6 ms·

Some people just do not give a single, solitary fuck about how their behaviour affects others. I don't think jail is the answer, some mental health support mig

by vr46 4y ago

Some people just do not give a single, solitary fuck about how their behaviour affects others. I don't think jail is the answer, some mental health support might be.

dqpb 4y ago
Some people even enjoy harming others.
diob 4y ago
That and I wonder if this person has a support system that allows them to self isolate? They still need to pay rent, etc.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  On a related note, are they getting solitary confinement?
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    Yes, and usually negative pressure. Most jails above a certain size will have at least one or two negative pressure rooms for inmates who may have such illnesses.
- MrLeap 4y ago
  I wondered this too. There's rock-and-a-hard place economic scenarios I'd feel a lot of compassion for. Is it one of those, or is she just woefully capricious/willfully defiant? The coverage makes it hard for me to draw conclusions.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > "We assess that balance between restricting somebody’s liberty and protecting the health of the community. We also want to make sure that we have time for the person to comply and try lots of different options that are short of requiring somebody to be detained," he added. "Incarceration detention is the very, very last option that we want to take and we don’t do that lightly. But occasionally that becomes necessary if there is a risk to the public." Also, as noted in the article: she went to the ER complaining of chest pain, knew she was TB positive, and did not tell anyone. She was a passenger in a car while sick with both TB and COVID. She's not disobeying because she doesn't have a support system. She's disobeying because she's a selfish asshole. Why after a year of her clearly being a plague rat the court is only just getting to threatening her with electronic monitoring or confinement is beyond me. She should have been given a court order, and then upon failing to follow it, involuntarily confined until she submitted to treatment. I am completely exhausted by our government's nearly endless toleration of people spreading highly contagious diseases.
  - vuln 4y ago
    I'll at least play devils advocate. Due to lack of information about the individual I wonder if language is a barrier. If their reasoning behind not seeking treatment is due to historical systemic racism within the medical community. Perhaps is a financial decision like others have stated. From the documents we can see she is ordered to confine to "her residence" but according to the documents that location changed many times. Which leads me to believe this person may be without a home. The government can deem a shelter as her residence. Should she quarantine there or with family members or friends? I believe there is a lot of nuance to these situations which may be why the state government has treaded lightly.
  - dTal 4y ago
    >She's not disobeying because she doesn't have a support system. She's disobeying because she's a selfish asshole. That might be satisfying to say, but it doesn't really solve anything on a systemic level. I think it's worth exploring how people become selfish assholes. I strongly suspect that a lack of trust in society, stemming from being repeatedly fucked over, is a primary cause. You can't expect people to show loyalty to a society that makes no secret of the fact it doesn't care about them. I'm not implying anything in particular about this case. I'm just encouraging you, in the most general terms, not to let your thoughts terminate there, and to keep pulling on that "root cause" string.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  In California, and I'm sure many places in Washington state are the same, we have financial assistance for exactly this reason. We'll help with the rent, groceries, bills, etc. while they're on respiratory isolation (this doesn't usually last more than a couple weeks, but that can still be a lot of lost work time), and get them to and from clinic visits and handle their directly observed therapy. We don't want these people untreated and it's as big a financial burden to them as you say it is. Source: public health TB physician for 15+ years
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    > this doesn't usually last more than a couple weeks, but that can still be a lot of lost work time Are there protections against them losing their job?
    - classichasclass 4y ago
      (IANAL) California is an at-will state generally, so the answer is usually no. It is illegal in California for someone to be terminated for using their accrued sick leave, and firing someone solely on their medical condition is also illegal. But these are folks who can't afford a prolonged employment discrimination lawsuit, and I've had patients lose their jobs for "other reasons," which an employer can easily come up with if they want someone gone.
    - plandis 4y ago
      Presumably FMLA would protect their job.
lovich 4y ago
Mental health support is probably the answer to people waving knives around in public too. We don't let them keep the knife however, to protect their liberty. This person needs to be locked up because at minimum, if we accept that its a mental health issue and not maliciousness, they are incapable of not endangering others around themselves. Not getting her treatable fatal disease cured also implies she is incapable of not endangering herself either, but that's less troubling than what she does to others.
jojobas 4y ago
Mental support doesn't want when the recipient doesn't want it or doesn't care.
anenefan 4y ago
I don't think mental health support encompasses issues due to personality types. The vast number I've seen that do this don't seem to have anything out of the ordinary, they probably score slightly higher on narcissistic and socipathic traits. Sadly a lot of the people who ended up as my close acquaintances and including some family are like that, people I call Travellers since they don't stay at home when they're sick and like to go visiting. It took me a while to realise that the unexpected drop in, no that's no just hay fever ... I'm unlucky in that I seem to be very susceptible to respiratory illnesses. I really can't see any treatment for people who literally go visiting ten minutes after thinking they're done with a dose of the squirts.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Travelers means something different. Maybe call these people Spreaders.
  - anenefan 4y ago
    Spreaders would take in people who have to go to work when they're really sick and or have no idea of good hygiene, for example, visit and use the toilet and simply neglect to wonder why there's a wash basin and or soap and walk back without using them. I can't be too annoyed at those who go to work with the flu, some businesses are run by idiots who don't really care if one worker has the flu and insist they turn up or else.
nitwit005 4y ago
Probably would refuse the mental health support too. If she violated court orders multiple times, electronic home monitoring seems appropriate.
themitigating 4y ago
Why isn't jail the answer here? If by mental health support you don't mean being institutionalized then won't she continue to put people in danger. Most think jail is about protecting others, not a punishment, isn't this a case where it would actually be used for its intended purpose?
