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I found my father living on the street

bbc.co.uk

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Re: I found my father living on the street

#131

Post by DominikR »

nikolay wrote: post #109
chris_wot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have quite bad depression. That's a mental illness, and I have free will. My brother-in-law has very bad schizophrenia. I can assure you, he has free will. You speak about mentally ill people like they are subhuman. They aren't - they are people with the capacity for agency and they have rights. And they should be treated with more respect.

Are disabled people subhuman, because they don't have free mobility? Never said anything like that - only that your illness affects the reasoning, i.e. the will as well. It doesn't have to be all the time as there are different mental conditions affecting people differently at different times.

Many things can affect your reasoning, that is true. But the issue is how do you prove it, and if so, does it even matter what you prove if the person isn't harming anyone?

Coercing someone into psychiatric treatment in some facility until the person "is better" is open ended in nature that it might effectively mean imprisonment for life.

That's why there is (or should be) such a high barrier for this.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy for the family in this article and if I knew 100% for sure that (reasonable) action X and Y would have this positive outcome - I would do it.

But the problem is that more often than not you cannot know because we all can't read the minds of others.

There are cases of people living in (for us) unimaginable conditions by their own choice. And some of them are even willing to fight for their right to live in such a way.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#132

Post by Mz »

DominikR wrote: post #34
nikolay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubled a mentally ill person has anything resembling "free will"...

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.…

Thank you for your comments in this discussion.

Often persons will be categorized as mentally ill just because they deviate in their beliefs or lifestyle from the mainstream culture.

Reminds me of this quote:

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

-- Albert Einstein

Simply being unconventional can be dangerous. Lots of people who were the wrong sexual orientation, skin color, you name it, have been classified in an ugly manner as an excuse to justify mistreatment of them.

(Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania)

Re: I found my father living on the street

#133

Post by thaumasiotes »

robotresearcher wrote: post #127
thaumasiotes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is that relevant at all? It could have been a lie. The police would never know.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-03-07

Re: I found my father living on the street

#134

Post by thaumasiotes »

LordKano wrote: post #125
thaumasiotes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but let's not start pushing for that to happen more. The comment I responded to sounds very approving of this.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#135

Post by LordKano »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #133
robotresearcher wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He had made some self-destructive statements... > ... he made some more self-destructive statements It wasn't a lie.

How is that relevant at all? It could have been a lie. The police would never know. http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-03-07

It could have been a lie but it wasn't.

We can play that game all day.

Even if the cops had heard him, the doctors who treated him wouldn't know if the cops were lying.

The judge, who had the final say about extending his observation beyond three days couldn't have known if I, the other friend, the cops, the paramedics and the doctors were lying.

There is often more nuance to real-life situations than "I contend that I didn't say that. He can't prove that I did say it."

Namely, my friend needed help. It was obvious to everyone, except him.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#136

Post by LordKano »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #134
LordKano wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but let's not start pushing for that to happen more . The comment I responded to sounds very approving of this.

The comment to which you replied was mine.

Yes, I approve of it. Without the ability to compel him to receive medical attention, my friend would have died.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#137

Post by thaumasiotes »

LordKano wrote: post #136
thaumasiotes wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but let's not start pushing for that to happen more . The comment I responded to sounds very approving of this.

The comment to which you replied was mine. Yes, I approve of it. Without the ability to compel him to receive medical attention, my friend would have died.

You value your friend more than you do the people who were killed because someone else lied to the police.

But I don't.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#138

Post by danieltillett »

arethuza wrote: post #39
danieltillett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the same thing be done by a wristband with just a shortened weblink. The advantage is you could update the website and the link could be engraved on the wristband.

I'd have thought a wristband would be too easy to damage/remove - especially if they become indicators of people in that kind of situation. Similarly I think things like tattoos or embedded chips are spectacularly bad ideas - for all manner of reasons. Maybe retina scans or something like that?

You could make the wristband hard to accidentally remove, but if it is made out of a decent metal and engraved then it would not be hard to ensure that it survived.

Something like this needs to be voluntary - we really don’t want to be forcing vulnerable people to start wearing something they don’t want to.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#139

Post by Mz »

kweks wrote: post #106
Turukawa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an idea by the writer, almost lost in the article, that I thought is brilliant: "When he was in hospital without any documents or ID I came up with the idea of medical bracelets for homeless people. I bought about 100 waterproof USB wristbands which can hold important information and I've given away about 60 so far." There are any number of people made homeless through mental illness. They are often lost in t…

I work with homeless people, people in precarious situations, people without ID, immigrants without papers, etc. I've discussed this very concept multiple times, from multiple angles, with a few organisations. This issue becomes a real issue of when the person becomes gravely ill, or dies. Most of the time, it's impossible to trace the person's history - contacting next of kin, working out their path until their demi…

These are very real and very serious concerns for some homeless individuals. For others, not so much. I think it would be great if the system you describe were available. But I also see nothing wrong with trying to find something simple and easy that works in the here and now for some portion of the homeless population.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#140

Post by bzbarsky »

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #130
bzbarsky wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Police abuse in a "benevolent political system" generally reads to things like bills of rights and restrictions on when the police can arrest people. Sometimes that means criminals go free.

That's precisely what happened with psychiatric institutionalization: abuses (not just in totalitation regimes) led to restrictions on when it can happen. Sometimes that means that people who maybe should be institutionalized are not.

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