How to Get Therapy or Mental Health Care Under Kaiser Permanente

As Always Avoid Alliteration slowly turns into something more resembling a professional blog, rather than a source of ad revenue, I hesitated to post this guide as there is a stigma around mental heath. I've decided that if being open, honest, and helpful about my experiences in trying to find a mental health provider puts me at risk of not receiving a job offer in the future, I'm better off for it. If this helps one person, then it's all more than worthwhile. The way in which Kaiser Permanente operates is far more shameful than anything I am going to say here. I initially wrote this post as a forum post, replying to someone else who was experiencing the same issues with Kaiser Permanente Mental Health Services. I have somewhat expanded on and cleaned up that initial post. 

If you are experiencing crisis and need to talk to someone immediately call 1-800-309-2131 at any time of day. If you're paranoid you can dial *67 first and this will mask your phone number. You can also call in using a free Google Voice number.

I want to set the expectation with you that Kaiser's mental health system is specifically made to be negligent and discourage anyone who is experiencing mental health issues from actually using their services. In October 2023 Kaiser settled with the state of California in regards to not providing mental health care that they were legally required to provide. Second article. This is also not the first time Kaiser has been fined for this exact same problem. Impacted patients will receive no compensation as a result of this settlement. At the end of the day, there's a litany of reasons why Kaiser Legal has multiple floors of office space in a building overlooking Lake Merritt.

Here are the steps to receive mental health care from Kaiser Permanente. I'd recommend reading through all of the steps before starting your journey:

1. Call the Kaiser Mental Health office local to you (Google your local number).

2. Almost certainly leave a voicemail for an appointment. Kaiser will say that they will call you back in 48 hours. They almost certainly wont. You can kill two birds with one stone by preemptively leaving a bad Google review while you're on hold to leave a voicemail, for what it's worth.

3. Repeat this process, playing phone tag until you get someone on the phone. If Kaiser can't reach you on the phone this is where this process ends and you will need to call them back.

4. Once you get someone on the phone, Kaiser will try to offer you an appointment with a Kaiser therapist in three months, or if you're lucky, you'll get an outside referral right off the bat. Ask for one right away if the soonest you can get an appointment is more than a month away.

Optional step: If you get a Kaiser therapist plan to be stood up on your appointment in three months or plan to have the appointment cancelled the day before. In California you need to file a compliant with Kaiser about this before escalating to the state. (In California you have the right to timely access to care.) This requires documenting every phone call and appointment in forms they provide, and then again on forms the state provides. So if you have the energy to file a complaint, start documenting every phone call and conversation you have. Kaiser meanwhile will provide documentation of every single time they've called you and every appointment they've offered. The intention is to paint a picture that you the individual trying to get mental healthcare are the one that has been inaccessible this whole time, not them the giant company with thousands of workers who aren't staffed appropriately to pick up the phone or call you back.  

5. Call the outside referral program and have them find a therapist for you. While they will provide you a list of therapists you can call yourself, they usually know of a few that are actively open to receiving new clients. Around the time I went through this process I literally called over 50 therapists and did not get a single call back.

Optional step: While calling around I got a more than one recordings saying the therapist I called is not accepting any male or cisgender male clients. This is illegal in my state of California. If this happens, and you have the energy, record the recordings and file complaints with your state's mental health board or board of psychology.

6. Repeat steps 1 through 3 with the outside referral program. They tend to be more professional than anyone at Kaiser that you'll talk to and will actually call you back in the time frame that they give you. If you go longer than a week without getting a therapist with the outside referral, Kaiser is pretty good about just giving you a different outside referral once you have one, and renewing your referral once you have a therapist you like. 

 

7. Expect to initially get a few really bad therapists before landing on one that rocks. Plan to continue looking for a therapist again after a few sessions while continuing to see the therapist you have.

As I stated at the beginning: Kaiser's mental health system is specifically made to be negligent and discourage anyone from experiencing mental health issues from actually using the service. Good luck and I'm sorry that you had to read this article. 

