Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to bring back asylums?

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 397 posts

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#161

Post by fragmede »

phatskat wrote: post #61
iancmceachern wrote: post #39

Earlier 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)

In response to baby formula getting stolen, supermarkets put it at the front under lock and key. Which is an entirely logical conclusion under our current system and culture. But something is clearly wrong with how we distribute resources when helpless infants can't get what they need.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#162

Post by janalsncm »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #83
warning26 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. Even something as simple as detaining a criminal is "carving out an exception to human rights". You're correct that this could be abused, but so can any law. It's possible to mitigate though; that's the entire reason for the concept of an independent judiciary.

I don't think detaining a criminal is the counter-example you want to be using here. If anything, the horrific and egregious ways that the incarcerated are treated is proof that the government is incapable of not further harming people who they deprive of human rights.

The point is that you cannot categorically say that human rights should not be suspended for any reason. The fact that a particular implementation happens to be unpleasant and at times unfair does not 1) suggest that human rights should never be suspended or 2) suggest that the alternative would not be at least as unpleasant.

Few people would suggest that not having prisons is a better alternative than having them, however unpleasant. Similarly, in a world of deinstitutionalization it seems unlikely that 500k people living on the streets is the best of all possible worlds.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#163

Post by harimau777 »

imgabe wrote: post #106
pierat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can be used as a punishment, they WILL be used as a punishment. Not too long ago, BDSM was considered a mental illness. We'not talking the 1960s either.. this was 2010 when the DSM-4 had BDSM and similar removed. Prior to 1980, homosexuality was also in the DSM-4. The trend is obvious and troublesome: this is mainly a list of consensual actions that were listed as "mental health problems" and therefore could…

Do you think they're suddenly going to put homosexuality and BDSM back in the DSM-4 and lock people up for it? I mean, you look at the current political climate and you believe that is a thing that could actually happen when the White House is hosting a Pride parade? There are real people getting assaulted and murdered by the mentally ill right now. Not to mention the mentally ill themselves who are subject to violen…

I have ZERO doubt that the Ron DeSantis' of the world would try to lock up LGBTQ people. It's honestly hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking that people like him would try to do it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#164

Post by imgabe »

pierat wrote: post #114
imgabe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think they're suddenly going to put homosexuality and BDSM back in the DSM-4 and lock people up for it? I mean, you look at the current political climate and you believe that is a thing that could actually happen when the White House is hosting a Pride parade? There are real people getting assaulted and murdered by the mentally ill right now. Not to mention the mentally ill themselves who are subject to violen…

[flagged]

I’m not the one who’s missing the point here. I know people have in the past been institutionalized for bad reasons. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to institutionalize other people who can be genuinely helped. I’m saying we should not institutionalize people for bad reasons and do institutionalize people for good reasons.

You seem to think that because some bad cases exist, we should never do any of the good ones, because for some reason you think human beings are fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between the two? Like we couldn’t make reasonable rules and follow them?

If that’s the case why have any society at all if you think humans are incapable of creating and following just rules?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#165

Post by soligern »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #89

For anyone who wants to bring back asylums: first and foremost, you must imagine that you will be subjected to asylums as they existed. You could simply be protesting while black or female, considered insane for protesting and forcibly detained-- for which you can be raped and assaulted, and any reporting to the police of your trauma isn't taken seriously because you're considered insane. It's nonsensical to say we s…

Things can improve. We can learn from past mistakes and do it better. Have a high bar for entry, have stringent regulations that involve inspections every week etc. The solution is not to just throw up your hands and refuse to do anything about a clear problem and hope it goes away because we failed in the past.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#166

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#167

Post by soligern »

harimau777 wrote: post #163
imgabe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think they're suddenly going to put homosexuality and BDSM back in the DSM-4 and lock people up for it? I mean, you look at the current political climate and you believe that is a thing that could actually happen when the White House is hosting a Pride parade? There are real people getting assaulted and murdered by the mentally ill right now. Not to mention the mentally ill themselves who are subject to violen…

I have ZERO doubt that the Ron DeSantis' of the world would try to lock up LGBTQ people. It's honestly hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking that people like him would try to do it.

I’ll reluctantly back you up on this one. There are definitely people in power right now that would definitely lock up LGBTQ/Black/Women (honestly white males too) under false pretenses.

Still, we have to do something about the homeless problem. These handful of people ruin millions of peoples lives.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#168

Post by iancmceachern »

vba616 wrote: post #50
iancmceachern wrote: post #39

Earlier 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. Your feelings, whatever they are, that lead you to your opinions, political principles, or ethics, are inherently immune to being invalidated by others. However, it makes me nervous to read comments such as yours, because my first reaction is that I can't tell wha…

I'm just repeating a commonly held belief, hence the upvotes. It's not as if I came up with this opinion out of thin air.

>Your feelings, whatever they are, that lead you to your opinions, political principles, or ethics, are inherently immune to being invalidated by others.

You don't know me. You can't possibly know something like this from one comment on the internet. It seems that others have said this to you in the past, and you are just parroting it to me.

Best wishes, much love

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#169

Post by bko »

m463 wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Do you have a source about California mental health spending being cut?

Anytime i read a comment about spending being cut or austerity it never materializes when I look it up. I blame the media that reports "cuts in the future anticipated spending growth" as "cuts". So basically someone said spending on X will grow Y percent a year and someone else comes in and changes Y to slightly lower.

Sure enough:

> The chart below shows that over the last 10 years, state budget expenditures on health have increased nearly 8% per year, while spending on education, transportation, and natural resources has increased at less than half that rate.

https://www.chcf.org/blog/californias-unfinished-business-ad...

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#170

Post by EatingWithForks »

imgabe wrote: post #164
pierat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m not the one who’s missing the point here. I know people have in the past been institutionalized for bad reasons. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to institutionalize other people who can be genuinely helped. I’m saying we should not institutionalize people for bad reasons and do institutionalize people for good reasons. You seem to think that because some bad cases exist, we should never do any of the…

You cannot merely wave aside that your proposed solution is a solution that also already evidenced to have caused mental illness on a broad, demographic-specific scale, in the name of solving mental illness! That's patently ridiculous.
Post reply on HN