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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#291

Post by georgeecollins »

sangnoir wrote: post #237
m463 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have direct experience with this. The police and emergency responders can be called, but are unable to take any action to help a clearly mentally ill individual unless they are a danger to themselves and others. The same is true for doctors/hospitals/emergency rooms. It is common for an individual to have 20 or 30 public service calls before they are admitted and start to receive guided treatment. Even individuals…

What kind of "action" would you want the police to take?

Without getting too much into the details of a personal experience in San Francisco (decades ago), I can say that a person can act extremely crazy and threatening, have a history of serious mental illness and it was effectively impossible to get the police to intervene until the person became violent or made threats that make coherent sense. I am not a lawyer, or an expert on mental illness, but everyone in this situation thought the person was really scary and threatening, just not in a way where they said something like "I am going to attack you". Ultimately a few days later that person did assault a stranger and got taken into medical care. But we couldn't get the police to do anything before that point.

I don't blame the police, they followed the law. But in a case like that, where a person seemed very dangerous (and ultimately was), had a history of severe mental illness, was off their meds.. it seems like you need a way to intervene before the ill person does something dangerous.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#292

Post by creata »

imgabe wrote: post #273
vel0city wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homosexuality is still on the books as a crime in the State of Texas and probably elsewhere, it's only a 2003 Supreme Court case that makes it unenforceable. A court case a lot of people on the Court wouldn't mind overturning, I might add. You may think these things are way in the past, but to many who aren't even that grey haired it was only yesterday. I'm not necessarily arguing for or against asylums, but just arg…

> But honestly, there's a lot of people still out there that think differently. And in some ways, they're gaining influence and power. They're gaining influence and power, in large part, because the people who would oppose them are advocating things like letting the mentally ill live in tents on the street and do whatever they want. People rightly see that this policy produces bad results and don't support the people…

Okay, come on, surely even you can see how this is the shittiest rebuttal ever.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#293

Post by boppo1 »

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…

>Do you think they're suddenly going to put homosexuality and BDSM back in the DSM-4 and lock people up for it?

Yes. A young woman was recently locked up for 90 days for terminating a pregnancy because she did not have access to legal abortion. There are people who basically want 'white sharia'.

I'm sick of the civic rainbow-religion. Get those flags and the moral authoritarianism out of my face. But let us not forget there really are people who think two guys shouldn't be able to hold hands in public or fool around in private.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#294

Post by vore »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #274
vore wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... why? Why can't we also build more affordable housing as well instead of just making rich people enclaves? If you're forcing all the low income people to live in one place, that is clearly not good for class mobility at all.

You're talking about people who work -- the homeless, well, the chronically homeless, are people who don't work.

You can work as hard as you want in a minimum wage job and still not be able to make rent in places with low housing supply.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#295

Post by imgabe »

creata wrote: post #278
mixmastamyk wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. These people that demand perfection are poison to any kind of progress, and one of the reasons the US is an increasing failure. Was recently in Asia, and the contrast was clear as day.

I'm not demanding perfection. I'm literally just asking "what would be different this time", and the only answer I'm getting is "we know better this time around". Seriously: the reason asylums were so prone to abuse in the past was not because the people running them didn't know better.

You don't think there's anything different between the 1960s and today? Like, nothing at all?

For one thing, there is a history of abuses in asylums, so people would know to look out for it. I confess I don't know every detail of the history of asylums, but hopefully we can agree:

1. Asylums existed, there was abuse

2. At some point the abuse was discovered and brought to light.

3. The people in power eventually shut down the asylums, partly because of the abuse.

So we know that some mechanism for detecting abuse existed. How about we do whatever that was earlier on and formalize it? We know that there is some authority that has the power to shut down asylums, so instead of that authority shutting them down, how about it just removes people who are committing abuse? This isn't rocket science.

Like, at some point in the past bakers would put sawdust in their bread to cut cost. Obviously, this was bad and they knew it was bad. But we didn't just say "Oh well, I guess we have to outlaw bakeries. There's no possible way we could ever stop them from putting sawdust in the bread". No, we created the FDA, started doing inspections and fining people and today you can buy bread anywhere in the US and be confident that there's no sawdust in it. Clearly, problems like this have solutions if people are willing to try instead of just giving up.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#296

Post by drekipus »

fragmede wrote: post #184
drekipus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're well on our way. Look at the data for poverty over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#297

Post by languageserver »

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 could simply be protesting while black or female,

do you have any sources for the occurrence of such events in the latter part of the 20th century?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#298

Post by rhaway84773 »

thwy435384 wrote: post #225
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…

The reason it was likely done away with is because it was abused. There will always be cases like that, most you'll never hear about. The mentally ill are also an easy target for haters with government power.

To be fair mental illness was far less understood and far more maligned than it is today making the likelihood of mistreatment of the mentally I’ll far more likely.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#299

Post by m463 »

sangnoir wrote: post #237
m463 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have direct experience with this. The police and emergency responders can be called, but are unable to take any action to help a clearly mentally ill individual unless they are a danger to themselves and others. The same is true for doctors/hospitals/emergency rooms. It is common for an individual to have 20 or 30 public service calls before they are admitted and start to receive guided treatment. Even individuals…

What kind of "action" would you want the police to take?

Well, "they are admitted and start to receive guided treatment".

Unfortunately the police will tell you bluntly: "It's not against the law to be crazy"

More unfortunately, medical personnel have told me that unless a treatment regimen with appropriate medication starts, the brain will deteriorate and chances of a full recovery disappear.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#300

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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