I found my father living on the street • Hacker News Board

Re: I found my father living on the street

#121

Post by mcphage » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

DominikR wrote: post #68

mcphage wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you 100% until you referred to taxes as "stealing".

I overreacted here, I don't believe that taxing equals stealing. It's just how quickly people that have this wish for the nanny state will claim they have a right to your resources for their very well thought out plans. Plans like imprisoning every mentally ill person and injecting them with some compound against their will.

> Plans like imprisoning every mentally ill person and injecting them with some compound against their will.

Yeah that's legit horrifying.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#122

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 8:30 PM UTC

LordKano wrote: post #100

vidarh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many other good answers, but here's an anecdote: In Oslo, near the university, there used by a "cave dweller". A by all accounts bright student who at 25 decided to stop washing himself. He was soon thrown out of his student accommodation because of the smell. He then decided to take up residence under a tarp in a makeshift "cave" in a hillside next to the university where he stayed for the following two and half dec…

I had to coerce a friend into getting mental help. He had made some self-destructive statements and a mutual friend reached out to me for help. Several of us scheduled an intervention to try to convince him to go get help and the day before the intervention, he made some more self-destructive statements so that same mutual friend called me and I went to his apartment. He looked like death warmed over. He hadn't been…

> He had been talking about harming himself and that's all we needed to have him involuntarily committed for 72 hours.

Frankly, I find it kind of disturbing that you can have anyone you know committed for several days just by lying to the police.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#123

Post by SpaghettiCat » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 8:39 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #110

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people don't have control over their mental faculties; they aren't competent enough to make a choice for what is best for them in the same way that minors aren't allowed to go truant or to consent to sex with an adult. If you are all there in the head, by all means live on the streets, stay filthy, don't eat and ignore people, but this man has a brain disease that makes him lose control of his mind. If he was f…

> These people don't have control over their mental faculties; they aren't competent enough to make a choice for what is best for them in the same way that minors aren't allowed to go truant or to consent to sex with an adult. Which people? "Mentally ill" people aren't a homogenous group, and the fact that someone is mentally ill and living on the street does not imply that they are incompetent to make personal decis…

> Which people? "Mentally ill" people aren't a homogenous group, and the fact that someone is mentally ill and living on the street does not imply that they are incompetent to make personal decisions due to their mental illness. The relation between mental illness, poverty, physical illness, etc. is complex.

I was referring to patients who lack control over their mental faculties at least to the degree of the man on which the article was written.

> There aren't simple answers, and this person isn't these people.

Yes, this person belongs to the general collective I described above. Clearly when I said "these people" I meant people like the man in the article I was talking about.

> Or was he, as he seemed, competent -- but voluntarily decided to discontinue the medication?

He may have been in the driving seat when he hypothetically decided to stop taking medication, but ultimately he lost control of the wheel. If a person is not taking care of themself and so out of your wits that you stand for hours at road junctions staring blankly forward, they need to be saved. The authorities must assume that though the decision to stop taking medication was voluntary, because the person lost control of their mind, maybe that person's decision was misinformed (or as you suggest, accidental). By analogy, ust because the driver of a car intentionally didn't buckle themselves in (maybe they wanted to die, or like the risk, or were just eccentric), doesn't mean that when they crash and their body flies out, that we shouldn't hospitalise them.

> And that's great, but its a mistake to project what you think you would want onto other people as their preferences.

Actually there is no mistake here: it's a fact that there are other people like me who want this protection from the state.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#124

Post by DominikR » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #105

DominikR wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can very objectively prove that a person is missing a limb but often you cannot prove that a person is mentally ill. Often persons will be categorized as mentally ill just because they deviate in their beliefs or lifestyle from the mainstream culture. And yes, mentally ill persons HAVE a free will, don't tell me they don't as this would be equal to declaring that they are not human beings but just a lump of meat.…

What you are describing seems similar to Szasz's ideas of mental illness (, but please correct me if I am wrong).[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz#.22Myth_of_mental...

Thank you for the link, I've never heard about Szaz before.

But I must say that I agree with many points he makes although I disagree with some.

In my naive view (this is not my profession) many persons that are just to some degree different are labeled as mentally ill and medicated starting with children that aren't docile enough.

Psychiatry surely has its uses helping people to improve and overcome fears / tragic events or to evaluate if someone can be dangerous but it can't be right to forcefully medicate everyone that doesn't fit our society into submission.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#125

Post by LordKano » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #122

LordKano wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to coerce a friend into getting mental help. He had made some self-destructive statements and a mutual friend reached out to me for help. Several of us scheduled an intervention to try to convince him to go get help and the day before the intervention, he made some more self-destructive statements so that same mutual friend called me and I went to his apartment. He looked like death warmed over. He hadn't been…

> He had been talking about harming himself and that's all we needed to have him involuntarily committed for 72 hours. Frankly, I find it kind of disturbing that you can have anyone you know committed for several days just by lying to the police.

