Time to bring back asylums? • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#131

Post by itake » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:08 AM UTC

creata wrote: post #87

m463 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with direct experience with someone that has a mental illness, there needs to be something better than the present system. I think something went right, then wrong with the treatment of mental illness in california. Years ago, when the laws were changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", lots of people could recover. But later state mental illness funding wa…

> lots of mentally ill people don't get proper treatment, yet are still a huge burden on the health care system. I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but why do you believe that?

Checkout this 2015 article: "San Francisco Firefighters Become Unintended Safety Net for the Homeless"

> With a budget of more than $330 million, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to more than 136,000 incidents last year — about 28,000 of them fires and other nonmedical calls for service, plus just under 12,000 false alarms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/san-francisco-firefigh...

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#132

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:11 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #107

coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If homeless shelters are shitholes, neglected, understaffed, with indifferent and uncaring (or abusing) personnel, with no boundaries between the inmates, so that dangerous and unstable people make it hell for the more well adjusted homeless people living there without recourse, then many or most homeless are not going to want to stay there.

And if you have strong boundaries and rules, there's a subpopulation that won't be allowed to stay there. (Most places have something in-between: policies that exclude a fair number of homeless but still leave enough behavioral issues to produce dangerous and unpleasant places). Of course, resourcing is part of the problem, but it also just can't be one-size fits all.

It's not just about policies, it's about the layout, affordances, staffing, and so on.

If you're set to be stuffed like canned sardines in small rooms, for example, there are fewer boundaries regardless of "policy".

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#133

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #130

coldtea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Advocating for "changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture" is a bit of a moonshot.

And how is not going for that "moonshot" work out for you?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#134

Post by gruez » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:16 AM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #59

uejfiweun wrote: post #24

Clearly HN does not seem to like this idea so much. But I do have to ask, what exactly do you propose as a solution to the massive, growing hordes of drug addicted zombies in west coast cities? You can't tell me that this problem doesn't exist, anyone who's been to a west coast city knows it's very real. The past 20 years of the "compassion" approach or whatever is clearly a total disaster. At what point do we just s…

What I read from that post is that you are outraged, or acting outraged, and want to abuse other people as a result. It's hard to find any specific argument in the comment otherwise. > The past 20 years of the "compassion" approach According to research, the problem is rising housing prices, not compassion. Human rights are also not compassion. It's sick how trendy it is to disdain compassion, human rights, and any o…

>According to research, the problem is rising housing prices, not compassion

While this might be true for the homeless population as a whole, I suspect the parent is talking about the people with mental illness and/or substance abuse problems. Making rent 20% cheaper or whatever isn't going to magically make them get better.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#135

Post by thebooktocome » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

baremetal wrote: post #72

amadeuspagel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

The Nuremberg Code is about medical experimentation, not vaccination programs.

The Nuremberg Code is not really relevant to modern medical ethics, or even to the history of medical ethics--its authors plagiarized [1] half of it from the 1931 Guidelines for Human Experimentation [2]. The relevant standard these days is the seventh revision of the Declaration of Helsinki, by the World Medical Association.

No, the use of COVID-19 vaccines was not "experimental" [3]:

> COVID-19 vaccines used in practice and involved in vaccination mandates are either authorized or fully approved by national regulatory authorities. Hence, they are not experimental and not part of research, and thus not covered by the Nuremberg Code. Taking approved medicines prescribed or used as a matter of regular medical or public health practice does not constitute an experiment or research in any common understandings of the terms.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3121268/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guidelines_for_human_subject_r...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10127050/

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#136

Post by gruez » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

Danjoe4 wrote: post #28

uejfiweun wrote: post #24

Clearly HN does not seem to like this idea so much. But I do have to ask, what exactly do you propose as a solution to the massive, growing hordes of drug addicted zombies in west coast cities? You can't tell me that this problem doesn't exist, anyone who's been to a west coast city knows it's very real. The past 20 years of the "compassion" approach or whatever is clearly a total disaster. At what point do we just s…

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.

So you wait for the mentally ill person to commit a crime (shouldn't be hard, they'll eventually commit some sort of trivial crime like disorderly), and then you jail them for treatment? Seems like a roundabout way of implementing asylums.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#137

Post by mlyle » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

EatingWithForks wrote: post #128

mlyle wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is a bit of a flawed argument-- it's not clear that people with severe mental illness are more violent than the general population, and if they are, it's not by a huge margin. It's also flawed because we already can forcibly hospitalize people who we can prove are a danger t…

People with severe mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators of it.

The data are of poor quality and confounded. I've become convinced that severely mentally ill people are generally not too much more violent, but I can't express a belief that the numbers are actually equal or less (they may be, but I have no specific belief).

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#138

Post by mlyle » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #132

mlyle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you have strong boundaries and rules, there's a subpopulation that won't be allowed to stay there. (Most places have something in-between: policies that exclude a fair number of homeless but still leave enough behavioral issues to produce dangerous and unpleasant places). Of course, resourcing is part of the problem, but it also just can't be one-size fits all.

It's not just about policies, it's about the layout, affordances, staffing, and so on. If you're set to be stuffed like canned sardines in small rooms, for example, there are fewer boundaries regardless of "policy".

Yes; I mentioned resourcing.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#139

Post by bill_joy_fanboy » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

iancmceachern wrote: post #39

amadeuspagel wrote: post #11

Asylums 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…

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…

Where did you come up with the numbers 90% and 10%?

Did you just make them up?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#140

Post by coffeemug » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 1:31 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #60

warning26 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. Yes. This is what we need; the fact is, many mentally ill individuals need help, but are not capable of realizing that they need help, and will refuse any attempt to offer it. Without the power to detain such an individual against their will, that person will remain on the streets, which is a…

The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. If you can suspend the rights of someone declared mentally ill, the unscrupulous parts of government will be tempted to declare politically inconvenient people mentally ill and strip them of their rights. Even in the United States, this happened during the suffragette movement; those women hunger striking for the vote were sometimes imp…

We suspend human rights in various circumstances all the time. Society couldn't function without bounded human rights suspensions. It just has to happen under specific conditions (due process, independent judiciary, checks and balances, etc.)