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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#171

Post by qwery »

It's interesting how the writer avoids the issue of homelessness, as if that's an unshakeable pillar of reality.

They even touch on the prison population in the U.S. -- comparing a figure from their childhood (when times were good) to today: "The number of inmates in the U.S. in 1955 was 185,000; today, that figure is 1,900,000." -- while gliding easily over any further details or uncomfortable truths about that, presumably that increase is entirely people who would/should be locked up in asylums instead.

The term 'asylum' implies refuge, yes. It also refers to actual places that "were popular because they [... relieved] families of their most burdensome members."

Places that largely ended with a legacy of being "torture chambers where icepick lobotomies, electric shock, sterilization and solitary confinement turned humans into zombies."

The presented model of success (the Worcester Recovery Center in Massachusetts) is described as something completely unlike the article's own description of asylums.

Note: the title on the article is the assertive 'It’s Time to Bring Back Asylums', not phrased as the question it is on HN ('Time to Bring Back Asylums?').

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#172

Post by iancmceachern »

harimau777 wrote: post #156
iancmceachern wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The point being that asylums had some aspects that we should improve, but it's pretty much unanimously agreed that they were better than what we're doing now

It's not anything close to unanimously agreed upon that they are better than what we're doing now. We have entire advocacy organizations who are opposed to incarcerating the mentally ill.

It's also not out of the blue, or as if I came up with it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#173

Post by EatingWithForks »

soligern wrote: post #165
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.

We can't even bother inspecting our current critical inpatient mental crisis facilities. You cannot seriously claim we should be bringing back an evidently widely abused institution because we can regulate it, when we already have widely abused institutions that are not regulated.

We had, in our most respected medical facilities, numerous women subjected to extremely painful ovarian harvesting with no pain relief and it turns out a nurse was stealing pain medication from the patients for YEARS. You cannot seriously suggest bringing back yet another widely abused institution when our current institutions already abuse people to a horrific, systemic extent, as if it will solve anything.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#174

Post by iancmceachern »

sgath92 wrote: post #120
iancmceachern wrote: post #38

I'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.

> They need to be good, well run with compassion and care of course. And there lies the core of the paradox: We can't pull that off with run of the mill geriatrics. Bottom barrel nursing homes, like the kind medicaid pays for, are hell holes. And the plight of an old patient who has no family left to advocate for them, is not an acceptable one in the least bit. If we're not going to properly handle this responsibilit…

True facts.

Depsite the challenges, we must try.

The existence of these challenges does not mean we shouldn't try.

I think that's the problem, we spend so much energy arguing about the shoulda coulda woulda's that we never actually get started doing anything meaingful.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#175

Post by ahelwer »

gruez wrote: post #134
wolverine876 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These things are interlinked. Developing addiction or mental health issues makes you less able to keep an income. If housing is more expensive it's then that much easier to not be able to make rent. And if you're homeless then it's quite easy to develop drug addictions or mental health issues. Housing prices are a single dial that turns up the heat on the whole system.

Honestly we don't have to intellectualize this very much. A child can understand this. If housing is more expensive it will be harder for people to afford it! And people who can't afford housing become homeless!

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#177

Post by imgabe »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #170
imgabe wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which of the following statements are you advocating for:

1. There is never any reason to involuntarily commit someone

2. There are valid reasons, but there is no known diagnostic that can detect them.

3. There are valid reasons, and we can detect them, but there is no way to prevent people from involuntarily committing people for other reasons, even if we make laws and conduct audits to ensure that only valid reasons and approved diagnostics are used.

4. Something else? You just think the mentally ill are better off living in homeless camps?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#178

Post by kelnos »

coldtea wrote: post #56
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. 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…

I agree, but band-aids at least stop the bleeding while the bigger issues are being taken care of.

Changing those conditions, even if everyone could agree on what needs to be done, and the political will were there, right now, will be a multi-year -- perhaps multi-decade -- process. I don't think we should let people suffer while we wait for that to happen.

I think we should start committing mentally ill homeless people to mental institutions, and force those addicted to drugs/alcohol into rehab programs. They need to be off the street in safer environments for these treatments to be successful. After those problems are dealt with, we can put them in supportive housing and get them into job training and placement programs.

That's not going to be perfect; it may just not work for some people. But it will work for many, and our cities will be safer, healthier, and cleaner as a result. The problem is that there are not enough resources and funding, and the political will to fix that isn't there.

And yes, we need to fix structural problems too:

* Neutralize NIMBYs who fight new housing; once the formerly-homeless get through their treatment programs and are in a position to be back on their feet, we need places to put them that aren't insanely expensive, especially if we expect these new residents to eventually start paying for their own housing.

* Raise minimum wages (somehow also for salaried workers in addition to hourly), with automatic yearly increases indexed to inflation or CPI or whatever. Eliminate the distinction between tipped and non-tipped workers; base wages should be living wages, conforming to the minimum wage laws.

* Either a) put some differential/ratio-based caps on executive compensation, or b) tax the shit out of high income earners to fund fixes to income inequality.

* If we can't get some sort of universal healthcare, at the very least we need to require that health insurers cover mental health and addiction treatment at much better levels than we do now.

But fixing structural problems takes a lot of time. I don't see better mental health & addiction services as putting the cart before the horse; I think both attack vectors are essential.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#180

Post by phatskat »

autoexec wrote: post #143
phatskat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing. Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the…

> Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? Overall you're right, but you also might be surprised at how fragile and insufficient our infrastructure is. There are many documented cases of problems with power delivery when sudden spikes in usage occur. There have been a few articles about it just this summer due to th…

It is fragile and a lot does need to be done to make it more resilient - the incentive isn’t there under the current capitalist model. For example, in the US, power companies can’t make a profit from anything except doing new construction[1]. This is why we had the Camp Fire - a PG&E system had faults with no incentive to get fixed that eventually failed and led to a devastating wildfire. We can do these things, but the people most capable also happen to care the lease.

[1] https://youtu.be/2n_au5Hje_E - Some More News - The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies

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