Extended narrative and evidence beyond the summary pages — for readers who want the complete record.
There is a difference between a mistake and a lie. A mistake goes in random directions. Every single scoring error in this evaluation went one direction — against the patient. That is not a mistake.
But what followed is worse. When asked to produce the raw WAIS-IV scores, Dell did not produce them. When asked to produce my sister's email to Dr. Logue — which my sister confirmed in writing that she sent — UT's records department said it was not there.
They did not just lie about my scores. They lied about the fact that they are lying. They are keeping my scores captive while telling me they are not. They are keeping my sister's email while telling me it does not exist.
I have proof of both. My sister's written confirmation that she sent the email. Dell's own report showing "above average" where the standardized rubric requires "Superior."
"The tower says: Ye shall know the truth. They are keeping my truth from me. And then lying about keeping it. That is what is happening beneath the skyline of the University of Texas."
My symptoms began in full in January 2007, while I was working as a graduate research assistant at the University of Oklahoma, in an old renovated dormitory that had been converted into an educational training center. I did not know it then, but I would later learn, through a doctor trained in the Ritchie Shoemaker protocol for mold-related illness, that I carry what is sometimes called the "double dreaded" HLA-DR genotype — present in roughly a quarter of the population — which impairs the body's ability to clear mold-derived toxins. I also do not produce glutathione, the body's master antioxidant, as efficiently as most people. Together, this means mold exposure builds up in my system faster than it would in someone without this genetic profile, and hits my immune system harder.
Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff directs the Institute for Early Life Adversity Research at Dell Medical School. His career was built studying how early life stress permanently dysregulates the nervous system — how chronic invalidation, persistent stress, and inflammation cause lasting biological harm, largely through the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) system. This is not peripheral to his work. It is his life's work.
I came to Dell Medical School with active tick-borne infections, documented mold toxicity compounded by a genetic vulnerability I did not choose, a nervous system already in chronic dysregulation, documented systemic inflammation, and a history I described to the team in writing. Dr. Nemeroff's own research on CRF shows that a person in this state cannot heal without safety and validation — that continued stress in the presence of inflammation causes permanent neurological damage. He knew, better than almost anyone alive, exactly what financial coercion and institutional betrayal would do to a nervous system already this compromised.
This is the part that is usually read as grievance and is actually mechanism, so I want to be exact about it.
Dr. Nemeroff's finding is not that stress feels bad. It is that chronic stress a person cannot resolve or escape keeps corticotropin-releasing factor elevated, which keeps inflammation elevated, which prevents recovery. The operative word is unresolvable. A stressor with an exit does not do this. A stressor with no exit does.
So consider what has actually been built around me.
There is a false psychiatric record in my file. There is a diagnosis code the same report says had no evidence behind it. There are infections that were dismissed and are still untreated. And every mechanism that exists to resolve any of it has closed: the Texas Medical Board declined to investigate. The UT Austin Ethics Office did not respond. The University's General Counsel did not respond. The Office for Civil Rights closed my complaint with no reason stated. The HHS Inspector General has not answered since February.
That is not a series of unfortunate outcomes. That is the construction of a stressor with no exit — which is precisely the condition Dr. Nemeroff spent forty years establishing does permanent damage.
And the reason those doors are closed is not that anyone examined my case and disagreed. It is that the offices that would have examined it have been systematically disabled. Seventeen inspectors general were removed in a single night. The Office for Civil Rights still exists on paper; it simply does not investigate. The machinery is intact and switched off.
Which brings it to the Senate, and I state this plainly because it is the operative fact of my life right now:
I cannot heal because there is no longer anywhere to take this — and there is nowhere to take it because the body with the constitutional power to restore those mechanisms has declined to use it.
I am not saying the members of that body wish me harm. I am saying the mechanism is not mysterious and it does not require anyone's intent. A man is kept in an unresolvable situation. His inflammation stays up. His treatment cannot begin. Every day that the checks stay disabled is another day of it.
