"If the facts don't fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts." — GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Ms. Debra Rinaudo, the Executive Director of the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners (BBHE) hardly needs an introduction. She is the force that has driven the BBHE and its 'asleep at the wheel' members into the proverbial ditch of incompetence, waste of resources, and culture of prosecutorial zeal. Under her misdirection, no stone is left unturned. And no stone turned fails to reveal some onerous misdeed, real or imagined. This is the brilliance behind Ms. Rinaudo's particular brand of 'sleuthing.'
Hers is the slippery slope of preexisting schemas.in other words, when Ms. Rinaudo's assumptions, allegations, inferences, and biases are challenged, SHE is challenged. And so, she tends to cling to her beliefs and dig in her little heels, even in the face of contrary evidence. ESPECIALLY in the case of potentially disconfirming evidence. She discounts, denies, or simply ignores any information that runs counter to her cherished beliefs. How convenient. How sad. And how terribly expensive, time-wasting, paranoid, and misguided. Not to mention personally and professionally devastating to the professionals and applicants whose careers, licenses, futures, finances, and reputations are in her tight little fists - which also hold the reins by which she (surprisingly successfully) keeps the professional and public members of the BBHE - who are intended to be (ahem...) well, professional and/or independently neutral, on her very short leash. Ironic, as it is THEY who are intended to rein in this E.D.'s penchant for playing: Private Investigator, Clinician, Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Philosopher, Physician, Pharmacologist, Interpreter, and arbiter of 'Good and Evil.' Oh, and add in Shepherd, as the members of both the CCC and Board are Baaaaad when it comes to challenging their tiny leader in her petite-sized haute couteur. She is as flexible in her thinking as her 'snap-on' overly-coiffed bob would infer: not at all.
HOW DOES SHE DO IT? The 'belief perseverance effect' is one of the many tools she employs in her creative assortment of flaws-in-thinking. This 'effect' is one element of the 'slippery slope' that has led to her well documented and observed penchant for negation and gross distortion of disconfirming evidence. What she cannot deny, negate, or invalidate, she simply either ignores completely or 're-frames' and reinterprets. The problem is, Ms. Rinaudo has not the objectivity, professional training and education, personal confidence (don't mistake bravado as confidence), or even the general respect one would expect from a professional for other professionals (and aspirants) to allow for hearings to be anything short of a highly manipulated and orchestrated zerosum game.
It's all about 'winning, ' but who wins when capable, educated, prepared, and much needed Counseling professionals are denied license, sanctioned, forced to surrender or have their licenses revoked? NOT "The Public" Ms. Rinaudo is quick (a bit too quick and far too adamant) to claim as her primary concern to protect. Yes, there are those, smaller in numbers than the BBHE's record of denial and revocation and sanctions would infer, who should not be practicing behavioral/mental health counseling. But the cases that are of this caliber of seriousness are lost in the body count of those unnecessarily vetted, probed, screened, scrutinized, weighed, winnowed, and ultimately found wanting and so - rejected. The net Ms. Rinaudo and her team of acolyte investigators cast wide in order to ensnare the criminal, unethical, maligned, incompetent, and impaired professional and applicants seeking license has a very fine mesh. So fine, that all too few escape entrapment. No wonder Arizona is becoming infamous for it's licensing restrictions, its under-served and unserved population of mentally ill and 'at risk', and its Board and E.D. Likewise infamous for their unnecessarily punitive and prejudicial conduct.
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