Getting Xbox 360 Wireless Controllers and Dongle Working on Windows 10 and 11

In the past you used to only have to install your Xbox 360 drivers from an installer executable that you would either get from Microsoft's site or, if you still have it, from a CD that came with your hardware. This no longer works. The good news is that current versions of Windows now already have the Xbox 360 peripheral drivers ready to go, Windows for whatever reason, no longer automatically recognizes the peripherals when they are plugged into your PC. In order to get your hardware to work on newer versions of Windows, you need to select the appropriate driver from the Device Manager. These steps will also work for a third party aftermarket dongle or controller.

(If you're here because your first party Microsoft dongle died, this Youtuber found a repair, but please note the component that needs to be replaced is a micro component, which is a tricky fix even if your handy with a solder iron.)

You can no longer use the installer, you will need to manually assign the drivers. 

 

 

1. Plug in your Xbox 360 wireless dongle into the PC. If you are plugging in a wired controller just follow these steps for now as well and plug in your controller. 

2. Start device manager. You can start it by pressing Windows Key + R and pasting in devmgmt.msc. You can also type device manager into the search that comes up after you hit the start button. 

3. You should see your dongle as an unknown device. You're going to want to right click on it and select the Update Driver option. 

4. Select the option to Browse My Computer For Driver Software.

5. Select the option that says Let Me Pick From a List of Available Drivers. You should now see a list of available Xbox 360 drivers in the list to select from:

Be sure to select the appropriate driver for your peripheral. If you're installing the dongle you should do this for the dongle first. Let your dongle discover your controller, and then you may need to repeat this process for the first controller you connect once it is also discovered as an unrecognized device.

PLEASE NOTE: At some point Microsoft made it so that the Home/Guide button is automatically hard-mapped to open up a Windows Game overlay. This, probably intentionally, conflicts with using Steam Big Picture mode and the Steam overlay. As a result I would suggest installing the earliest version of the drivers that will work for your Xbox 360 peripherals. You can also try reverting the controller firmware by opening the Xbox Accessories app, then pressing Windows Key + R. and then running:

> xboxaccessories:\\firmwareupdate?legacyDowngrade=true

If for whatever reason your drivers are not available, you can install the drivers from the executable, and then seeing if the drivers are then listed after a reboot. For posterity, I have included a download link the the drivers here since they don't seem to be available at all from Microsoft themselves any longer.

No emails, follow up questions and comments below please. Thanks.

Sync Windows system time with time.windows.com on startup (all Windows versions)

Here are the steps to sync Windows system time with time.windows.com on startup. I've confirmed that this solutions works on Windows 7 and 10, it should also work on all currently available versions of the Windows operating system:

1. Open PowerShell by typing PowerShell into the search bar in your Windows start bar. 

2. Copy and paste the below line of code into PowerShell:

%windir%\system32\sc.exe start w32time task_started

3. Save As... the file to your Windows Startup folder for all users as "timeSync.bat" or whatever name will help you remember what this file is. It needs to be saved as a .bat file or it will not work.

Where your startup folder is located will depend on your version and installation of Windows, but you can try: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp

Please note that some versions of Windows has a startup folder for individual users as well as for all system users. Individual startup folders are located somewhere within the user's folder.

4. After you add the file to your startup folder, I would hit Windows Key + R and run msConfig. From there make sure that the bat file is set to run.

5. Restart your system.

It may take 30 to 60 seconds for this bat file to run after a user logs on. If you have a way to get the script to execute faster please comment below. 

6. If the system time does not automatically update after startup hit Windows Key + R and run services.msc

Make sure that the local service Windows Time is set to Automatic startup type. To modify this, right click on Windows Time and select Properties. Reset your system again.

Use cases for this issue:

I setup a dual boot between Ubuntu and Windows. Whenever I boot up Ubuntu, the system time gets converted to UTC which throws off the system time for Windows. Since websites' security certificates rely on system time to verify certificates I could not access most websites and the system time threw off how the f.lux application worked.