Resolve the record and the stressor ends. That is the treatment I have not been able to start. It is the only one that matters now, and I cannot administer it to myself.
He knew this. And then he did it to me. He took a patient in a dysregulated, inflamed, genetically vulnerable state — present under documented financial coercion — and produced diagnoses that validated the coercing party and dismissed the biological evidence. The director of the Institute for Early Life Adversity Research caused adverse conditions to continue in a patient's life, under the banner of medicine, for $15,000.
At Emory University, Dr. Nemeroff failed to disclose approximately $1.2 million in pharmaceutical industry payments to his institution while simultaneously receiving federal NIH research grants — conduct that triggered a Congressional investigation and resulted in his resignation from the Emory chairmanship. He was later hired by the University of Miami and then UT Austin. This history was not disclosed to me as his patient. It is now relevant to every patient who has been through his program at Dell Medical School.
The spasms Dell's own report describes — "unusual grunting vocalizations and head movements" — have a documented biological explanation from two independent, converging directions, not one.
The first pathway is direct. A 2013 case report in the Journal of Medical Case Reports (Schoof, Kluge, Heinze, and Galazky, DOI 10.1186/1752-1947-7-124) documents a confirmed case of Lyme neuroborreliosis presenting as pathologic startle myoclonus in a 69-year-old man, treated successfully with intravenous ceftriaxone — the same antibiotic I received. The paper's own definition is precise: the startle response is itself a form of physiological myoclonus.
The second pathway is the one Dr. Nemeroff's own field established. Published, peer-reviewed research confirms that CRF1 and CRF2 receptor activation — in the extended amygdala and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis — directly potentiates the startle reflex. This is not a fringe claim; it is foundational neuroendocrinology, and it is the exact mechanism Dr. Nemeroff's own laboratory helped establish over four decades.
Two separate, real, documented pathways — one infectious, one endocrine — converging on the same observable symptom. Financial coercion from my family elevated my CRF before I ever arrived at Dell. The evaluation itself, and everything that followed it, elevated it further. Dr. Nemeroff did not need to guess what continued, uncontrolled stress would do to a patient already presenting with these two convergent pathways. He had spent forty years publishing the answer.
One more point on the record deserves to be stated plainly. Dell's own report describes two additional cognitive scores as "exceptionally high" without disclosing the numerical values. The 97th percentile figure that is public is the disclosed score. The undisclosed scores, by their own report's language, may be higher still. And the Full Scale IQ score obtained during that evaluation was measured while I was symptomatic with active, documented Lyme disease — meaning it may understate, not overstate, baseline cognitive function. Both of these are fair, stated qualifications, not embellishments: the record we have access to may be a floor, not a ceiling.
The UT Austin Ethics Office received a detailed complaint on May 30, 2025. No response was received.
The Texas Medical Board received a formal complaint against Dr. Nemeroff on November 5, 2025. The TMB declined to investigate.
UT Health Austin's records department required federal intervention — a complaint to the HHS Office for Civil Rights — before producing my own medical records. When produced, my sister's confirmed email to Dr. Logue was absent. A formal Cure Demand sent January 24, 2026 has received no response.
On February 20, 2026, I sent a formal letter to Daniel H. Sharphorn, Vice Chancellor and General Counsel of The University of Texas System, requesting preservation of EHR audit logs and an independent review. The HHS Office for Civil Rights does not contact a major public university without that contact reaching general counsel. Silence is a choice.
Dell's own evaluation team — Dr. Erin Logue specifically — requested a written characterization of me from my sister during the evaluation itself, in December 2024. The request and the reply are documented, dated, and in writing.
On December 16, 2024, at 3:13 PM, Alison Engbretson, Executive Assistant to Dr. Nemeroff, wrote to my sister: "Dr. Logue is asking if you can please send over the letter you prepared." The next day, December 17, 2024, at 10:54 AM, my sister wrote to Alison asking to confirm the terms of a promised treatment plan, and asked directly whether family counseling — the reason she told me she was arranging the evaluation — would give the family "help/tools in dealing with him." Alison replied the same day, 11:51 AM, clarifying that the evaluation was for the individual only, and that family therapy was not part of the process but could, at most, become a later recommendation.