People can and have been sentenced to death because of lies told to the police.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#126

Post by DominikR » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #104

DominikR wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentally ill persons enjoy the same rights that other citizens enjoy and have their own free will. As long as a person didn't commit any crime and is no risk to society or oneself you cannot institutionalize him or her. In any case I would refrain from making such broad generalizations about a society. Some societies prefer strong individual rights and others prefer a strong state that tells them what to do.

Some societies prefer strong individual rights and others prefer a strong state that tells them what to do. That sounds like a false dichotomy. It isn't a choice between institutionalizing people or leaving them to fend for themselves entirely. Whether private or public, the choices made on this spectrum absolutely do reflect on the society making them.

> It isn't a choice between institutionalizing people or leaving them to fend for themselves entirely.

I didn't say that it is a binary choice of either forcing them into a psychiatric ward or letting them rot on the streets.

One can offer persons in such situations help in different ways, which they are of course free to reject.

> Whether private or public, the choices made on this spectrum absolutely do reflect on the society making them.

No, it does not reflect in an _absolute_ or _general_ way on the society, it is only one specific feature.

That's why I cite the strong individual rights in the next sentence.

If a person rejects any help and is no threat to anyone then it is none of your or anyone else's business if he ruins his life.

There's no psychiatric ward, jail or Gulag awaiting such a person to "mentally correct" him.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#127

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #122

LordKano wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to coerce a friend into getting mental help. He had made some self-destructive statements and a mutual friend reached out to me for help. Several of us scheduled an intervention to try to convince him to go get help and the day before the intervention, he made some more self-destructive statements so that same mutual friend called me and I went to his apartment. He looked like death warmed over. He hadn't been…

> He had been talking about harming himself and that's all we needed to have him involuntarily committed for 72 hours. Frankly, I find it kind of disturbing that you can have anyone you know committed for several days just by lying to the police.

> He had made some self-destructive statements... > ... he made some more self-destructive statements

It wasn't a lie.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#128

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:06 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #89

kriro wrote: post #86

I think it's very unethical that she published the initial pictures without consent (from what I understand, sounds like he didn't know the pictures until she showed him when he was better) even if she is a family member and did it "in good faith" and even when he gave her implicit permission after the fact. I also can't help but wonder why she didn't bring him to a hospital when she first saw him in the streets. I'm…

She couldn't. You cannot make someone go to a hospital if they aren't harming themselves or others.

You can (and people do) argue that by refusing to take prescribed meds the sick person is harming themselves. This only works if you have a diagnosis already, of course.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#129

Post by SpaghettiCat » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:08 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #118

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What gives you the authority to institutionalize him? A government has the duty to provide for the welfare of their people. It's every government's goal to make their people healthier. > How do you force a person to take their medication? In a psychiatric institution you could for example inject the medicine into them. > Why should you do it for this particular person but not that particular person? If a person's m…

Your very insistence that you have the only right point of view on this makes me even more against ever allowing anybody who thinks like you the power to involuntarily commit anybody. The USA, for all it's flaws, is supposed to be based on the idea that the people are not subservient to the Government's goals, but instead, the Government is subservient to the peoples' rights. That they can only be deprived of their r…

> Your very insistence that you have the only right point of view on this makes me even more against ever allowing anybody who thinks like you the power to involuntarily commit anybody.

I don't know what made you think that I have the only right opinion. I'm advocating a view, and actually part of developing a well-rounded view is challenging beliefs you yourself hold--playing devil's advocate.

> That they can only be deprived of their rights through due process of law, as passed by elected legislature. Not a "scientific" book written by people who have no accountability to the population as a whole.

The part of the government that deals with health sets the policy on who should be institutionalised, and they are the ones that give executive power to do so to doctors. Actually, doctors and psychiatrists hold an immense amount of responsibility over the welfare of patients; they may not personally hold accountability, but the hospital or other medical instution does, because of the great potential for lawsuits in the case of mistakes (AFAIK).

> It may well already be true that a malicious individual with enough knowledge could look at your current lifestyle and find a justification for committing you and injecting you with things against your will. I'm sure that such a thing could happen under the rules that you seem to advocate.

This is rather unplausible; there is a mountain of a difference between my behaviour and of an unwashed, malnourished man who fails to communicate even basically with other people, standing for hours at road crossrods like a zombie.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#130

Post by SpaghettiCat » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #117

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But who decides who has control over their mental faculties? Who decides who is competent? The state? The family? The physician? Who is the most competent to make this decision? The medical professional. Of course government (advised by medical professionals) will set the policy which will constrain the possible decisions. > Can you imagine scenarios where the state, or the family, or the physician are incompetent,…

Note that countries used to do a lot more forced institutionalization than they do now. There were lots of abuses (even in the West, to say nothing of the way it worked in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_... should be a must-read for anyone arguing for government involvement in institutionalization decisions) and people have backed away from that sort of thing. It's possi…

And there have been at least as many cases of political abuse of the police force, should we also cut down on that just because there is a potential for abuse? Many instutions that are intended to good can be abused or used as political weapons under a totallitarian government, but I think the potential for abuse is much reduced under a more benevolent political system.