Why is this website needed? Good question. You would think it is not needed.

After all, if you’ve ever been inside any mental-health facility in Massachusetts (any facility, whether an inpatient unit, a group home, a halfway house, etc. etc., there is a notice posted in an obvious place saying that if there is any suspected Human Rights violation, it will be taken very seriously. You are told the person to contact; you are told who the Human Rights officer is. You are told the Massachusetts state law governing Human Rights Complaints. Chapter and verse.

I saw those signs and thought that a Human Rights Complaint would mean there’s hell to pay.

But that was naive. Laws look good, and legislators pat themselves on the back. But how many laws actually have any teeth? Bureaucrats do whatever they want. They ignore whatever they want.

And so it is with Corrigan. The Corrigan IPU has a Human Rights Officer. His name is Larry Weiner. I sent him this email (here) in October 2024. At the time, I was a social work intern at Corrigan. Was he interested? He is the Human Rights Officer. He must take that seriously, right? Turns out, no. He completely ignored me. He never even acknowledged receipt, much less followed up.

Corrigan also has a Person in Charge. It is someone named Jeanne Crespi. I emailed her an official Human Rights Complaint. Surely, since her position as Person in Charge requires that she respond to Human Rights Complaints, she would do so, right? Nope. I had previously sent her an email about the social work internship supervisor, Danielle Keogh. I felt that Ms. Keogh’s supervision was not a good reflection on Corrigan or DMH. I sent her this email here, expecting that, whether or not she took it seriously, she would at least respond, saying, for example, “Thank you for expressing your concerns. We regret the negative experience you had. We take all suggestions seriously and wish you well.”

Nope! Nothing. Nada. She never even acknowledged receipt of that email. So i figured she would be tempted not to reply to another. But, seriously, her role is the Person in Charge. Certainly she would be professional enough to reply to an official Complaint sent to her in that role.

This was my email to her (here).

Nope! Silent treatment. Nothing. Nada.

And that is why this website is needed, right there: Larry Weiner and Jeanne Crespi showing no integrity at all.

Witnessing the lack of outdoor access for these vulnerable patients made my stomach turn. They were being treated much worse than anyone would treat a dog. It sickened me. But I never wanted to make Fresh Air a personal project. I simply wanted to pass it off to official channels who would take care of it. I certainly did not want to call attention to the moral injury I suffered at the hands of Danielle Keogh. Victims always look bad. I don’t like calling attention to a situation in which someone traumatized me. But it is tough when you go through official channels and get ignored. So I figured I would make this website.

If either Larry Weiner or Jeanne Crespi had given me even the slightest indication that they were going to take my complaint seriously, I would have left the issue there. I didn’t want to make a stink. I wanted to go crawl under a rock, lick my wounds from the horrendous internship experience, and continue on my way. I would have been thereby sticking my head in the sand, using the classic defense mechanism of denial (or is it disavowal?) I would have gone on my way and thereby let the torture continue at Corrigan.

I’m not proud of that, but there it is.

The truth is that Weiner and Crespi’s negligence signaled a broader malaise at Corrigan. If you think about it, how do the staff there put up with the conditions there? How do you work there for months and know that Bobby has been there for months and never goes outside? It has to be that the staff become adept at seeing the patients as non-persons. It is impossible to believe that if Bobby was any staff member’s grandparent, they would never have let him be treated like this.

To tell the whole story, I will have face the issue of Danielle Keogh, LICSW. She was the first person to resist my efforts to call attention to the outdoor problem at Corrigan IPU. I am not sure I have the stomach for that. I would have to tell the story of an internship that was traumatic for me. It would be the story of my envisioning / hoping that someone [Keogh] would become a mentor for me, however Modern Family. The story of her turning against me, though, and it starting with outdoor air. She thought I got emotional about it, and she thought that for a social worker such emotionality was unprofessional.

I have a recurring dream in which I am trying to insist to her that she look me in the eye, and she refuses to. It was traumatizing to me, because trying to become a social worker at age sixty, you don’t fit what people expect. As a result, I have been resisted and attacked at every step of the way. I had hoped she would be the knight in shining armor, but she simply stopped talking to me and instead started talking to people behind my back with a powerplay in mind. I wanted her to look me in my eyes. To talk with me. She wanted to work behind the scenes and outside the rules. She wanted to force me to submit to her. She wanted to arrange it so that I had to squirm under pressure. That may seem extreme, but power corrupts. And pretty curls can hide weirdly distorted quests for power. When dignity is understood as repressing emotion, a social worker can come to embody a regulated agression which can be extremely harmful. To me, it was a moral injury.

If I ever do screw up the courage to write out the story, I will do so here. For now, who is Danielle Keogh? Her title is Director of Social Work. She claims that she is the Director of all the social workers “in the whole building,” which would make her the director for all the programs at Corrigan MCH. That seems unlikely, although I suppose she has some reasoning behind it. I think it is more accurate to say that she is the Director of Social Work for the Corrigan IPU only. When I interviewed there, there was only one other social worker on the IPU, an excellent social worker named Nicole Crellin (who remains above reproach throughout this story). At that time, Danielle was the Director of one person. Before starting however another social worker was hired, a person my age with many years in DCF. Mel is a strong personality and has especial expertise in splitting. Danielle seems intimidated by her. Working with Mel is hours and hours of okay punctuated by moments of her rebuking you so harshly, you are left in stunned silence.

At any rate, Danielle is young, promoted from within (pretty privilege via Mayer and Afonso?) and she is the sort of person who people love to protect. Or so it seems to me. She is the Director of Social Work, but that means she is in charge of either one or at most two people. Danielle is expert at appearing to be overworked and harried. This is purposive and strategic; it exploits others’ desire to see her as aggrieved and to want to come to her rescue.