Consider further the secret billions that have been spent to develop listening devices and miniaturized electronics. Implantable electronic devices are now even becoming common in veterinary medicine. It is not much of a stretch to postulate that one could find a place to implant a miniaturized sensor to monitor someone's subvocalized thoughts. Then again, there may be other mechanisms for such a device, for example by analyzing some components of the body's naturally emitted EM radiation. However it is done, I have no doubt that it has regularly been done to me.
These devices, then, are capable of mimicking some of the prime symptoms of certain mental illnesses. While many people know of these symptoms, often people do not consider that the people with these devices know the symptoms too. (I call this 1-ply thinking.) The people with access to these devices know quite well which types of harassment they can get away with, either because the harassment mimics the symptoms of mental illness, is extremely difficult to prove, or both. (Plus, abusing the most secret technology almost guarantees a coverup of the crimes.) This type of abuse violates not only the direct victims, but also the truly mentally ill, whose illnesses are used as a cover.
Psychiatry has a long and sad history of being used, wittingly or unwittingly, to suppress so-called ``dissidents.'' It is widely known that various intelligence agencies have used innocent American citizens as unconsenting experimental subjects. (And most of them have still not even been told what was done to them.) Among the experiments were ones in behavior control and modification. [See, e.g., U.S. News and World Report, Jan. 24, 1994, p32, for some background.] What sort of reception do you suppose these people received if they found themselves in the psychiatric system? Even if they had figured out who was truly responsible for what was happening to them they would risk being called ``delusional'' for saying an intelligence agency was harassing them. Psychiatric practitioners need to always be on guard against becoming a party to this sort of repression.
But I have not let the other incidents of harassment, torture, and blackmail threats silence me. I am certainly not going to be quiet for fear someone will call me crazy.
Unfortunately, you cannot just go in and have a medical procedure done: You need to have a referral. Not knowing any local physicians, I called up a local hospital and made an appointment with the Neurosurgery Department to see someone about a ``head and neck'' problem. I got the appointment. So, a week or so later, on Feb. 21 at 2:30 in the afternoon, I went in to the hospital.
After a short while my name was called, and a nurse showed up to escort me to another waiting room. It was a fairly large waiting room with many people in it. It was too hot and a little stuffy. I sat down, and passed the time by looking down at the floor and out a large window across the room. My hopes that I might quietly have the procedure done were starting to fade.
After some time a nurse came in and called out my name. She took me to an examination room. I waited in there a little while and then a doctor arrived. He was under the impression that I was there for a headache, and told me that that would have been a change of routine for him. I told him my story as best as I could manage at the time. I told him I wanted to have an ultrasound examination of my head and neck area. He said he could not order a procedure without some clear medical need. I told him I was willing to pay for it myself; I was not trying to put it on insurance or anything. And besides, the peace of mind was need enough. We argued about this for a while, and he maintained his position. He kept suggesting that I go to the emergency room, where a psychiatrist could see me and would have the power to order me the ultrasound. We talked back and forth for some time, and something seemed to be telling me (just a figure of speech here), ``No, no, don't do it.'' But at the time I figured, ``What do I have to lose?'' So I said OK.
Let me discuss my state of mind for a minute. I had been tortured for over a year. Harassed by various high-tech and low-tech methods. Had people spying on me and then openly, publicly taunting me about it on the Net. Had people promising to help me -- only to manipulate me for their own ends. My mind was being raped every day. Like with rape the issues are consent and power. I could not -- and still cannot -- even control who steals the very thoughts from my head. (And people complain about intellectual property rights to their written, published works.) I had been branded like an animal, without my consent, and the ``brand'' was being used to further torture me. To feed back my own thoughts and fears and ``embarrassing'' (if broadcast) thoughts. Imagine how it is when people start hinting things about you, planting rumors. You know they are reading your thoughts, and applying their sordid imaginations to try and fish for more dirt on you. You think, "I shouldn't think that..." so of course you do. Your torturers react with gleeful mocking and the cycle continues. You sometimes even catch yourself censoring your thoughts for the thought police. Other people who seemed to know what was going on, instead of reacting with outrage, took it as their own personal source of amusement. They had violated my wife, home, family, and religion, stolen years of my work without any compensation, made threats against me, violated my mind in abominable ways, and destroyed my livelihood and any hope of having children in such a world. And plenty of people had already seen me in Neurosurgery already, so what did I have to lose in going to the emergency room?