What I've Read Halfway into 2023

Traumnovelle / Dream Story

is the 1926 novella by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler that the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut was based off of. The film is pretty true to the flow of the book with the exception that the film is much more... provocative than the book. I wanted to understand the ending of the film better where the doctor finds the mask on his pillow. In the book it is insinuated that his wife finds it and places it there, rather than it being a mystery. The book ends in that bedroom scene with him confessing what he’s been up to - the toy store scene at the end of the film was added by Kubrick. The title Dream Story also confirms that the use of soft lenses in the film was an intentional choice by Kubrick to give certain scenes a dream-like quality.

Barbarians At The Gate

 

What stood out in this book to me was the extreme extravagance the executive class lived in fifty to forty years ago. As the wealth gap in America widens I can only imagine what that life is like now, reading the descriptions in the book made me kinda disgusted. The book is pretty long and dry, you’d probably get more enjoyment out of watching the HBO film adaption of the book. The film comes from a time where the movie was made to cater to multiple different family members who might watch the film together; there is a small comedy B plot about the family dog taking airplane rides. If you’re interested in the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, I’d recommend reading the individual news articles written by the investigative journalists that wrote this book.


American Kingpin

 

goes into the personal life of the main founder of The Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, up until after his apprehension and imprisonment. The book gets into Ulbricht’s ideology as well as the ideology of the law enforcement personal that are trying to find him. The biggest surprise from this book was how utterly incompetent law enforcement was, and how the investigation had to get all the way up to the Department of Justice in order to stop the crab mentality different law enforcement agencies had when pursuing the founders of The Silk Road.


Inner Work

is one of the best self-therapy books I think I have ever read and you don’t need to read the whole book. It establishes how you need to talk to yourself and how to best use your active imagination to cultivate mental health. I think I would have considered this book a little “out there” if I had not studied psychology in college first. This will be a book where I buy multiple times to give to people I know and I only really read the last half of the book.

When Food Is Love

The gist of the book is that if you don’t have a healthy concept of self-love or self esteem you will repress negative feelings you have. Overeating is one of the ways that this repression can manifest; food is there for you when no one else is. I wish the author spent more time on strategies for building self-love and self esteem rather than talking about themselves. Maybe some people will find the author's personal examples helpful, I did not.

The Riders Come Out at Night

 

gives a meticulously researched history of policing in Oakland California and a protracted list of probably all of the known illegal things they have done and continue to do. The book starts with The Riders; who kidnapped, planted evidence on, beat, and tortured citizens of Oakland. From there the book goes into the history of policing in Oakland and San Francisco including the how the KKK actively recruited police officers and sheriffs. The book then chronicles all of the US policing incidents of killing civilians that has happened since. This is a good book, but if you have been on top of the shit show that is American policing, you can probably drop off of the book from where you ended up starting in real life and skip to the last few chapters.

Who Censored Rodger Rabbit

Only picked this up because the idea that Who Framed Rodger Rabbit was derived from an 80s adult fantasy mystery novel was so bizarre to me. It’s a mystery book; I wont give anything away. While reading the book I thought it was silly and I wanted to be done with it, the last page made me want to re-read the book with a new perspective on it. The author Gary Wolf also has mastered the art of the garden path sentence.


The Road To Jonestown

is written in an investigative journalism style and goes up through the life of Jim Jones, and the history of The Peoples’ Temple, up until after the massacre that took place in Guyana. If you’re interested in a first hand account of how a narcissist could manipulate a group of people to kill themselves, this is the book for you. If you’re an American that lived through the Trump presidency, there’s probably not a lot here for you to pick up unless you have a specific fascination in The Peoples’ Temple.


The Minority Report / We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (Phillip K Dick Short Stories)

From Robert Crumb's The Religious Experience of Philip K.Dick

Wanted to read some short stories from Dick since I'm a fan of a lot of his books. The Minority Report and We Can Remember it for you Wholesale are sort of almost half-baked ideas with The Minority Report being the better short story of the two. I watched Total Recall recently after reading We Can Remember it for you Wholesale and it's pretty obvious that they slapped a completely different sci-fi screenplay someone else had written onto the end of Dick's story.


