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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#211

Post by phendrenad2 »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #126
imgabe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you must imagine that you will be subjected to asylums as they existed. No you don't. Nobody is advocating for that. Nobody is saying we should follow the same broken standards that led to locking up people for protesting, or that we should allow abuse and rape. Do you not think there is any middle ground between raping protestors and letting people with violent schizophrenia live in a tent on the street?

You cannot advocate to bring back an institution and then lie about what that institution was. The asylum institution was a way to label people as insane regardless of their sanity and then subject them to heinous mistreatment for which they had no recourse. Unless you directly address this, you are simply advocating for the re-implementation of institutional abuse.

You cannot interpret people's meaning however you want. If someone wants to "bring back asylums" it's entirely possible (and from the context here, very likely) that they want to bring "back" a version of asylums that never technically existed, but nevertheless both this new thing and the old thing are in the "asylums" category.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#212

Post by phendrenad2 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #67

A step like this one establishes the precedent. In a few years, the WSJ will be advocating locking up people they don't like, making they case that they are ipso facto mentally unstable, a threat to society, etc. How about protesters? Left-wing ones, of course. Many people in business arguably belong in an asylum - how about the wealthiest person in the world? how about some WSJ op-ed writers? crypto bros? some SV VC…

> In a few years, the WSJ will be advocating locking up people they don't like

Okay but if we need to fear the opinion of the WSJ, we're already screwed. What's stopping them from advocating for locking up people they don't like right now? How does the existence of asylums suddenly turn this frightening power of mind-control that you seem to imply that the WSJ has into a real threat?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#213

Post by graeme »

sudosysgen wrote: post #142
graeme wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada we have free health care and a similar homelessness situation as in the US. USA 17.5 per 10K Canada 10 per 10K Americans like to think that universal health care solves every problem but it really doesn’t. It’s a good system and helps many things but not a panacea.

Mental healthcare coverage in Canada is pretty abysmal. It's barely covered at all unless you're in a crisis situation, which is not very different from many US states.

That’s fair. Though to be clear the following are covered:

* Family doctor or clinic visits for mental health * Psychiatrist visits * In most provinces, medications

Talk therapy through a psychologist is what is generally not covered outside of work insurance. That’s a big gap, but also not quite right to say “not covered at all”.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#214

Post by creata »

imgabe wrote: post #205
EatingWithForks wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not addressing my concerns and are mostly creating straw men to avoid that I am pointing out the historical, real, already evidenced harms of the proposed solution.

You are the one creating strawmen by harping on abuses from 60 years ago when I'm specifically saying don't do that. Are you just completely against the idea of human progress? Do you think we're incapable of fixing things that were bad in the past? Both my parents were nurses who worked in psych hospitals. I can promise you people exist who need to be in there. People who are incapable of caring for themselves. Peop…

If something goes really badly, and someone wants to try it again, the natural questions to ask that person are:

* What do you think are the reasons why it went badly last time?

* What are you proposing we do differently?

* Are you sure that they weren't already doing that last time?

* How do you think that this change would avoid things going badly again?

Could you explicitly answer those questions? Maybe I'm just bad at reading, but so far, all I can get out of your comments is that we should "make reasonable rules and follow them", but I assume that's what people thought they were doing last time, too...

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#215

Post by danShumway »

novok wrote: post #186
bobthepanda wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not fix prison type 1 first so that it can accommodate the existing prisoners with mental health issues? Our current prisons are horrible for people with mental health problems. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit there that could be addressed to improve standards of mental care -- and it's not like people with mental health issues aren't ever sent to prison when they commit crimes. The State already has a pretty large collection of people with mental health issues who are forcibly incarcerated, and it's not helping them.

Obviously a problematic/crass analogy, but think of it like getting a hamster before you get a dog. Prove that you can take care of prison 1, and then maybe we can talk about you getting prison 2. But if you can't take care of prison 1, you probably aren't going to be very responsible about prison 2.

And I just don't know if you're ready for prison 2 yet, prison 1 still has a lot of human rights violations in it. Prison 1 doesn't really make feel like we all know how to avoid committing human rights violations against people with mental health issues, it really makes me feel the opposite.