Even through all the torture, and the rage I felt at the violations, I generally remained my normal, rational self. I even tried to laugh at the pain and terror. But the torture had made me very deeply depressed, and you do not feel very sociable when people are constantly treating you as subhuman. Nonetheless, the doctor and I had a reasonably nice conversation as we walked down to the emergency room. He had graduated as a UVA undergraduate at about the same time I had. He spent a fairly long time talking to me and had volunteered to walk down to the emergency room with me.
I talked with the second doctor for a little while more. I kept saying I wanted an ultrasound exam, even as they tried to push me to a psychiatrist. I kept asking if they would do the ultrasound. The doctor eventually led me to a bed in the emergency room. It was a metal-frame bed in a cubicle with ``walls'' made of hanging white curtains, except for the front wall which was open and faced the main desk.
After a wait, another doctor came by, introduced herself to me, and I told her my story as best as I could at the time. I kept asking if they would do an ultrasound exam. She examined me a bit, and then agreed to set me up for a CAT scan. I asked her why a CAT scan and not an ultrasound, and she said the resolution was better and that you cannot see much on an ultrasound. I was happy someone had finally agreed to do any type of scan, and so I agreed to the CAT scan. She set me up for the procedure, but told me I would have to wait for several hours. I said OK.
A nurse came in and talked to me. I told him my story. He said he needed to take a blood sample ``to see if something else could be causing this.'' I still do not know what tests they ran. (I now wonder if it was a drug test, but it probably was not. I would be angry if they had done a drug test without my knowledge, even though it would have come up negative.) The nurse said I could choose to have my skin pricked to get the blood, or I could have a catheter put in my arm. He said the catheter might be needed later if they needed to put in anything to increase the resolution of the CAT scan. I wanted to help the scan be as revealing as possible, so I chose the catheter.
I waited and waited. I waited some more, while the emergency room went on around me. It seemed like shifts changed, and that the original people I had talked to had left. I seemed to have become ``that guy who thinks he has a CIA implant,'' though I had never specified the CIA. (On a side note, some of the emergency room people seem not to remember that the patients can hear them when they talk and even joke around.) Finally someone came and took me up to have the CAT scan. By now it was around 10:00pm. The CAT scan did not take too long, and soon a nurse was leading me back to my place in the emergency room. As soon as we got out the door of the CAT scan room she told me that they hadn't found anything. That seemed suspicious to me, so I asked her if she knew what they were looking for, and that it would be very small. I asked her if she was sure they had scanned the neck area too. She would not tell me more.
Back in my cubicle I waited for the results. I was introduced to a new doctor. (I may have been introduced to him before the scan, I do not recall.) The time was approaching 11:00pm. I had been there for many hours, had not eaten or had much to drink, and had been repeating my painful story over and over to various strangers. I was not feeling my best. Two women approached, and introduced themselves as a doctor and trainee. They stood and seemed to be placing themselves between me and the cubicle exit.
She did not seem to really consider my story: that I had actually done work for an intelligence agency, my research work that some might consider ``sensitive,'' or that some paranoid bureaucrat might have marked me as a ``cult leader'' due for some secret police type repression. She went down her list. If I was slow to answer, or did not answer, she would go, ``Are you telling me something? I think you're telling me something.'' She struck me as being amazingly transparent. I asked them when I would get the scan results.
