11 ms·

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

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 for clothing, food and upkeep of the buildings”, studies showing that institutions never actually got patients’ signatures on the forms that were supposed to waive their rights to court hearings. > [He] describes the case of Edna Long, who was hospitalized for “public drunkenness” and “permanently hospitalized in 1952. As Ennis tells the tale, Long received no treatment during the next fifteen years, but was kept busy working at menial jobs in the hospital. After the death of her husband in 1960, the state hospital had her declared incompetent, and seized her assets to pay for her care. Then, they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). Once Long had become too physically ill to continue working, the hospital suddenly found her “competent to manage her own affairs” and released her, to a life of elderly poverty. Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.” [1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransi...

bitwize 3y ago
This sounds like that movie I Care a Lot, which is about a woman who runs a scam getting old folks locked away in care homes while acquiring power of attorney and cleaning out their assets.
- ec109685 3y ago
  That movie was a rollercoaster.
pjlegato 3y ago
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?
iancmceachern 3y ago
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, lobby to have rules and regulations surrounding these institutions that get you what you want. But it doesn't mean we don't need the 90% good they will do for fear of the 10% bad they've done in the past
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Homeless shelters still exist too. It's not about what to call it, it's about whether people are forced to be there.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    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.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      And if you have strong boundaries and rules, there's a subpopulation that won't be allowed to stay there. (Most places have something in-between: policies that exclude a fair number of homeless but still leave enough behavioral issues to produce dangerous and unpleasant places). Of course, resourcing is part of the problem, but it also just can't be one-size fits all.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        It's not just about policies, it's about the layout, affordances, staffing, and so on. If you're set to be stuffed like canned sardines in small rooms, for example, there are fewer boundaries regardless of "policy".
warning26 3y ago
> What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. Yes. This is what we need; the fact is, many mentally ill individuals need help, but are not capable of realizing that they need help, and will refuse any attempt to offer it. Without the power to detain such an individual against their will, that person will remain on the streets, which is a worse outcome for both that person and also everyone else.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. If you can suspend the rights of someone declared mentally ill, the unscrupulous parts of government will be tempted to declare politically inconvenient people mentally ill and strip them of their rights. Even in the United States, this happened during the suffragette movement; those women hunger striking for the vote were sometimes imprisoned in asylums for hysteria.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Don't worry, in today's climate it will be people outside the consensus opinions of the elites getting locked up, so clearly "bad people" /s
  - warning26 3y ago
    > The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. Even something as simple as detaining a criminal is "carving out an exception to human rights". You're correct that this could be abused, but so can any law. It's possible to mitigate though; that's the entire reason for the concept of an independent judiciary.
    - EatingWithForks 3y ago
      I don't think detaining a criminal is the counter-example you want to be using here. If anything, the horrific and egregious ways that the incarcerated are treated is proof that the government is incapable of not further harming people who they deprive of human rights.
m463 3y ago
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 was cut. Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others". Many homeless people are these mentally ill people, and can't get help (and they can't be forced in unless they are dangerous, which is usually how recovery begins). Additionally, some clearly mentally ill people suffer from anosognosia, which seems to fix their self-image in their mind to eliminate any self doubts or insight into their mental image. At a minimum, there needs to be a way - with checks and balances - to support recovery for people who don't have insight into their disease, and the current system doesn't provide it. I also think it would pay for itself, as lots of mentally ill people don't get proper treatment, yet are still a huge burden on the health care system.
- htss2013 3y ago
  >Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others". People talk as if this standard is the source of problems, but it's a fine standard. We just don't enforce it. Eg, if a homeless drug addict overdoses and is brought back by the fire dept with narcan, this is clearly someone who is a danger to themselves. They should be treated no differently than someone rescued from a suicide attempt. Fentanyl itself changes the imminent danger of being an opiate addict because there's no remotely safe way to use it. Any chronic user of Fentanyl is a danger to themselves. Someone who is unable to maintain basic level of health on the street is the same. Do you have infected wounds festering? Teeth rotting out of your mouth? The government would take away a pet dog from someone in that state, but for a human doing it to themselves, no problem.
  - TurkishPoptart 3y ago
    A devil's advocate view is, if someone has no regard for their own wellbeing, why should taxpayers be forced to foot the bill for their care? There are resources for those who want rehab, food, and a safe place to sleep in my city, but if those people want to keep using dangerous drugs, it complicates everything else.
dmatech 3y ago
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 with medical orders than someone in a very precarious living situation. So forced institutionalization will likely affect the marginalized the most. It's still the right thing to do if the risk is severe enough.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mlyle 3y ago
  > 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 to others. (Yes, I'm aware a whole lot slip through the cracks, but this is a resources and administrative capacity issue, not an issue of the laws we're operating under).
  - sam345 3y ago
