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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is the point of clarification around the baby formula thing there was actually an article oh few months ago a while back anyway that pointed out that most of this baby formula that was being stolen wasn't actually by needing mothers but was actually part of a massive international crime syndicate that was stealing it and then reselling the goods.

It turns out that when it's easy to steal things that people need organized crime will get low-level people like drug addicts and petty criminals to steal the goods for them who then give it to an intermediary middleman who then moves it to the person at the top that then resales it online and they're able to have fantastic prices because they have no no unit cos. In fact in many cases a lot of stolen goods tend to end up being part of organized crime not homeless or needy people that need things. People who need things generally we have a robust social safety net that includes things like food stamps and housing assistance in many parts of the country already.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#182

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.

Yes, and those organizations are dumb, and should be ignored. Any organization that somehow thinks that leaving mentally ill people on the streets to live in squalor and danger is better than institutionalization should not have a place in policy decisions.

It is mind-boggling to me that this is at all debatable.

Obviously we need to mandate levels of treatment and care, and constantly audit institutions to ensure conditions are maintained at a high level. But this is not even remotely an unsolved problem. We shouldn't let the failures of the past force us into failures today.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#183
States need to start doing better taking care of the people they’ve made themselves responsible for. We can talk about expanding that when they’re doing a better job of what they are responsible for now.

Jails need to be supportive places where a person actually has the opportunity to grow and experience some dignity.

Facilities for the profoundly disabled need to be appropriately funded and there needs to be more room to those need.

Facilities for those experiencing mental health crises need more space and resources so they can actually get in in a timely manner and spend the time they need.

Quality of care needs to be improved across the board.

Then you can start talking about expanding to people who are having lots of trouble taking care of basic life necessities either temporarily or long term.

A lot of people really do just need a time when their basic needs are met with some good life advice provided to reset and rebuild themselves.

But the state doing it in the past has turned into minimizing costs and incredibly inhumane treatment of people least capable of advocating for themselves.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point in saying money is a made up construct is that, well, yeah, communism. With infinite possibilities of products and 8 billion players, capitalism, as a way to distribute the collective output of humanity just makes sense. But where there's misery, destitution, and hopelessness, money's just a made up concept and we could make things so much better just by flipping a couple of bits in a database somewhere to create money out of thin air and fund soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Of course we won't and can't actually do that because so many reasons, but if you look past money, and see that its just some system we came up with one day, I fantasize about other solutions to the problem of distribution with the technology we have available to us today, that we didn't have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#185

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…

You can make similar assertions about anything of a forced nature like that. Public schools, prisons, etc. Because some do prisons or public schools are done badly, it is not an argument against them in general, because you can point to many other cases where they were done properly.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#186

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…

IMO we do the same for crime. And maybe that should be the standard? Many of the mentally ill homeless repeatedly commit minor and major crimes throughout their existence in that state, and they essentially become prison type 2?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An institutional system can be built with cross-checks, inspections, corruption fighting mechanisms, etc. By this I mean actual, independent, not powerless, not perfunctory, corruption-fighting, enforceable, etc. It can be but not within capitalism. Even if it’s the Best Government Program Ever, eventually it will become public/private, and eventually private. And it will get worse and worse the entire time. Once i…

Also: kids for cash scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Who could forget that classic?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#188
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and those organizations are dumb, and should be ignored. Any organization that somehow thinks that leaving mentally ill people on the streets to live in squalor and danger is better than institutionalization should not have a place in policy decisions. It is mind-boggling to me that this is at all debatable. Obviously we need to mandate levels of treatment and care, and constantly audit institutions to ensure co…

That's a strawman argument. They are not arguing that it's good for people to live on the streets. What they are arguing is that the abuse associated with making it easier to incarcerate mentally ill people is too great of a risk.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#189

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…

Asylums are prison type 2, and I am already subjected to the possibility of prison for crimes. Most arguments against asylums is an argument against criminal prosecution, police and prisons in general. Make the standards the same then and only subject to committing an actual crime in the first place?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my grandma had Alzheimer’s we put her in a nursing home and took away her legal ability to leave. And what is Alzheimer’s but a really bad, invariably terminal mental illness? To call a mental hospital a “prison” is to rhetorically group it with an extremely violent, cold, and otherwise unpleasant institution. But a mental hospital doesn’t have to be.

And prisons don't have to be. Think of the resorts rich white collar criminals get put away in.

Sure, but the difference is compassion.

Unfortunately, many people have little compassion for those sent to prison, so they don't particularly care what kind of conditions prisoners face. It's terrible, but that's just how many humans are.

I think most people wouldn't find it hard to show compassion toward an Alzheimer's patient, and want them to be in a safe place with good conditions and good medical care.

Why is it so hard to extend that compassion to a wide variety of mental illnesses? We've come a long way from the late 60s in our understanding of mental illness (when many abuse-riddled mental institutions in California started being forced to release their patients and eventually shut down). The stigma around mental illness has not completely evaporated today, but we've made a lot of progress.

I think it's fairly safe to say that if we opened a bunch of mental institutions tomorrow, we could come up with and enforce a humane set of standards on them, and that the abuses of the past would largely be, well, a thing of the past. No system is ever perfect, of course, but I think we'd do a lot better than back then, and we'd overall have a better situation than we do today.

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