The Binary Circumstance

Prompted by the recent frontpage series in the Seattle Times about sexual abuse by health care workers, Washington State’s very own nanny-in-chief, Christine Gregoire, has come up with a plan to fix things.

Given the speed at which she came up with such a far-ranging, detailed plan, I can’t help bu wonder if is possible the new legislation was drafted before the Seattle Times articles were written to sell it.

Gov. Christine Gregoire is launching sweeping changes this week that are intended to combat health-care practitioners who commit sexual misconduct against patients.

Gregoire’s initiatives are in response to a Seattle Times investigation, “License to Harm,” which reported last week that state health regulators repeatedly failed to adequately investigate and penalize health-care practitioners accused of sexual misconduct.

In the past decade, the state dismissed one-third of all sexual-misconduct complaints without any investigation, The Times found. When it did act, the state often returned offenders to work under dubious safeguards, such as treating female patients only if they were older than 50.

“This is not just about us enforcing the law and investigating complaints and taking disciplinary actions,” Gregoire said Friday. At the center of every state action or, all too often, inaction is a patient who experienced a “terrible incident,” she said.

Sexual misconduct is one of the leading disciplinary problems in Washington health care.

There are several aspect to the plan, but I want to focus on the fact that she wants the amount of training for registerd counselors to be increased.

The governor wants to create stricter qualifications to become a “registered counselor.” Currently, registered counselors pay a $40 registration fee and take a four-hour class on AIDS awareness but are not required to have any training or education, not even a high-school diploma.

Washington is the only state to issue credentials to so many registered counselors under such scant qualifications. Higher-level counselors, such as licensed mental-health counselors, must earn master’s degrees and garner extensive clinical experience to qualify for a license.

The Times reported last week that 104 registered counselors have been charged with sexual misconduct since 1995, more than any other profession.

Gregoire said she was stunned to learn that the state had 17,000 counselors who were not required to have any education or training.

“When you put yourself out as a registered therapist, in the mind’s eye of the average person, that means you have some special credentials,” she said. “That should mean something.”

A new task force, overseen by the Health Department, will study the registered-counselor program and recommend new educational standards, Gregoire said.

Tougher standards will require a change in Washington law.

Many registered counselors may have college degrees, but the state doesn’t ask them to list their education.

“If we’re going to continue to register them, then we better make sure people have met some minimum qualifications,” Gregoire said.

The Governor is confusing the term therapist with counselor. The license is for “registered counselor” not “registerd therapist.”

The only requirement of a therapist should be that they do something which is therapeutic. The only requirement of a counselor should be that they counsel.

The state’s further involvement in the field of therapy and counseling can only further politicize those fields to insure that therapists and counselors discourage any beliefs or sentiments that are contrary to the state’s interest. When the state controls the training and licensing of mental health workers, it determines what is considered illegal or socially unacceptable in terms of therapy, counseling and by extension thinking and feeling.

As I pointed out in a previous post about this series, psychologists and chiropractors are involved in sexual misconduct at a higher rate than registered counselors and they have much more training than registered counselors. There is no direct correlation between the level of training and the percentage of practitioners from the various licensed fields engage in sexual conduct that ultimately results in a complaint.

I would submit that it’s the all-to-cozy relationship between the state and licensed psychologists that gives psychologists the sense that they can get away with abusing their clients. How many victims of sexual abuse, especially those who suffer from real psychiatric or drug problems, have been told by their therapists, “Nobody is going to believe you?”

Gregoire’s plan also includes more background checks which is fine. That does not have to be done by the state, however. It could be done by any private agency that is issuing a license.

These proposed changes are about creating barriers to entry to protect those in high-paying heathcare fields from competition and some of those therapists according to the states own numbers are the worst abusers.

It will also give the state much more control over the health care field and particularly the mental health field which is always a dangerous marriage, just as bad as the marriage of church and state, because it gives the state control over beliefs and ideas.

Since the existence of a mandatory, coercive state is not based on rational premises to begin with, it cannot possibly result in better mental health to have irrational premises pounded into the minds to vulnerable individuals.

Objective reality, not the state, is the arbiter of what is sane or insane. There is a fine line between a nanny-state and a bully-state and an inflated view of bureaucratic authority is all that’s required to cross it.

View my other posts on this series.

This is what happens in a mystical culture that places too high a value on degrees, social status and fame and too little value on knowledge and truth.

Mysticism worships the rejection of truth and finds “real” value in self-serving fantasy. Religion is the most glaring example of this but it can take many other forms.

For those who aren’t familiar with it already, I introduce you to Ayn Rand’s concept of the “second-hander”:

Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison…. They’re second-handers….