    >"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.
sgath92 3y ago
> A typical case from this time... the case of Edna Long, ...they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). ...Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.” This practice is widespread today minus the slave-labor component in the form of the guardianship system, underwhich people who work as "guardians" give kickbacks to healthcare providers to identify wealthy geriatrics. The guardian, once one of these victims is identified, has them declared incompetent (even if the victims are still living independently with no apparent problems), and then takes over all their financial resources and complete control over their healthcare. The end result is the elderly person or couple is forced into a nursing home against their will; their family will be barred from visiting or corresponding with them; and the guardian walks away with a percentage of their net worth (with the reminder going to the cost of the nursing home). In states that are popular destinations for retirees like Nevada, the court system sees families who oppose this fraud/practice as evidence in favor of it happening, with judges & guardians often arguing that it shows the next of kin(s) are only concerned with money and that's why they don't want their (up until now healthy and independent) retired parent going into a bottom barrel nursing home. > What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. What they want, is a way for socially undesirables (an intentionally vague and flexible category) removed from society in a way that avoids the guilty emotions invoked by executing them. 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. The cruelty towards these people was the goal itself. People were warehoused in feces without clothing instead of employing enough staff to change people & do the laundry often enough. I have been to the house of Pennhurst's head psychologist from the "bad years." When he went into a nursing home a contractor bought his Federalist era farm to use it as his own-home and found that the doctor had gone insane from the guilt that his career had given him; he lived his last decades off the grid with no heating, electricity or running water; had a hole in the decaying roof that he had dragged a 19th century clawfoot tub under to collect water, and filtered the rainwater through old bedsheets and used that for cooking/drinking. The farm, with brush & grass 3ft thick grew over everything; the barn filled with a massive dragon's hoard pile of intellectual books (many of which I got to keep as souvenirs), while the hidden loft had been turned into some kind of computer & photography studio with restraints, camera arrays and so on. I forget whose case it was, but sometime after Kaczynski was sent to ADX Florence, there was a criminal who was sentenced to join him there. The judge remarked at sentencing that they were to be sent "where people's souls go to die" or something to that effect. That. Was the real purpose of our state Asylums.
wk_end 3y ago
Why do you think this was a "typical" case, as opposed to atypical one? Do you think that "typical" outcomes these days are better?
8jef 3y ago
> 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. Places that lock up people against their will with little recourse are called prisons these days. To be fair, prisons always existed, it's just that now, the're primarily used for putting away folks suffering from mental illnesses and dependency to substances.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  When my grandma had Alzheimer’s we put her in a nursing home and took away her legal ability to leave. And what is Alzheimer’s but a really bad, invariably terminal mental illness? To call a mental hospital a “prison” is to rhetorically group it with an extremely violent, cold, and otherwise unpleasant institution. But a mental hospital doesn’t have to be.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    And prisons don't have to be. Think of the resorts rich white collar criminals get put away in.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Sure, but the difference is compassion. Unfortunately, many people have little compassion for those sent to prison, so they don't particularly care what kind of conditions prisoners face. It's terrible, but that's just how many humans are. I think most people wouldn't find it hard to show compassion toward an Alzheimer's patient, and want them to be in a safe place with good conditions and good medical care. Why is it so hard to extend that compassion to a wide variety of mental illnesses? We've come a long way from the late 60s in our understanding of mental illness (when many abuse-riddled mental institutions in California started being forced to release their patients and eventually shut down). The stigma around mental illness has not completely evaporated today, but we've made a lot of progress. I think it's fairly safe to say that if we opened a bunch of mental institutions tomorrow, we could come up with and enforce a humane set of standards on them, and that the abuses of the past would largely be, well, a thing of the past. No system is ever perfect, of course, but I think we'd do a lot better than back then, and we'd overall have a better situation than we do today.
soligern 3y ago
For that one example of abuse, there are a thousand cases where a mentally ill person didn’t assault someone on the street or break into their vehicle. I’m all for preventing abuse but there must be a way for asylums to exist with high bars for entry and stringent regulation to keep the abuse at bay. The current situation in untenable- 50 seriously mentally ill people can ruin entire cities for the millions that live in them.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I do still have empathy for the people themselves too. It is certainly not fun to have serious un/poorly treated mental illness and being thrown on the streets to fend for yourself. Most aren’t attacking people, they’re just suffering in their own hell. Being in a controlled environment where they’ll have to take appropriate medication and treatment would be much better for themselves
novok 3y ago
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.
- sneak 3y ago
  The nonconsensual nature of them is the airtight argument against them, generally.
david38 3y ago
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 large numbers of mentally ill people who are given a bottle of pills and just released to fend for themselves. This became common after the development of certain medications and the government felt it was a lot cheaper than institutionalizing them.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831467
1000bestlives 3y ago
It's so weird how people get taken advantage of when they abdicate their responsibility to themselves.
Exoristos 3y ago
Do you have the actual source?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bitwize 3y ago