Jennifer Government

As a teenager I played Nation States, which was programmed by the author to promote the book. The consensus of people on the Nation States forums that read the book was that it was pretty good and worth reading. I agree, the book is pretty good and worth reading. It’s a dystopian novel written in 2003 where the world is more or less controlled by corporations. Like a lot of (good) dystopian and science fiction books, as time goes on you start to see the parallels between yesterday’s fiction and today’s reality - which probably makes this book even more interesting to read twenty years after its publication.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

is written by Christopher Wylie who was the whistleblower for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This book goes into depth about how they, and eventually Russia, were able to influence American, British, and African elections. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that every person that lives in a democracy should read this book. If you're not going to read it at least take the time to try to create an ad campaign on Facebook or Reddit and take a look at how many tools are available to you to really drill down into the specific person that you can to create ads to cater to. Then keep in mind that you can do that without the phone tracking data and hundreds of data points on individual people that Cambridge Analytica had. Also keep in mind that while there is some oversight over the US collecting data, there is no oversight about them buying it.

The Punisher

I thought reading the original series would give some insight into why police and fascists have co-opted the Punisher logo. There was no answer in reading the original series. The answer is that Chris Kyle, the American Sniper guy, used the symbol during his deployment in Iraq and it picked up traction as he built his personal brand. 

“We all thought what the Punisher did was cool: He righted wrongs,” Kyle stated in his 2012 book American Sniper. “So we adopted his symbol,  a skull, and made it our own."

The quote is interesting because frankly, the only kind of adult that would find the Punisher cool is one who cannot understand nuance even if they are repeatedly hit over the head with it. The Punisher has a complete black and white view of the world and it's shown time and time again that his obsession with his own definition of justice and vengeance is destructive. For example, in the series there is a little girl who is shot due to the main character's obsession with vengeance. He does not stop to help the little girl. Maybe in the future I'll put my German degree to use and write an article about how and why fascist movements co-opt cultural symbols.

This comic book was written for children. There's not really much to it, the thing I liked the most was the color coordination and color layout of the individual comic pages. The hyper violence in the comic clashes with what I assumed was comic code regulations of the time. There's lots of people getting shot and killed but no blood or gore at all. In a way the censorship seems counter productive because the gruesomeness and horror of war-like violence is completely taken away. If you're looking for something in this vain I would instead recommend the original The Mask comic series published by Dark Horse.

How to Fix The Manhunt Memory Card Error on PS2

 

If your copy of Manhunt running on the PlayStation 2 hangs at the save screen, the solution is to simply use an 8MB memory card. Even though the error message that eventually shows up says that an official Sony memory card is needed, the issue specifically has to do with the size of the memory card. According to the current reverse engineered documentation of the PS2 hardware: for unknown reasons, certain games do not work if the memory card is larger than expected. If you are using Open PS2 Loader (OPL) virtual memory cards WILL work, they just need to be manually set to be 8MB. Due to the bug mentioned above you should only be using virtual memory cards of 8MB for all games.

I was not going to do one of those recipe website moves where I provide a whole background story before giving the answer people are looking for. If you're confused as to why this is posted here, I felt that this post fell in with a lot of the one off technical solutions I have been posting as of late. I ran into this issue about a year ago, meant to share a broader explanation to the solution online, and am only now getting around to it. So if this post saves one person hours of trouble because they're able to find this on Google, great!

(And if you're asking why post something like this in the first place:) Manhunt was a niche stealth PS2 game developed by Rockstar Games in 2003. The stealth mechanics developed in the game have been implemented  in just about every Rockstar game released since Manhunts release in 2003. Even in their most recent release, Red Dead Redemption 2, the stealth mechanics and games play and feel exactly like Manhunt. Due to the violence and subject matter of the game, there was an ensuing media circus and the game was outright banned in some countries. Users are unable to play the game on other platforms today because the re-releases and ports are considered inadequate and buggy compared to the original release. As a result many users run into the above error early on when trying to run the game on the original hardware. For the sake of media preservation and to humor those with an interest in the forbidden or obscure - I think this is important information to share.