Words Mean Something

In my  role as a social worker at a medical teaching facility, in a psychiatric department, I've witnessed, written, and read a lot of petitions.  Petitions in Michigan are the initial paperwork needed to hospitalize someone involuntarily.  They're pretty serious stuff.  The petition itself, which anyone can fill out, doesn't take away a person's rights; for that,  two physicians, one of whom must be a psychiatrist, must compete a certificate saying that they agree the patient needs to be hospitalized against his will.

Mandatory Denouncing? The politics of CPS

Bad Quaker (or as Michael Deene likes to refer to him, Ben Quaker) is doing a superb podcast series on protecting children in a free society. Building on the premises that 1) we have no free society, at least in the US and 2) putting them in the "system" which includes the police, the courts, and Child Protective Services does not help kids and it especially doesn't help families.

I have my differences with Ben, which I've already addressed in a comment on his blog.  But CPS has been coming up in all sorts of coversations around me lately, so I figured it's time to do a blog post.

Let me first establish my street cred with regard to CPS, at least CPS in my own state.