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Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

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Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#51

Post by newman314 »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #40

I was about to wonder aloud why there can't be more private, for-profit mental health facilities instead of private prisons, as huge swathes of the incarcerated population are very mentally unwell and probably do need to be in custody but would likely benefit tremendously from a less oppressive setting. Surely there could be some profit to be extracted by privatization there. Then I realized it's because they couldn'…

Health should not be for-profit. Such a system puts the needy at a tremendous disadvantage. Needing a heart transplant etc. does not put one in a situation to shop around.

Blind worship of a free market can lead to some pretty obscene outcomes.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#52

Post by astrodust »

Theodores wrote: post #17
_nullandnull_ wrote: post #8

This is just sad. Didn't something similar happen with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s? http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...

...and with Margaret Thatcher. In the UK it was called `care in the community`. This also coincided with lots of heroin filling our streets, presumably sold to keep the mercenaries branded mujahadeen paid in Afghanistan. Seems that we have some horrible drugs on our streets these days so rinse and repeat. Happy days.

The CIA was heavily involved in drug trafficking in the US in the 1980s, so it's hardly surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...

If you need to do things off the books one of the best ways to do that is through illegal operations, something made easier when you can do these things with almost zero legal ramifications.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#53

Post by Keverw »

madelinecameron wrote: post #47
Keverw wrote: post #45

What do mental health services do anyways? Just give kids meth in a pill for not paying attention to boring school topics? You can be locked up, drugged, shocked, lobotomized. No rights to an attorney, not even a one phone call. I really believe the whole psychiatric industry is a fraud. Leon Eisenberg admitted ADHD being fake when he died.

If your purview of mental health starts and stops at ADD/ADHD, you aren't really qualified to write off all of psychology.

They sit around a table voting on stuff to add to the DSM... You sit with them for like 10 minutes and "Oh you're bipolar." No MRI or blood test... The same people who said being gay was a mental illness. So why trust a industry promoting hate and still promoting ADHD which was admitted as being a work of fiction.

There's a group called Citizens Commission on Human Rights that made documentaries on the subject which are really convincing. Seen their commercial one day on TV, and spent a night watching some of their material.

There's a clip somewhere on YouTube where someone went to like 5 different psychiatrists but was told all different things. Then they also had a mother tell her story about how a psychiatrist killed her son Matthew.

I already had a bad view of the industry, but after watching their content it really reinforced my feelings towards them.

Edit: Found the video I was talking about it. http://www.cchr.org/videos.html The first one on that page, It's about a hour but I think it does a great job at exposing psychiatry. I think everyone including parrents should watch this before visiting a psychiatrist

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#54

Post by elgabogringo »

The real issue is a legal, not financial one. The ACLU fought a long time ago to make it very hard to commit anyone, very hard to give them treatment while committed, very hard to keep them there, etc.

No matter how much city/states spend, they can't fill up the hospitals and treat patients, which is why most of the hospitals were closed.

If you are interested, there's a very thorough book on the subject that I'd recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/My-Brother-Ron-Personal-Deinstitution...

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#55

Post by trhway »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #48
trhway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is Florida going to add more police, social workers, ER doctors and etc deal with the consequences? no. Like all the others it will add more prisons. Prison guards unions and commercial prison providers are doing exceptionally well financially and the prison guard unions are actually the biggest and most powerful lobbyists, at least in CA. There is no such thing as decrease of spending, there are only increase and r…

I've never heard of the correctional officers' union (CCPOA) being a top lobbyist. I don't see it anywhere on this list, which puts it out of the top 100. http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert... Edit: I can't find any primary sources regarding lobbying by the CCPOA, but I did find a blog on a site called Union Watch that makes the claim about CCPOA being the largest lobbyist, and then I saw th…

i meant "lobbyist" in the more wide sense than the pure officially reported total sum of receipts of breakfasts with senators. I meant it in the sense of demonstrated ability to steer decisions to their own benefit.

And when it come to right/left wing - while both are unions, teachers union and prison guard union are on the opposite sides, so pigeon-hole accordingly.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#56

Post by Gustomaximus »

astrodust wrote: post #50
will_brown wrote: post #49

I am not sure the answer is framing this as a Left/Right issue like a lot of the thread is doing. The underlying reason for cuts in Mental Health is the same reason 1,000 State jobs got eliminated this year or $1.2B was cut from FL education the Governor's first year...it is a finite budget problem. Take the Zika virus, a current South Florida news story gaining national attention. I haven't seen a single news spot/a…

"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up." Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.

