ah yes another way to shut down people you find inconvenient
Time to bring back asylums?
71–80 of 397 posts
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#72> These days, the idea of compelled vaccination is pretty controversial, so the idea that we are going to take away peoples' liberty and force them to take psychotropic drugs after we've imprisoned them seems beyond belief. This is already happening. Compelled vaccination is completely different than a mentally disturbed member of our society roaming the streets unhinged. I have been party to several title 36[1] case…
Compelled vaccination — forcing people to endure the pain of a needle and a few hours of feeling sore in their arm — is indeed completely different from locking people up in mental institutions for decades.
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Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really at all. In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. We need a way to pay the people that do the work, buy the buildings, keep the lights on. We call this infrastructure asylums, whatever you want to call it we need it desperately. If you want to stop things like what you cited from happening, lobb…
> In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. Maybe that's putting the cart before the horse? How about what is needed is changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture, so that fewer people end up "mentally ill", and those that are environmentally or genetically mentally ill do not get broken an…
But there will still be some mentally ill people right? Not everything and everyone can cured. Just like we will always need jails.
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#74[flagged]
Your sarcasm/examples are false equivalencies. US cities were at one point far less car centric than they are now. Do you think we should maintain the status quo there as well?
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really at all. In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. We need a way to pay the people that do the work, buy the buildings, keep the lights on. We call this infrastructure asylums, whatever you want to call it we need it desperately. If you want to stop things like what you cited from happening, lobb…
Or make healthcare accessible. Make housing accessible. Make food accessible. We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it. It’s arbitrary, as much as markets would want us to believe otherwise. As a species we choose to let them have that power, and with it they will kill us all (seriously)
Http and the internet is also a made up concept that has not actual value outside of what we place in it.
Conversations get no where if you're going to talk nonsense.
We don't (feed and house everyone) because the people who grow and distribute food need to get paid.
Australia has public healthcare and public housing. I myself am a beneficiary of that, as my parents were homeless. I got out of the cycle because there's things there that helped me. But I am 1-in-a-1000 case.
It's not "give them more" that's needed, there's many factors in play. Drugs, mental illness, and even the mentality and language around it.
Everyone I knew in homeless shelters as well as my family (except me) were either completely ignorant of how money works, or staunch communists who didn't believe in working for the man, with drugs and illness mixed in.
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#76Asylums still exist. What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. A typical case from this time[1]: > [Cramer] frankly discusses the “regimented, often hopeless conditions of state mental hospitals”, talks about a hospital in Alabama where “care was worse than simply inadequate: one psychiatrist for 5000 patients; astonishingly low funding…
The main concern these days is with people with specific mental illnesses or addictions that make them unable to comply with treatment. Schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder are some of the more obvious ones. One can argue that there's a human right to be insane, but most of us would prefer not to be pushed in front of an oncoming subway train.
People with a good support network might find it easier to comply with medical orders than someone in a very precarious living situation. So forced institutionalization will likely affect the marginalized the most. It's still the right thing to do if the risk is severe enough.
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#77Congress
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jail. Asylums circumvent due process as other commentators have pointed out. Jails should be staffed with a physician who has the discretion to transfer inmates to treatment centers.
Leave it to an HN commenter to suggest that a marginalized group face the most draconian, outlandish, unrealistic proposition as a viable solution. Might as well propose that we eat the homeless and mentally ill. Then we can complete the Jonathan Swift proposal and go back to the real world.
Let me steelman the suggestion then. Our western answer for when society is allowed to intervene against the will of an individual is when a law is broken. I agree that we shouldn't involuntarily commit people arbitrarily, but if you break the rules of society and engage in trespassing, theft, assault or sexual assault, etc then yes society should be allowed to intervene against your will.
It then becomes a question of preventing harm. Releasing the individual back onto the street seems like a recipe to have the same harm occur again. Putting a crazy person in jail seems harmful as well. Which is where your parent commenter's suggestion comes in...
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really at all. In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. We need a way to pay the people that do the work, buy the buildings, keep the lights on. We call this infrastructure asylums, whatever you want to call it we need it desperately. If you want to stop things like what you cited from happening, lobb…
Or make healthcare accessible. Make housing accessible. Make food accessible. We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it. It’s arbitrary, as much as markets would want us to believe otherwise. As a species we choose to let them have that power, and with it they will kill us all (seriously)
As long as resources are limited there will be money or an equivalent mechanism for valuing and controlling those resources. Resources can be anything from land, food, knowledge, political power, etc.
Re: Time to bring back asylums?
#80I've had this conversation with many friends. Totally agree. They need to be good, well run with compassion and care of course. But we indeed need them.
What if most of the people you wish were interred there are competent enough to decide they don't want to be there but not competent enough to meaningfully integrate with society. This can even be true of some who definitely not competent now but would become sufficiently lucid to disinter themselves before discontinuing medication and resuming drinking and drugging.
".. competent enough to decide they don't want to be there but not competent enough to meaningfully integrate with society..."
At some level these should be mutually exclusive conditions; one (unable to integrate) is the major fact that disproves the other (competent enough for self-determination).
"but would become sufficiently lucid to disinter themselves before discontinuing medication and resuming drinking and drugging."
If someone is forcibly committed to an institution, there would almost certainly need to be a set of steps to transition to a non-institutionalized way of living. For example, a probation-like system to monitor progress and look for signs of relapse and non-compliance would almost need to exist. Halfway house stays may also make the transition more likely to stick. probably some combination of those.
Much of this sounds like the kind of things you do in criminal matters. It's not surprising that it would. The resemblance is only because both deal with behavioral issues requiring the denial of personal liberties. However, we mustn't view this kind of thing like its about criminality, someone that isn't sufficiently mentally sound enough to support themselves isn't a criminal: almost certainly not from a moral point of view.
But at some point, the impacts on society by the extremely mentally ill can be just as negative as someone acting with criminal intent. So appropriate responses may look similar, but for the mentally ill they should not be punitive.