- classichasclass 4y ago
  Sometimes it is. I've had a few TB patients who ended up receiving the entirety of their treatment in custody because they wouldn't stick to it, though this depends greatly on the judge. No one likes putting these folks in jail and it should always be a last resort, but it does happen.
lazide 4y ago
If someone is showing such casual indifference to the well being of others, turning around and putting them in jail seems like a pretty good service to the public to me. And why should anyone care about how this might offend them, if they cared so little about anyone else either?
- agr33d 4y ago
  I love how we demean one person in a society that, on the whole, refuses to provide cheap, accessible, healthcare with high quality outcomes (US healthcare outcomes lag developing nations). Surely, surely, it’s just this one person failing society. We do not say “it is us failing each other” but this person failing us; the temerity of them!
  - lazide 4y ago
    Yeah, fuck you.
ericmcer 4y ago
Is your first instinct that jail is too harsh and we should find them a qualified therapist? I have several elderly relatives (including my 70+ year old parents) and if a person infected them with TB or Covid through gross negligence I would not wonder how we can help that person. I don't know if I am a bad person or what, but I struggle not to fall into tribalistic patterns mentally and view dangerous outsiders as people who should be shunned instead of people who need help. I guess I was just curious if your first instinct is so generous.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices?
  - xoa 4y ago
    >Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices? This doesn't seem like an honest analogy. The legal/social concern here isn't about the individual, it's about their effect on others, and the extent to which it is willful negligence of something treatable. If someone has a known, treatable mental disorder and, repeatedly, refuses to follow the treatment and then engages in wilful behavior endangering others then yes that can absolutely be an issue. A better example would be epilepsy: in much of the world people with it cannot drive (or are restricted in license type/conditions, no Class C for example), because the accident rate for drivers with epilepsy is over double the baseline. They're not bad people obviously. And my understanding is that just in the last few years some very promising new medications have had studies showing significant improvements without side effects. So perhaps under those treatments it'd be fine for them to drive. But if someone with epilepsy knew they did, refused treatment, lied about it, got a commercial license and then started side swiping people with a semi, then yes they'd be "shunned" (dealt with). It's the "dangerous" qualifier in OP's post that is the big issue.
    - luckylion 4y ago
xen2xen1 4y ago
Have you read about Typhoid Mary? She went from rich house to rich house killing the inhabitants over and over, even after being shown it was her doing it, with government threats. She didn't keep doing it because she was mentally ill, she kept doing it because her livelihood has cooking for rich people. She would have to give up her lifestyle if she admitted she was killing people. Her motives were largely economic, not mental illness. There are MANY reasons people do dumb crap.
- elif 4y ago
  USD acquisition hyper-primacy is just another form of mental illness.. it is just a socially accepted and ubiquitous one.
  - ranger_danger 4y ago
    what?
- crazygringo 4y ago
  There are historians who disagree with you. The idea of an asymtopmatic carrier was not well understood at the time, and she had tests done that came back negative for typhoid. There's a good argument to be made that she genuinely believed she'd been singled out as some kind of anti-Irish conspiracy, that the authorities pinning the infections on her were scapegoating her based on totally hypothetical science. (That today we know the science was sound, but at the time her distrust of it may not have been unreasonable.) So the idea that Typhoid Mary knew exactly what she was doing and did it anyways, makes for a great movie villain, but not necessarily real life. For more details: [1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/typhoid-mary https://allthatsinteresting.com/typhoid-mary
  - dTal 4y ago
    Both things can be true. Mary's receptiveness to the idea that she could possibly be an asymptomatic carrier could hardly have been separated from the fact that this would be deeply inconvenient to her. Given the choice between two unlikely explanations (asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, grand "anti-Irish" conspiracy targeting her and her alone for unknown reasons), she chose to believe the one that disrupted her life less. "It is difficult to get a man [sic] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
squokko 4y ago
What's wrong with jail for someone like that? There are some people who just cannot accept that some other people are unfit for civilization, and must be permanently excluded. They search for explanations like "mental illness" when mental illness is a completely different thing than being a complete fucking asshole.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  What if she was just forced to wear a mask? Would that be an acceptable compromise?
  - squokko 4y ago
    If effective, sure. What mechanism could the state use to enforce this in a cost effective manner?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hilbert42 4y ago
We used to have well established practices to deal with TB and leprosy and that was enforced isolation. Leprosy cases were isolated in special locations by law. Such quarantining practices were commonplace in many countries. As we've seen with COVID that system no longer works. I can only guess why long-standing laws to protect the community are no longer applied. Even as recently as 50 years ago she would have felt the full force of the law—the moment she failed to comply she would have been put in enforced quarantine. If anyone can tell me why the law no longer work/is enforced then I'd love to know.
jimt1234 4y ago
I tested positive for TB back in my early-20s. I was fine, but I still tested positive, and so the county health officials were on me like flies on shit. I had to take a pill every day for a year. They'd give me a monthly supply of pills, and if I didn't pick up new meds at the end of the month, they would call me immediately (and constantly!), pressuring me to pick up my pills. I even moved and changed phone number at one point, yet they somehow found my new number and called me there. These people were intense. I was annoyed back then, but I totally get it now - you know, now that I'm older and give a shit about anyone other than myself. LOL
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > tested positive for TB back in my early-20s Note that if you were inoculated with BCG, you'll show false positive for TB [1]. I had to go on six months of Zithromax as a kid because of this, despite everything from X-rays to blood tests coming back negative. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/testing/testingbcgvaccinated.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/testing/testingbcgvaccinated.ht...
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Only the skim test. I’m British, had the BCG and for my green card had that happen. Blood test proved negative. Now they just go straight to blood test for BCG countries.

