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Time to bring back asylums?

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Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#121

Post by [deleted] »

dmatech wrote: post #76
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#122

Post by sgath92 »

baremetal wrote: post #72
amadeuspagel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compelled vaccination — forcing people to endure the pain of a needle and a few hours of feeling sore in their arm — is indeed completely different from locking people up in mental institutions for decades.

[flagged]

Vaccinations /= medical experimentation.

Are you suggesting we as a species should still be being ravished by the scourge of smallpox?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#123

Post by phatskat »

graeme wrote: post #119
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)

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.

Your healthcare system doesn’t (from my anecdotal experience knowing someone in Ontario) cover that much mental health. She could effectively see a therapist a few times of year before it became an out of pocket expense. If we want to address homelessness that’s related to mental health we need much better access. We also need housing, food.

We need things that are doable but we don’t do them because capitalism doesn’t allow for it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#124

Post by DropInIn »

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…

For some us states I have zero doubt they'd make such things eligible criteria for placement in a facility, regardless of thier presence in the dsm.

Just look at what's happening right now with them violating hippa to attack women trying to survive miscarriages...

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#125

Post by wk_end »

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…

Why do you think this was a "typical" case, as opposed to atypical one? Do you think that "typical" outcomes these days are better?

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#126

Post by EatingWithForks »

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?

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.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#127

Post by DropInIn »

phatskat wrote: post #69
creer wrote: post #32

Mental health doesn't have to be done in the most stupid way possible. And yet could be much more present, available, temporary. 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. As opposed to the usual such cross-checks around here. This is a far broader i…

> 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

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#128

Post by EatingWithForks »

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…

People with severe mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators of it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#129

Post by phatskat »

yardstick wrote: post #118
phatskat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not short of housing or food. Artificial and market scarcity don’t make it so.

Both of those require resources. Or are you going to grow your own trees and build a log cabin yourself? How much time will that take? Can you build it by yourself or will you need someone elses help? These are all resources that are not unlimited, and there are trade offs whatever way you allocate said resources. Edit: also power, water, wastewater, internet for a house are services run using limited resources

First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing.

Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the fast food joint because then they’ll just make extra food, so instead you end up tossing tons of perfectly good food. I’d help my dad pick up “old” food from grocery stores for a local shelter and they had to still only take some because the volume of usable food being tossed was too much for one shelter. There’s plenty of food.

Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? If, for instance, every vacant property that has working power/water/sewage/internet was filled, would that be too much strain? Would the system that was planned for that capacity buckle under the weight of what it’s made to bear? I don’t buy it.

Re: Time to bring back asylums?

#130

Post by slibhb »

coldtea wrote: post #56
iancmceachern wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really at all. In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. We need a way to pay the people that do the work, buy the buildings, keep the lights on. We call this infrastructure asylums, whatever you want to call it we need it desperately. If you want to stop things like what you cited from happening, lobb…

> In a sentence, we need a public infrastructure in place to care for the mentally ill that currently are forced to live on the streets of our major cities. Maybe that's putting the cart before the horse? How about what is needed is changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture, so that fewer people end up "mentally ill", and those that are environmentally or genetically mentally ill do not get broken an…

Advocating for "changing the conditions in society, workplace, and culture" is a bit of a moonshot.
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