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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#371

Post by pjlegato »

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…

Non sequitur fallacy; mismanaged and abusive hospitals are not an inevitable consequence of involuntary committment for people with severe mental illnesses who are unable to take care of themselves.

There are also many cases of mismanaged and abusive conventional hospitals for purely physical ailments. Should we shut down all ERs and stop putting casts on broken bones because of that?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#372

Post by sbuttgereit »

michaelmrose wrote: post #341
sbuttgereit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

".. competent enough to decide they don't want to be there but not competent enough to meaningfully integrate with society..." At some level these should be mutually exclusive conditions; one (unable to integrate) is the major fact that disproves the other (competent enough for self-determination). "but would become sufficiently lucid to disinter themselves before discontinuing medication and resuming drinking and dr…

> one (unable to integrate) is the major fact that disproves the other (competent enough for self-determination). Except that just isn't even remotely anything like true. Every adult is presumed competent until a court has declared the converse and merely mental illness is not by itself sufficient to provide this. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mental_competence It has a legal meaning that isn't malleable to meet wh…

"Except that just isn't even remotely anything like true. Every adult is presumed competent until a court has declared the converse and merely mental illness is not by itself sufficient to provide this."

Who's disputing this? If we start with the person already being hospitalized, which seemed to be true in your comment ("were interred there") my comment stands. If by "interred there" you mean self admitted, well, OK... sure they could check themselves out... but that's not the scenario that the article raises. The meaning of "interred" as I understood it, and a brief review of the article seems to agree with my understanding, we're talking about an involuntary commitment. If that's the case, we can presume a legal process was performed to get the person in question in the hospital in the first place: establishing legal mental incompetence. Therefore, a legal process regarding release should, if its to be consistent, operate on the premise that, "one (unable to integrate) is the major fact that disproves the other (competent enough for self-determination)".

"Merely being a loser who wants to live in a tent and do meth doesn't make one legally incompetent and in fact any attempt to patch that bug with law alone will probably run into constitutional challenges"

And the initial premise has been challenged, kind of... the 9th circuit stopped Boise, ID from breaking up a homeless encampment on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment. But Boise didn't actually provide for an alternative to the encampment: it fined and sentenced them to a a day or two in jail (most of them were sentenced time served)... the response was entirely punitive. Note that the right to camp/do wherever you want, uninvited, on public or other's property wasn't the right being protected: there is no constitutional right to that. It was that arbitrary punishments were being dolled out.

Having said that, there are already laws already instituting involuntary treatment and hospitalization, so the constitutional challenges may not be so clear cut as you might think:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#373

Post by thebooktocome »

baremetal wrote: post #360
thebooktocome wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a simple metaphor to illustrate the difference, if we’re going to argue the meaning of terms of art by their dictionary definitions. When Sully Sullenberger pulled off the Miracle on the Hudson, that was an emergency use of the airplane’s water landing capability. It wasn’t experimental. Airbus designed a “ditching” button for the A320, they knew more or less what it would do, and the regulators (here the FAA)…

You are downplaying the role of an emergency use authorization. "Reasonable belief" sounds experimental to me. Otherwise they would've had all the information needed for FDA approval, it wouldn't have been predicated on belief, and it wouldn't have been labeled emergency use. Why are you so adverse to accepting the reality of the situation? "The process for issuing an EUA is different than an FDA approval. Under an E…

> Why are you so adverse to accepting the reality of the situation?

Because your reality contradicts the evidence I’ve seen. Really, there’s a convincing, logical argument in Section 2.2 of that third link above about exactly this kind of equivocation on the meaning of experimental in the context of medicine.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#374

Post by yardstick »

wildrhythms wrote: post #319
yardstick wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hitler.

I get what you're saying but Hitler never went to jail; his forces were eliminated by the armies of multiple world superpowers working together. Imagine if such manpower and might were used to eradicate homelessness and hunger.

Ironically we may have never reached the moon, or have deployed GPS, Starlink, etc without the huge advancements that came about through war R&D.

(Or taken a few additional centuries to get there)

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#375

Post by yardstick »

coldtea wrote: post #323
yardstick wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hitler.

Hitler was the person running jails, camps, and asylums and sending people there. So this argument kind of backfires...

Would we have been better off putting Hitler in jail before all that? He didn’t just switch a crazy light in his head overnight.

All I’m saying is, there will always be people that need to be inside jail rather than outside jail. The parent asked for a citation. I said Hitler. Because it would have been better if he was inside jail and not running it.

Another one: Charles Manson. He was jailed. I don’t think there is any society where he could have lived and not committed atrocities. Unless you lived in a society that legalised such atrocities but I’m not interested in living somewhere like that.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#376

Post by Incipient »

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…

Ultimately good mental health care is at odds with how your society is set up in the US. You're very much a capitalist/user-pay type approach. Anything that remotely seems to help the common good gets shot down as "socialism".

Mental health, and a lot of other societal issues (homelessness etc) all need a socialist/common good type solution.

Unfortunately, I just don't see the US being able to get it together, especially combined with the general decline of your country as a whole/on average.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#377

Post by sneak »

novok wrote: post #185
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…

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.

The nonconsensual nature of them is the airtight argument against them, generally.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#379

Post by dang »

iancmceachern wrote: post #348
nradov wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher minimum wages are the last thing those people need. We're talking about the least productive workers. If minimum wage is $20 and their labor is only worth $10 then no one will hire them at all. They will remain dependent on handouts and never have the opportunity to gain real work experience. Under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) of 2008, medical insurers are already required to cove…

You, nradov, are the problem. Paying people a living wage is not a handout. Raising the minimum wage is not a handout. These people are working, hard, harder than you do, for way less. These people are being taken advantage of. It's not just fast food workers, it's bank tellers, it's farm workers, it's orderliness and custodians at hospitals, it's the backbone of our society. What do you get paid to do? I would argue…

Please don't cross into personal attack. We're trying to avoid that here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#380

Post by sam345 »

mlyle wrote: post #108
dmatech wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main concern these days is with people with specific mental illnesses or addictions that make them unable to comply with treatment. Schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder are some of the more obvious ones. One can argue that there's a human right to be insane, but most of us would prefer not to be pushed in front of an oncoming subway train. People with a good support network might find it easier to comply wit…

> One can argue that there's a human right to be insane, but most of us would prefer not to be pushed in front of an oncoming subway train. This is a bit of a flawed argument-- it's not clear that people with severe mental illness are more violent than the general population, and if they are, it's not by a huge margin. It's also flawed because we already can forcibly hospitalize people who we can prove are a danger t…

>"This is a bit of a flawed argument-- it's not clear that people with severe mental illness are more violent than the general population, and if they are, it's not by a huge margin."

Have you been around schizophrenics ? Particularly those that go off meds ? And many do from time to time. "Mental Illness" is a broad term. But people with psychosis (the two most major and "severe" diagnosable forms being schizophrenia and bipolar) are clearly more prone to violence, particularly schizophrenics and particularly those who don't take their meds. Anyone having any experience with those haunted with psychosis can absolutely agree they are more prone to violence. I agree with being able to hospitalize people who prove dangerous but it is usually for a very short period of time to deal with some acute episode.

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