I 100% agree with your point in priciple. The problem is reality. Government leaders use this principle to overspend on non-productive causes and create debt problems. So end of the day I'd prefer to have a government balancing the budget and leaving some opportunity on the table, rather than the likeyhood debt spent on non-productive causes will become an anchor to future development.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#57

Post by dalke »

refurb wrote: post #31
_nullandnull_ wrote: post #8

This is just sad. Didn't something similar happen with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s? http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...

Please don't reference Mother Jones. It's incredibly biased. Just like every other political issue, mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are. Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community. Also, the ACLU along with the supreme court changed the la…

It would be nice to know what that bias might be. For example, "bias towards truth" is different than "bias towards restoring the US to British monarchy."

Mother Jones is of course a politically progressive magazine, so there's a bias in the topics they cover. But that sort of bias says nothing about the quality of the coverage. The Economist is also 'incredibly biased' in what it cover, and they do good job of it as well.

Similarly, Mother Jones wins awards, like the National Magazine Awards.

Quoting its co-editor Clara Jeffery http://www.wnyc.org/story/what-its-when-redditors-ban-your-w... :

> We report from all side of an issue. We do investigations into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn’t. And all of our journalism is fact-checked, sourced, and linked through. Facts are what we do, and statistical data analysis journalism is a big part of what we do. So I don’t see that part either. And we don’t really lace our reporting with opinion. It’s more, we’re a shop that cares about the little guy and inequality. So that informs some, but by no means all, of our story selection.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#58

Post by honkhonkpants »

trhway wrote: post #55
honkhonkpants wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of the correctional officers' union (CCPOA) being a top lobbyist. I don't see it anywhere on this list, which puts it out of the top 100. http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert... Edit: I can't find any primary sources regarding lobbying by the CCPOA, but I did find a blog on a site called Union Watch that makes the claim about CCPOA being the largest lobbyist, and then I saw th…

i meant "lobbyist" in the more wide sense than the pure officially reported total sum of receipts of breakfasts with senators. I meant it in the sense of demonstrated ability to steer decisions to their own benefit. And when it come to right/left wing - while both are unions, teachers union and prison guard union are on the opposite sides, so pigeon-hole accordingly.

So you believe that adding up all election and/or legislation-influencing activities would reveal that CCPOA is the largest actor in California politics, despite the fact that even in above-board registered lobbying the oil industry spent $22 million last year? I think your claim requires some substantiation.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#59

Post by forgetsusername »

newman314 wrote: post #51
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #40

I was about to wonder aloud why there can't be more private, for-profit mental health facilities instead of private prisons, as huge swathes of the incarcerated population are very mentally unwell and probably do need to be in custody but would likely benefit tremendously from a less oppressive setting. Surely there could be some profit to be extracted by privatization there. Then I realized it's because they couldn'…

Health should not be for-profit. Such a system puts the needy at a tremendous disadvantage. Needing a heart transplant etc. does not put one in a situation to shop around. Blind worship of a free market can lead to some pretty obscene outcomes.

>Health should not be for-profit.

Yeah, it should be public like Canada, where I've been on a waiting list for 2 years just to get a family doctor...

I think there's some middle ground there. The market does solve certain problems.

Re: Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

#60

Post by barry-cotter »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #40

I was about to wonder aloud why there can't be more private, for-profit mental health facilities instead of private prisons, as huge swathes of the incarcerated population are very mentally unwell and probably do need to be in custody but would likely benefit tremendously from a less oppressive setting. Surely there could be some profit to be extracted by privatization there. Then I realized it's because they couldn'…

There are private mental hospitals. They're the ones that are merely pretty bad places to be, but that look nice enough and seem like they'd be tolerable for a short length of time. Most public mental hospitals are terrible places; if I was going to spend a significant portion of my life in such places and knew it that'd be enough to make me depressed all by itself.

There are lots of people in prison who would be better off in mental hospitals but you need to be committed to go to a mental hospital. They're not nice places. Few people are going to voluntarily commit themselves, and that's before considering that (a) They check if you're doing something suicidal every 15 minutes so you get neither sleep nor privacy (b) Lots of psychiatric drugs are hideous. The side effect profiles of anti-psychotics are such that being schizophrenic can look fine.

As to the patients/inmates and facilities you're wrong. A mental hospital looks like a hospital, not a prison, inside and out. They'll have better security than a normal hospital but the comparison is absurd if you've visited both, or even just seen both on tv. And the inmates at a penal institution are enormously more violent that the patients at mental hospitals.

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