I was not part of any of these communications. I received them only because my sister forwarded me Alison's final reply — and the full email chain, including this correspondence, came with it.
Years before this evaluation, my sister had told me she believed I had bipolar disorder and repeatedly suggested I be tested for it at Dell. A SPECT brain scan I underwent at the Amen Clinic in Newport Beach, California found, according to their neurologist, no indication of bipolar disorder.
Dell's official diagnostic conclusion, in the report signed February 3, 2025, states on page 2: "no evidence of any mania." Bipolar Disorder does not appear anywhere in their five final diagnoses.
Yet a lab order dated December 12, 2024 — obtained only through federal OCR intervention, not disclosed to me during or after the evaluation — carries ICD-10 code F31.9: Bipolar Disorder, unspecified. I did not learn this code existed until after I filed my first complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights.
On February 2, 2026, and again on March 2, 2026, I received direct invitations from UT Health Austin to enroll in a bipolar research study, addressed to me by name, stating plainly: "You may be eligible to participate if... you have been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder." The Principal Investigator is Jorge Almeida, MD, PhD, Director of the Bipolar Disorder Center at UT Austin. The invitation states the study includes four annual blood draws and MRI scans, that "all study procedures will be at no cost to you," and that compensation would be provided.
I am enrolled in Medicare. Had I accepted that invitation, Medicare would very likely have been billed for cognitive assessments, blood draws, and MRI scans tied to a diagnosis that Dell's own final report explicitly rules out, and that an independent neurological evaluation had already contradicted years earlier. A federal healthcare claim submitted on the basis of a diagnosis the treating institution's own signed report says does not exist is not a billing error. It is the textbook definition of a false claim.
Senator Chuck Grassley is the principal author of the 1986 amendments to the federal False Claims Act — the law that empowers citizens to bring exactly this kind of fraud to light, and that has recovered more than $27 billion for American taxpayers since its passage. He has spent decades defending and strengthening it.
On May 29, 2012, Senator Grassley sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health, questioning why NIH had awarded a new federal grant to Dr. Charles Nemeroff while, in Grassley's own words, "there has been no final resolution by DOJ or public finding by HHS OIG related to the investigation of Dr. Nemeroff." Grassley's letter confirmed that Nemeroff remained under investigation at that time by both the HHS Inspector General and the Department of Justice — years after the 2008 Emory findings, and years before I was ever his patient.
Senator Grassley has already, personally, in writing, questioned federal money flowing to Dr. Charles Nemeroff while an OIG and DOJ investigation into his conduct sat unresolved. I currently have an active HHS Office of Inspector General complaint, filed February 10, 2026, against the same doctor. It has received no response. And Medicare — a federal program — may have been on the verge of paying for a research study built on a diagnosis that doctor's own signed report rules out.
Same doctor. Same federal agency left holding an unresolved investigation. Same senator with the authority, the legislative authorship, and the documented history of asking exactly this question before.
Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff currently leads the Texas Children's Adversity Network — a body funded by the people of Texas to address the impact of adverse childhood experiences on health and development.
The man leading that network took $15,000 to diagnose a coerced, chronically ill patient with personality disorders, oversaw the falsification of that patient's cognitive scores, and presided over the alteration of his medical records after he raised objections. His own institution's conduct in this case is the definition of the harm the network claims to prevent.
The people of Texas have a right to know this.
What follows is not a medical or scientific assertion. It is a pattern I am naming, and I want to be precise about the difference. The biology in this document — the CRF mechanism, the Lyme myoclonus research, the coercion documented in Dell's own report — is established, cited, and verifiable. What I am about to say next is something else: an analogy, offered for the reader to weigh, not a diagnosis of a state or a population.