The psychiatrist and trainee finally left. Soon, though, I noticed a couple of policemen walking around outside the entrance to my cubicle. At first I thought they had just decided to stand there while they were waiting around for something else. After a while I began toying with the idea that they were there to guard me. Not that it seemed likely. But maybe the brain scan had turned something up... After more time had passed it became clear that they most likely were ``guarding'' me.
Eventually the psychiatrist came back. She told me that they had taken out a Mental Emergency Custody Order against me, and that I could be held against my will for the next few hours while they ``evaluated'' me. Another psychiatrist was being called in for a second opinion. In the meantime I had to wait. The whole scene had taken on a surreal quality. I asked about the scan results. I now seemed to become a non-person to the people around who had treated me normally an hour before. They wouldn't look at me, and started talking down to me. It was as if they had been setting up some kind of elaborate trap, which now had been sprung. I asked them to take the catheter out of my arm. They would not.
I passed the time sitting and pacing around in my cubicle, waiting for the new psychiatrist to arrive. I kept asking about the scan results. Finally a doctor came over, patronizingly put his hand on my shoulder, and told me the scan did not show anything. That is all I ever learned about the CAT scan. I do not know if anyone ever really even looked at it.
I would ask the policemen why I was being incarcerated. They would say that technically I was not being incarcerated... I would ask if I was free to leave, and they would say no. This went for a few rounds. The policemen and I also chatted and made conversation about various other things. They seemed like pretty cool guys. They seemed to think it was unusual that I was being detained, and one would occasionally check for me about why the psychiatrist was taking so long.
Eventually the new psychiatrist arrived. I told her my story. This conversation seemed to go better than with the first psychiatrist, so I assumed I would be released soon. She soon started wielding her ``keep you overnight'' bludgeon, though. I had to give her the phone numbers of some of my family members or they would keep me overnight. I was scheduled to leave town the next day, and my wife was out of town and could not be reached. So the psychiatrists called my parents out of the blue and talked to them.
She went off to call my family and make her evaluation. The policemen and I waited. And waited. Eventually she came back and said she had decided to keep me overnight. But if I promised to go and meet with her the next day she would release me. If I missed the meeting she would send people out to get me. That is the choice I was given. She said, and I will always remember the words and the oppressive feeling I got, ``We're here to help you... with your mental illness.''
So there I was. I had been tortured for over a year. My repeated complaints seemed to fall on deaf ears. The media would not openly report the story. And now, I had voluntarily gone to try and get some help against my torturers. I had marched around all day telling my painful story over and over to various strangers. And now I was being labeled mentally ill and held against my will. And the police had been called in to prevent me from ``escaping.'' But this type of story is really not that unusual. We regularly hear variants of it from various third world countries. (And we love to use these occasions to preach about how things work in a ``free democracy.'')
I eventually agreed to her extortion demands, though I told her that I profoundly resented it. It was about 1:30am or 2:00 by the time I eventually left, to go back to my car on the top of the parking garage. It had gotten cold outside for how I was dressed, but I was glad to be out of that building. I really felt sickened by the whole episode. When I went in to meet her the next day, the psychiatrist seemed to have thought about things overnight and was somewhat apologetic about what had happened to me. She said she believed that some of the harassment, like on the Internet death threats, the phone calls, etc., had really happened. No kidding. It all happened. She said that she had not thought I was a threat to myself or others -- even though that was a condition for the mental ``emergency'' order.
I do not know what sort of lasting legal stigma I now have from the emergency detainment order. My rights to speech, free religious exercise, due process, fair takings, association, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, to name a few, have all been trampled as if they did not exist. I now wonder if they have indirectly managed to trample my second amendment rights too.
I still do not know how the mind rape is being carried out. I now wish I had insisted on an ultrasound exam. CAT scans use X-rays, to which certain materials are invisible. (Assuming the scans were even closely inspected in the first place.) I think cautiously about trying to have some other procedures performed. Of course I am not even sure if implanted devices are what is being used, but the surveillance can seemingly follow me everywhere.
So now you know the story of what happened when I went in for a brain scan.