by vr46 4y ago

Some people just do not give a single, solitary fuck about how their behaviour affects others. I don't think jail is the answer, some mental health support might be.

dqpb 4y ago

Some people even enjoy harming others.

diob 4y ago

That and I wonder if this person has a support system that allows them to self isolate? They still need to pay rent, etc.

lostlogin 4y ago
On a related note, are they getting solitary confinement?
- classichasclass 4y ago
  Yes, and usually negative pressure. Most jails above a certain size will have at least one or two negative pressure rooms for inmates who may have such illnesses.
MrLeap 4y ago
I wondered this too. There's rock-and-a-hard place economic scenarios I'd feel a lot of compassion for. Is it one of those, or is she just woefully capricious/willfully defiant? The coverage makes it hard for me to draw conclusions.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
> "We assess that balance between restricting somebody’s liberty and protecting the health of the community. We also want to make sure that we have time for the person to comply and try lots of different options that are short of requiring somebody to be detained," he added. "Incarceration detention is the very, very last option that we want to take and we don’t do that lightly. But occasionally that becomes necessary if there is a risk to the public." Also, as noted in the article: she went to the ER complaining of chest pain, knew she was TB positive, and did not tell anyone. She was a passenger in a car while sick with both TB and COVID. She's not disobeying because she doesn't have a support system. She's disobeying because she's a selfish asshole. Why after a year of her clearly being a plague rat the court is only just getting to threatening her with electronic monitoring or confinement is beyond me. She should have been given a court order, and then upon failing to follow it, involuntarily confined until she submitted to treatment. I am completely exhausted by our government's nearly endless toleration of people spreading highly contagious diseases.
- vuln 4y ago
  I'll at least play devils advocate. Due to lack of information about the individual I wonder if language is a barrier. If their reasoning behind not seeking treatment is due to historical systemic racism within the medical community. Perhaps is a financial decision like others have stated. From the documents we can see she is ordered to confine to "her residence" but according to the documents that location changed many times. Which leads me to believe this person may be without a home. The government can deem a shelter as her residence. Should she quarantine there or with family members or friends? I believe there is a lot of nuance to these situations which may be why the state government has treaded lightly.
- dTal 4y ago
  >She's not disobeying because she doesn't have a support system. She's disobeying because she's a selfish asshole. That might be satisfying to say, but it doesn't really solve anything on a systemic level. I think it's worth exploring how people become selfish assholes. I strongly suspect that a lack of trust in society, stemming from being repeatedly fucked over, is a primary cause. You can't expect people to show loyalty to a society that makes no secret of the fact it doesn't care about them. I'm not implying anything in particular about this case. I'm just encouraging you, in the most general terms, not to let your thoughts terminate there, and to keep pulling on that "root cause" string.
classichasclass 4y ago
In California, and I'm sure many places in Washington state are the same, we have financial assistance for exactly this reason. We'll help with the rent, groceries, bills, etc. while they're on respiratory isolation (this doesn't usually last more than a couple weeks, but that can still be a lot of lost work time), and get them to and from clinic visits and handle their directly observed therapy. We don't want these people untreated and it's as big a financial burden to them as you say it is. Source: public health TB physician for 15+ years
- bdcravens 4y ago
  > this doesn't usually last more than a couple weeks, but that can still be a lot of lost work time Are there protections against them losing their job?
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    (IANAL) California is an at-will state generally, so the answer is usually no. It is illegal in California for someone to be terminated for using their accrued sick leave, and firing someone solely on their medical condition is also illegal. But these are folks who can't afford a prolonged employment discrimination lawsuit, and I've had patients lose their jobs for "other reasons," which an employer can easily come up with if they want someone gone.
  - plandis 4y ago
    Presumably FMLA would protect their job.