----

I don't know, I genuinely don't mean to be snarky about it, just... it's a little weird and uncomfortable to be sitting in the realm of theories while discussing a system that actually exists in the real world and that horribly hurts people on the regular, and to say, "we'll just expand that and have the same standards." People with mental health issues already get incarcerated and they're treated horribly, and we're glossing over that when we talk about incarcerating more people.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#216

Post by hayst4ck »

imgabe wrote: post #96
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…

> you must imagine that you will be subjected to asylums as they existed. No you don't. Nobody is advocating for that. Nobody is saying we should follow the same broken standards that led to locking up people for protesting, or that we should allow abuse and rape. Do you not think there is any middle ground between raping protestors and letting people with violent schizophrenia live in a tent on the street?

I think when you look at history it doesn't predict the future, but it tells you what is possible.

What we had is possible, it did happen. Why? What was the system of alignments and incentives that led to that being the case, and how are we different now?

I do think that if you want to bring back asylums, a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat, you must have an answer.

Talking about taxation in America is a political death sentence. Privatization of public services is still extremely rampant. How are you going to get well run asylums if you can't tax or you have a for-profit model?

If you want nice things, we have to be getting less corrupt as a country, not more corrupt, and we are most definitely getting more corrupt. I absolutely do not want asylums as long as we are inching towards literal oligarchy, and we definitely are inching closer to it than farther away. Our supreme court justices openly take bribes, and our representatives think it's ethically okay to trade stocks. Our politicians are choosing to carve up districts to keep themselves in power, and some want to absolve the idea of voting altogether and just choose federal candidates from state legislatures.

Asylums are running when we can't even walk. The post office was in the process of being dismantled to create pretext to steal an election and you think we can run an asylum?

Do you really want an asylum in the context of Ron DeSantis's Florida and GOP rhetoric against trans people? That seems like a bad mix.

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#217

Post by [deleted] »

drekipus wrote: post #75
phatskat wrote: post #61

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…

[deleted]

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#218

Post by danShumway »

iancmceachern wrote: post #174
sgath92 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> we must try

Start with the existing system then. If you think we can do better, prove it. Bring that same level of optimism into improving existing standards of medical care -- then come back and we'll talk about expanding those systems.

> we never actually get started doing anything meaingful.

I think this regularly gets pulled out as a justification for expanding systems that have significant problems, and critics are supposed to take it at face value that we're all going to earnestly try to do better this time. But without something more concrete behind it, it's just talk, and talk is cheap. What often ends up happening is the same negative outcomes are expanded, and then the process repeats with the exact same line -- again and again and again.

So let's all get together and fix at least a few of the things that are already broken, and then maybe I'll believe you that we can all band together and build something new. But this kind of optimism divorced from practical action doesn't actually address concerns and doesn't actually improve existing or future standards.

I'm not saying everything needs to be perfect before we do anything new, of course that's never going to be the case. But I am saying that if all of our existing systems are garbage, the words "we must try" need to be backed up with something much more tangible than anyone is providing in this comments section.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#219

Post by imgabe »

creata wrote: post #214
imgabe wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the one creating strawmen by harping on abuses from 60 years ago when I'm specifically saying don't do that. Are you just completely against the idea of human progress? Do you think we're incapable of fixing things that were bad in the past? Both my parents were nurses who worked in psych hospitals. I can promise you people exist who need to be in there. People who are incapable of caring for themselves. Peop…

If something goes really badly, and someone wants to try it again, the natural questions to ask that person are: * What do you think are the reasons why it went badly last time? * What are you proposing we do differently? * Are you sure that they weren't already doing that last time? * How do you think that this change would avoid things going badly again? Could you explicitly answer those questions? Maybe I'm just b…

I think coming up with a comprehensive mental health policy is a little beyond the scope of a HN comment, and certainly far beyond my expertise. I merely posit that such a policy could exist, and could be developed. I don't see why not.

I mean, the comments here are like "b-b-but homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness!". Right, it was, but now it's not. So it seems pretty clear that to prevent people from being institutionalized for being gay, we could simply continue to not consider it a mental illness. You know, like we're already doing. That doesn't seem very difficult.

Maybe there are other things that are considered mental illnesses that shouldn't be. If there are, we already have an example in homosexuality of how we can stop considering them mental illnesses. It's clearly a thing that's possible to do, so if necessary, let's do that.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#220

Post by yardstick »

iancmceachern wrote: post #148
yardstick wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are not resource limited. A B2 bomber costs 2 billion and we have 20.

What’s the debt level at now? 30+ trillion?
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