Aaron Sibarium:
Many patients at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, an 89-bed facility affiliated with Pennsylvania State University, suffer from schizophrenia, substance abuse, depression, or bipolar disorder. They cannot complete the "activities of daily living," the hospital's inpatient clinic states. Some are "suicidal, aggressive, or dangerous to themselves or others."
During their stay, which is often involuntary, patients participate in group counseling, learn strategies for stress management, have their medication adjusted, and interact with therapy animals.
They can also partake in a less orthodox therapeutic activity: registering to vote.
Located in a swing state that could decide the 2024 election, the hospital asks psychiatric inpatients, regardless of diagnosis, if they would be interested in "voter registration tools" that let them check their nearest polling station and register to vote online. Patients can also request a mail-in ballot with "assistance" from hospital staff, according to a pair of papers about the project, which began in 2020.
Since then, the hospital has continued registering patients--even those who are not near discharge and have not yet been stabilized--on the grounds that voting, as the institute puts it, is a "therapeutic tool" that "helps empower patients and makes them feel good."
"Voting is an important part of the recovery process," Julie Graziane, a geriatric psychiatrist who leads the hospital's civic engagement efforts, said in a press release.
It works wonders for all the dead who vote Democrat!
Neither she nor Ruth Moore, the hospital's head of community engagement, responded to requests for comment.
Initially, the Pennsylvania-based institute was relying on "voter support" materials created by its own staff. In more recent years, however, it has turned to the nonprofit Vot-ER, which develops "nonpartisan civic engagement tools" for "every corner of the healthcare system."
Founded by an emergency room physician at Harvard Medical School, Alister Martin, who served as an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, Vot-ER has helped more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote. Its signature product is a badge--with a QR code that pulls up an online voter registration platform--that health care workers can wear around their necks. Doctors ask patients whether they've registered to vote and, if the answer is no, encourage them to scan the badge.
Though Vot-ER claims to be nonpartisan, it is staffed by progressive operatives, funded by progressive foundations, and run by an umbrella nonprofit, A Healthier Democracy, that has referred to DEI as "the bedrock of fair healthcare." And ahead of the 2024 election, it is leading a movement--backed by top medical groups and an executive order from the Biden-Harris administration--that is turning health care centers into political battlegrounds.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Nurses Association, and the Association of American Medical Colleges suggest that clinicians ask patients whether they plan to vote. So does the Department of Health and Human Services, which encourages federally funded health centers to provide "voter registration activities" to "underserved populations."
The HHS guidance is the result of a 2021 executive order instructing all federal agencies to promote "access to voting." Vot-ER has advised the Biden-Harris administration on how to implement that order, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner, and, amid a tightening presidential race, appears to be targeting traditional Democratic voting blocs.
Applications for the group's resources ask whether the "majority of your patients" are "24 years old or younger," "Black/African-American," or "LGBTQIA+." Vot-ER's data indicate that 64 percent of the clinics that use its badges "predominantly serve" African Americans and Hispanics, who lean 83 and 61 percent Democrat respectively, according to the Pew Research Center, while 29 percent of the clinics serve patients primarily under the age of 24, a cohort where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.
The group even has scripts doctors can use to encourage "undocumented patients" to register their "friends and family members who are citizens" to vote. Vot-ER did not respond to a request for comment.
At stake, critics say, is not just the outcome of an election but the integrity of the patient/doctor relationship, at a time when trust in medicine--worn down by the COVID-19 pandemic, the politicization of medical associations, and a string of high-profile scandals at elite medical schools--has reached a nadir.
"I can't even begin to tell you how inappropriate this is," said Sally Satel, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Medical School. "It's such a contamination of a physician's role."
Read the whole thing. The organization also fights "medical racism."
You may ask: Wouldn't mentally insane people confined to an asylum be willing to do anything to please their #WokeDoctors?
Others are asking that as well:
Questions about voting can carry a whiff of extortion in psych wards, Kaminetzky noted, since some patients have been involuntarily committed and are there against their will: "They may fear that not registering to vote will be seen as non-compliant, necessitating a longer stay."