The mechanism that was run on me — financial coercion, followed by an institution overriding a documented objection, followed by consequences that fell on the person with the least power in the room — is not unique to a medical evaluation. It is the same structure, at a different scale, when a state legislature redraws district lines specifically to reduce the political voice of people who did not choose that outcome and cannot undo it through the normal channel of a vote. I am not asserting that redistricting measurably raises anyone's cortisol or CRF levels; I have no population-level data for that, and I would be overstating my case to claim I did. What I am asserting is narrower and, I believe, fair: both situations share the same shape — a person or a group of people telling the institution with power over them "this will cause harm," and the institution proceeding anyway, because it can.
I grew up in Texas. I played football against kids whose grandfathers fought for the right to vote at all, the same decade my own grandfather was fighting for other things. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is who my state is. Whatever anyone believes about redistricting as policy, the pattern — override the objection, proceed anyway, because you can — is one I now recognize on sight, because I lived a small, individual version of it for fifteen months. I am naming the pattern. I am not presenting it as clinical proof. The reader can decide what to do with the comparison.
Strip away the legal language, the ICD-10 codes, the regulatory filings. Here is what happened in plain English.
A 59-year-old man, seriously ill for seventeen years with documented biological infections, financially dependent on his parents because of that illness, was told: submit to a psychiatric evaluation or lose your financial support. He submitted. The evaluation was arranged through a family contact on the advisory board of the institution conducting the evaluation. The family paid $15,000. The evaluation team knew about the coercion — they wrote it into their own report. They proceeded anyway.
That same team then administered a standardized intelligence test. The patient scored in the top 3% of human cognitive ability. They wrote down "above average." They hid the numerical scores. Every error went against him. Not one went in his favor.
When he objected, they removed one diagnosis and backdated a new one. When he asked for his records, a federal agency had to intervene. When the records arrived, his sister's email — the one asking for "tools to deal with him," the one that proves the conflict of interest — was missing. His sister confirmed in writing she sent it. UT said it wasn't there.
He asked for his raw intelligence scores. They have not been sent.
The Texas Medical Board refused to investigate. The UT Ethics Office did not respond. The General Counsel of the UT System has not responded.
And the man who oversaw all of this — Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff — continues to lead the Texas Children's Adversity Network, funded by the people of Texas to protect children from exactly this kind of harm.
This is not a complicated case. A family paid a university to produce diagnoses. The university delivered. Then it hid the evidence. Then it lied about hiding it. And every institution that exists to catch this kind of conduct has looked away.
That is the truth that the University of Texas will not give back.
Share this record with every UT Austin alumnus you know. They funded this institution. They deserve to know.
Contact your Texas State Representative and ask them to investigate the operations of the Texas Children's Adversity Network and Dr. Nemeroff's continued leadership of it.
If you are a journalist, attorney, or patient advocate — contact information is below. Documentation is available.
If you have been through Dr. Nemeroff's evaluation program at Dell Medical School and had a similar experience — you are not alone, and your story matters.
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
— Inscription, Main Building Tower, The University of Texas at Austin
UT Austin administered a standardized intelligence test to one of its own graduates. That graduate scored at the 97th percentile. UT's own team withheld those scores and mislabeled them. The family that paid $15,000 received the diagnoses they sought. The alumnus received a falsified report card — from the institution that has "truth" carved into its skyline.
I am still on disability with Lyme disease, Bartonella, and Babesia, and lab-confirmed mold exposure at seven times the reference range. For the past 21 months, I have had to set aside my own medical treatment to document this case, fight for my own records, and now speak up about what is happening nationally.
I am trying to find a place to settle and begin treatment. If this work has been useful to you — if it helped you understand what happened, or why it matters — you can help make that possible.
Every contribution goes directly toward medical treatment and the ongoing cost of pursuing accountability. Thank you for reading this far, and for caring.
Arthur "Brent" Porter
UT Austin Alumnus, B.A. Computer Science, 1987
If you are a journalist, patient advocate, attorney, or Texas resident who would like to review documentation or discuss this matter, please reach out. Documentation is available.