lovich 4y ago

Mental health support is probably the answer to people waving knives around in public too. We don't let them keep the knife however, to protect their liberty. This person needs to be locked up because at minimum, if we accept that its a mental health issue and not maliciousness, they are incapable of not endangering others around themselves. Not getting her treatable fatal disease cured also implies she is incapable of not endangering herself either, but that's less troubling than what she does to others.

jojobas 4y ago

Mental support doesn't want when the recipient doesn't want it or doesn't care.

anenefan 4y ago

I don't think mental health support encompasses issues due to personality types. The vast number I've seen that do this don't seem to have anything out of the ordinary, they probably score slightly higher on narcissistic and socipathic traits. Sadly a lot of the people who ended up as my close acquaintances and including some family are like that, people I call Travellers since they don't stay at home when they're sick and like to go visiting. It took me a while to realise that the unexpected drop in, no that's no just hay fever ... I'm unlucky in that I seem to be very susceptible to respiratory illnesses. I really can't see any treatment for people who literally go visiting ten minutes after thinking they're done with a dose of the squirts.

hgsgm 4y ago
Travelers means something different. Maybe call these people Spreaders.
- anenefan 4y ago
  Spreaders would take in people who have to go to work when they're really sick and or have no idea of good hygiene, for example, visit and use the toilet and simply neglect to wonder why there's a wash basin and or soap and walk back without using them. I can't be too annoyed at those who go to work with the flu, some businesses are run by idiots who don't really care if one worker has the flu and insist they turn up or else.

nitwit005 4y ago

Probably would refuse the mental health support too. If she violated court orders multiple times, electronic home monitoring seems appropriate.

themitigating 4y ago

Why isn't jail the answer here? If by mental health support you don't mean being institutionalized then won't she continue to put people in danger. Most think jail is about protecting others, not a punishment, isn't this a case where it would actually be used for its intended purpose?

classichasclass 4y ago
Sometimes it is. I've had a few TB patients who ended up receiving the entirety of their treatment in custody because they wouldn't stick to it, though this depends greatly on the judge. No one likes putting these folks in jail and it should always be a last resort, but it does happen.

lazide 4y ago

If someone is showing such casual indifference to the well being of others, turning around and putting them in jail seems like a pretty good service to the public to me. And why should anyone care about how this might offend them, if they cared so little about anyone else either?

agr33d 4y ago
I love how we demean one person in a society that, on the whole, refuses to provide cheap, accessible, healthcare with high quality outcomes (US healthcare outcomes lag developing nations). Surely, surely, it’s just this one person failing society. We do not say “it is us failing each other” but this person failing us; the temerity of them!
- lazide 4y ago
  Yeah, fuck you.

ericmcer 4y ago

Is your first instinct that jail is too harsh and we should find them a qualified therapist? I have several elderly relatives (including my 70+ year old parents) and if a person infected them with TB or Covid through gross negligence I would not wonder how we can help that person. I don't know if I am a bad person or what, but I struggle not to fall into tribalistic patterns mentally and view dangerous outsiders as people who should be shunned instead of people who need help. I guess I was just curious if your first instinct is so generous.

