council on Alcoholism (NCA). Their goal was to create a new ‘‘scientific’’ approach that would allow them to get beyond the old, moralistic ‘‘wet’’ versus ‘‘dry’’ battle lines of the Temperance and Prohibition period (Roizen, 1991). While there were a few scientists doing research on alcohol in the 1930s, the bulk of the scientific research that Mann and her allies hoped would be the basis for their new disease concept had not yet been done. Indeed, they hoped the NCA would generate contributions needed to fund that research. The 1942 ‘‘Manifesto’’ of the Alcoholism Movement clearly stated that they sought to ‘‘inculcate’’ into public opinion the idea that alcoholics were ‘‘sick’’, and therefore ‘‘not responsible’’ for their drinking and its consequences, and were thus deserving of medical treatment (Anderson, 1942; Roizen, 1991; Room & Collins, 1983).”

Journal of the AMA 1939

ama

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
Vol. 113(16), October 14, 1939

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. The story of how more than one hundred men have recovered from alcoholism. Cloth. Price $3.50. 400 pp.. New York: Works Publishing Company. 1939.
The seriousness of the psychiatric and social problem represented by addiction to alcohol is generally underestimated by those not immediately familiar with the tragedies in the families of victims or the resistance addicts offer to any effective treatment. Many psychiatrists regard addiction to alcohol as having a more pessimistic prognosis than schizophrenia. For many pears the public was beguiled into believing that short courses of enforced abstinence and catharsis in “institutes” and “rest homes” would do the trick, and now that the failure of such temporizing has become common knowledge, a considerable number of other forms of quack treatment have sprung up. The book under review is a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. It is in no sense a scientific book, although it is introduced by a letter from a physician who claims to know some of the anonymous contributors who have been “cured” of addiction to alcohol and have joined together in an organization which would save other addicts by a kind of religious conversion. The book contains instructions as to how to intrigue the alcoholic addict into the acceptance of divine guidance in place of alcohol in terms strongly reminiscent of Dale Carnegie and the adherents of the Buchman (“Oxford”) movement. The one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.”

It then took Marty Mann and NCADD, and coercive EAP programs to promote the ‘disease model’ and gain acceptance by doctors who proceeded to be abused by their own EAPs. Here is a timeline showing what happened after this book review. NCADD History

Transorbital Lobotomy

brain-external-parts.ai

In 1948 Norbert Wiener, the author of Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, said: “[P]refrontal lobotomy … has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.” — Wikipedia