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, and produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation–anchoring to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. [”The Nature of the Second-Hander”, Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 78: pb 69, quoted in Binswanger, Harry, The Ayn Rand Lexicon: New York, Meridian, 1988, pp 438-439]

But Harvard admits them and keeps them.

Kaavya Viswanathan fits the definition of a second-hander. Both her actions and the subject matter of her book reflect this. And she says her theft of another writer’s words was unconscious.

Other Harvard students are disillusioned — and even sympathetic — to the plight of the 19-year-old author. Most agree, however, that there are too many similarities between Viswanathan’s book and two works by novelist Megan McCafferty to be a coincidence.

“I just feel bad for her, even if it was totally intentional,” said Katherine Mims, 20, a freshman from Sterling, Va. “I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, like most students. But when you lay the passages next to each other, it’s hard to deny.”

Viswanathan did not return phone messages and e-mails seeking comment. She has said that she unintentionally “internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words” and that “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.”

Before the Harvard Crimson broke the story about the similarities between Viswanathan’s novel and the other books, staff writer Elizabeth W. Green opined in the student paper about the “soul-burning jealousy” of Harvard students when others get ahead.

The splash from the sophomore’s novel brought that envy to a new level, Green wrote. “Almost as soon as her success became public knowledge, Viswanathan became the target of an inspired private butchering,” she wrote.

In an interview with The Associated Press before the controversy, Viswanathan talked about the pressures of her new fame and described the first time she saw her novel in print. One Saturday in March in the Harvard bookstore, she happened upon a prominent display of her books, each slapped with a head shot that took up most of the back cover.

“I started to hyperventilate, and I burst into tears,” Viswanathan said at the time.

At noon Friday, the bookstore pulled the book with its fuchsia binding out of its front display window and off the local best-seller list. Just last Sunday, the novel hit No. 32 on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list.

Viswanathan’s book tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen who earns all A’s in high school but gets rejected from Harvard because she forgot to have a social life. The heroine bears superficial similarities to the author, including Indian heritage, a New Jersey upbringing and Harvard.

McCafferty’s book is also set in New Jersey; it follows a protagonist named Jessica Darling who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend.

The Crown Publishing Group, McCafferty’s publisher, alleges that at least 40 passages in Viswanathan’s book are similar to their author’s novels “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.”

At Harvard, most student agree.

“I think we have all accepted that she plagiarized parts of it,” said Jessica Lin, 19, a freshman from Warren, N.J.

The school has largely stayed out of the controversy. Robert Mitchell, spokesman for the undergraduate segment, said plagiarism policies do not relate to work performed outside class.

It’s all about being accepted by others and being popular and the social “power” that comes with it.

The vast majority of people in our extroverted, popularity-driven culture meet the definition of the second-hander.

From Yahoo News:

President Vicente Fox has yet to sign the bill, which would eliminate penalties for those caught with small amounts of some drugs, but his office has applauded it.

Mexican lawmakers have said the bill will let authorities focus on major drug traffickers and not clutter prisons with small-time offenders.

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Judith Bryan said Saturday the measure could actually make it easier to prosecute drug crimes because it attempts to “precisely specify the amount of narcotics in possession of a suspect to allow a criminal prosecution.”

“Preliminary information from Mexican legislative sources indicates that the intent of the draft legislation is to clarify the ’small amounts’ of drugs for personal use as stated in current Mexican law,” she said.

Mexican law already left open the possibility of dropping charges against people caught with drugs if they are considered addicts and if “the amount is the quantity necessary for personal use.” The new bill drops the “addict” requirement — automatically letting any “consumers” have drugs — and sets out specific allowable quantities.

This is a follow-up to this story.

First of all, I think this will boost Mexican tourism.

In the most optimistic outcome, it will make the U.S. look at its ridiculous drug prohibition policies that have wasted billions upon billions of tax dollars, destroyed thousands of lives and filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders. (More on number of Americans in prison for drug law violations here.)

Anybody who watches the gold price on the sidebar of my blog already knows that gold and other precious metals just keep going up.

Supposedly it’s because of concerns about Iran, but personally I think they’re just putting the blame on Iran when the real reason is that investors fear further inflation and devaluation of the dollar due to the war. The article even mentions the “breakdown of the dollar” as one possible reason for the price increase.

“Iran continues to provoke conflict and the gold price is reflecting that sense of uneasiness,” said Peter Spina, an analyst at GoldSeek.com. “Iran knows they have leverage here, especially with oil above $70 and the U.S. dollar becoming ever so vulnerable.”
So “all indications are that the geopolitical tensions will continue to support gold at this juncture, with the breakdown in the U.S. dollar adding even more ammo to the run,” he said. The greenback dropped to an 11-month low against the euro Friday, and a three-month low against Japan’s yen.