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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#301

Post by amadeuspagel »

coldtea wrote: post #62
amadeuspagel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeless shelters still exist too. It's not about what to call it, it's about whether people are forced to be there.

If homeless shelters are shitholes, neglected, understaffed, with indifferent and uncaring (or abusing) personnel, with no boundaries between the inmates, so that dangerous and unstable people make it hell for the more well adjusted homeless people living there without recourse, then many or most homeless are not going to want to stay there.

There's no reason to expect asylums to be any better, the only difference is that people are forced to be there.

If we see that someone in freezing weather prefers sleeping outside to sleeping in a homeless shelter, we're forced to reckon with the fact that homeless shelters must be terrible.

If we lock this person up in an equally terrible asylum, we can ignore that.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#302

Post by amadeuspagel »

kaitai wrote: post #207
amadeuspagel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeless shelters still exist too. It's not about what to call it, it's about whether people are forced to be there.

A shelter is generally a place that you go to overnight, where you can't keep your stuff, you have to be out early in the morning and come back at a strict time in the afternoon or evening. Very different than an asylum which provides 24 hour care. Also, there are many homeless families (shelters don't serve them that well), but when it comes to mental illness it's not usually a family thing.

> A shelter is generally a place that you go to overnight, where you can't keep your stuff, you have to be out early in the morning and come back at a strict time in the afternoon or evening.

Of course you could imagine shelters where people are allowed to stay all day. Or housing first programs. The relevant difference is still whether people are forced to be there.

> Also, there are many homeless families (shelters don't serve them that well), but when it comes to mental illness it's not usually a family thing.

I'm not sure I understand this argument. Shelters don't serve families well because they can't stay there together, but this is not a problem for asylums, since asylums would only take those who are mentally ill — so families can't stay there together either, but that's not a problem in this case?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#303

Post by fires10 »

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…

I whole heartily agree. Even when they are a clear danger to themselves, getting help can be non existent. I tried to save the mother of my children. Went to court numerous times and couldn't even get to a hearing, even when the doctors support it, there are barriers with HIPPA. Individual is now deceased.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#305

Post by johnnyanmac »

phatskat wrote: post #110
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 short of housing or food. Artificial and market scarcity don’t make it so.

on a global level, no. On a state level, especially a state like Califonia, it's more questionable but still feasible.

Unfortunately, this is more of a city level issue where a disproportionate amount of people are in the large metropolitan cities of San Diego, San Franciso, and Los Angeles. It probably can be handled if we could move them to other counties, but other counties don't want to inherit that burden. Even if a few did they very likely lack the infrastructure and staff to really support something at scale (not necessarily ALL of these homeless, simply enough to start having the population decrease faster than new ones are created.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#307

Post by RecycledEle »

This has been a used in the past to steal wealth from people, and it will be used to steal wealth in the future.

This has been used in the past to silence rape victims, and it will be used again to silence rape victims.

The State should not have this power.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#308

Post by amadeuspagel »

david38 wrote: post #201
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…

Pointing to the worst abuse of a system of the same name when that is clearly not the intent and claiming this is what the person wants is a lie. It is possible to keep mentally ill in walled communities and those communities not resemble the above. There are activities which are known to help some of these people, such as gardening (plants are cheap, forgiving, rewarding, and have no real profit motive). There are l…

As another comment points[1] out, this is far from the worst abuse of the system:

> The asylum system in the US was not dismantled because people like Edna Long had their inter-generational wealth stolen from their children/grandchildren. It was dismantled because in the 1960s it was shown that these places were engaging in torture. The journalist who broke the Pennhurst story (that culminated in the ending of the asylum system in the US) wanted to have the grounds turned into a museum modeled after the Holocaust Museum because he had uncovered how things like, full mouth tooth removal was being used as a routine punishment method, among other things.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831467

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#309

Post by danShumway »

bobsmooth wrote: post #276
danShumway wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly don't believe that the majority of people advocating for forced institutionalization are going to be satisfied by waiting for someone to commit a crime. I think the majority of people advocating for the return of asylums want the State to be able to commit citizens to asylums before they do anything criminal. Like you said, prison exists. And I will happily advocate for prison reforms within the existing le…

>People here are advocating that the government should have the ability to forcibly commit someone to an asylum. The state already has the ability to forcibly confine people. We just think that some people would do better in a hospital than a prison.

I think you should be honest that you're talking about putting people into a prison and then calling that prison a hospital.

And given the state of prisons in the US, I know what that "hospital" would end up looking like. And I think it's kind of weird and very vaguely gross to try and distinguish. There really aren't many reforms or programs for an asylum that aren't applicable to existing prisons -- normal prisoners deserve mental health services.

That people so intuitively understand that prisons are horrible places for people with mental disabilities should not spark you to try and create Prison 2.0 Deluxe Hospital Edition, it should spark you to try and make Prison 1.0 less horrible for everyone.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#310

Post by danShumway »

bobsmooth wrote: post #282
harimau777 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did Trump do it? Is Ron worse than Trump?

On LGBTQ issues, yes. Ron is unquestionably worse than Trump. It's part of his current campaign strategy to call out that Trump is "weak" on LGBTQ "issues."

Trump and DeSantis are individuals and their political views can't be reduced to a single scale running from "good" to "bad". They have different approaches to politics and they have different areas that they care about and they approach their political goals using different strategies.

They're both bad candidates, but they're bad in sometimes different ways. And there are many, many issues where DeSantis is better than Trump (although that's not saying much, and it's not saying that DeSantis is good on those issues). LGBTQ+ discrimination in specific though is an area where DeSantis is worse.

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