luckylion 4y ago
Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices?
- xoa 4y ago
  >Do you consider people with an acute neurosis the same way? Would you shun your sister if she had a sudden mental breakdown and believed to hear voices? This doesn't seem like an honest analogy. The legal/social concern here isn't about the individual, it's about their effect on others, and the extent to which it is willful negligence of something treatable. If someone has a known, treatable mental disorder and, repeatedly, refuses to follow the treatment and then engages in wilful behavior endangering others then yes that can absolutely be an issue. A better example would be epilepsy: in much of the world people with it cannot drive (or are restricted in license type/conditions, no Class C for example), because the accident rate for drivers with epilepsy is over double the baseline. They're not bad people obviously. And my understanding is that just in the last few years some very promising new medications have had studies showing significant improvements without side effects. So perhaps under those treatments it'd be fine for them to drive. But if someone with epilepsy knew they did, refused treatment, lied about it, got a commercial license and then started side swiping people with a semi, then yes they'd be "shunned" (dealt with). It's the "dangerous" qualifier in OP's post that is the big issue.
  - luckylion 4y ago

xen2xen1 4y ago

Have you read about Typhoid Mary? She went from rich house to rich house killing the inhabitants over and over, even after being shown it was her doing it, with government threats. She didn't keep doing it because she was mentally ill, she kept doing it because her livelihood has cooking for rich people. She would have to give up her lifestyle if she admitted she was killing people. Her motives were largely economic, not mental illness. There are MANY reasons people do dumb crap.

elif 4y ago
USD acquisition hyper-primacy is just another form of mental illness.. it is just a socially accepted and ubiquitous one.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  what?
crazygringo 4y ago
There are historians who disagree with you. The idea of an asymtopmatic carrier was not well understood at the time, and she had tests done that came back negative for typhoid. There's a good argument to be made that she genuinely believed she'd been singled out as some kind of anti-Irish conspiracy, that the authorities pinning the infections on her were scapegoating her based on totally hypothetical science. (That today we know the science was sound, but at the time her distrust of it may not have been unreasonable.) So the idea that Typhoid Mary knew exactly what she was doing and did it anyways, makes for a great movie villain, but not necessarily real life. For more details: [1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/typhoid-mary https://allthatsinteresting.com/typhoid-mary
- dTal 4y ago
  Both things can be true. Mary's receptiveness to the idea that she could possibly be an asymptomatic carrier could hardly have been separated from the fact that this would be deeply inconvenient to her. Given the choice between two unlikely explanations (asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, grand "anti-Irish" conspiracy targeting her and her alone for unknown reasons), she chose to believe the one that disrupted her life less. "It is difficult to get a man [sic] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

squokko 4y ago

What's wrong with jail for someone like that? There are some people who just cannot accept that some other people are unfit for civilization, and must be permanently excluded. They search for explanations like "mental illness" when mental illness is a completely different thing than being a complete fucking asshole.

hotpotamus 4y ago
What if she was just forced to wear a mask? Would that be an acceptable compromise?
- squokko 4y ago
  If effective, sure. What mechanism could the state use to enforce this in a cost effective manner?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hilbert42 4y ago

We used to have well established practices to deal with TB and leprosy and that was enforced isolation. Leprosy cases were isolated in special locations by law. Such quarantining practices were commonplace in many countries. As we've seen with COVID that system no longer works. I can only guess why long-standing laws to protect the community are no longer applied. Even as recently as 50 years ago she would have felt the full force of the law—the moment she failed to comply she would have been put in enforced quarantine. If anyone can tell me why the law no longer work/is enforced then I'd love to know.

jimt1234 4y ago

I tested positive for TB back in my early-20s. I was fine, but I still tested positive, and so the county health officials were on me like flies on shit. I had to take a pill every day for a year. They'd give me a monthly supply of pills, and if I didn't pick up new meds at the end of the month, they would call me immediately (and constantly!), pressuring me to pick up my pills. I even moved and changed phone number at one point, yet they somehow found my new number and called me there. These people were intense. I was annoyed back then, but I totally get it now - you know, now that I'm older and give a shit about anyone other than myself. LOL

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> tested positive for TB back in my early-20s Note that if you were inoculated with BCG, you'll show false positive for TB [1]. I had to go on six months of Zithromax as a kid because of this, despite everything from X-rays to blood tests coming back negative. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/testing/testingbcgvaccinated.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/testing/testingbcgvaccinated.ht...
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Only the skim test. I’m British, had the BCG and for my green card had that happen. Blood test proved negative. Now they just go straight to blood test for BCG countries.