This sounds like that movie I Care a Lot, which is about a woman who runs a scam getting old folks locked away in care homes while acquiring power of attorney and cleaning out their assets.

ec109685 3y ago
That movie was a rollercoaster.

pjlegato 3y ago

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?

iancmceachern 3y ago

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, lobby to have rules and regulations surrounding these institutions that get you what you want. But it doesn't mean we don't need the 90% good they will do for fear of the 10% bad they've done in the past

amadeuspagel 3y ago
Homeless shelters still exist too. It's not about what to call it, it's about whether people are forced to be there.
- coldtea 3y ago
  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.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    And if you have strong boundaries and rules, there's a subpopulation that won't be allowed to stay there. (Most places have something in-between: policies that exclude a fair number of homeless but still leave enough behavioral issues to produce dangerous and unpleasant places). Of course, resourcing is part of the problem, but it also just can't be one-size fits all.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      It's not just about policies, it's about the layout, affordances, staffing, and so on. If you're set to be stuffed like canned sardines in small rooms, for example, there are fewer boundaries regardless of "policy".

warning26 3y ago

> What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. Yes. This is what we need; the fact is, many mentally ill individuals need help, but are not capable of realizing that they need help, and will refuse any attempt to offer it. Without the power to detain such an individual against their will, that person will remain on the streets, which is a worse outcome for both that person and also everyone else.

bobthepanda 3y ago
The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. If you can suspend the rights of someone declared mentally ill, the unscrupulous parts of government will be tempted to declare politically inconvenient people mentally ill and strip them of their rights. Even in the United States, this happened during the suffragette movement; those women hunger striking for the vote were sometimes imprisoned in asylums for hysteria.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Don't worry, in today's climate it will be people outside the consensus opinions of the elites getting locked up, so clearly "bad people" /s
- warning26 3y ago
  > The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused. Even something as simple as detaining a criminal is "carving out an exception to human rights". You're correct that this could be abused, but so can any law. It's possible to mitigate though; that's the entire reason for the concept of an independent judiciary.
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    I don't think detaining a criminal is the counter-example you want to be using here. If anything, the horrific and egregious ways that the incarcerated are treated is proof that the government is incapable of not further harming people who they deprive of human rights.

m463 3y ago

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 was cut. Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others". Many homeless people are these mentally ill people, and can't get help (and they can't be forced in unless they are dangerous, which is usually how recovery begins). Additionally, some clearly mentally ill people suffer from anosognosia, which seems to fix their self-image in their mind to eliminate any self doubts or insight into their mental image. At a minimum, there needs to be a way - with checks and balances - to support recovery for people who don't have insight into their disease, and the current system doesn't provide it. I also think it would pay for itself, as lots of mentally ill people don't get proper treatment, yet are still a huge burden on the health care system.

htss2013 3y ago
>Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others". People talk as if this standard is the source of problems, but it's a fine standard. We just don't enforce it. Eg, if a homeless drug addict overdoses and is brought back by the fire dept with narcan, this is clearly someone who is a danger to themselves. They should be treated no differently than someone rescued from a suicide attempt. Fentanyl itself changes the imminent danger of being an opiate addict because there's no remotely safe way to use it. Any chronic user of Fentanyl is a danger to themselves. Someone who is unable to maintain basic level of health on the street is the same. Do you have infected wounds festering? Teeth rotting out of your mouth? The government would take away a pet dog from someone in that state, but for a human doing it to themselves, no problem.
- TurkishPoptart 3y ago
  A devil's advocate view is, if someone has no regard for their own wellbeing, why should taxpayers be forced to foot the bill for their care? There are resources for those who want rehab, food, and a safe place to sleep in my city, but if those people want to keep using dangerous drugs, it complicates everything else.

dmatech 3y ago

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 with medical orders than someone in a very precarious living situation. So forced institutionalization will likely affect the marginalized the most. It's still the right thing to do if the risk is severe enough.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mlyle 3y ago
> 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 to others. (Yes, I'm aware a whole lot slip through the cracks, but this is a resources and administrative capacity issue, not an issue of the laws we're operating under).
- sam345 3y ago
  >"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.

sgath92 3y ago

> A typical case from this time... the case of Edna Long, ...they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). ...Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.” This practice is widespread today minus the slave-labor component in the form of the guardianship system, underwhich people who work as "guardians" give kickbacks to healthcare providers to identify wealthy geriatrics. The guardian, once one of these victims is identified, has them declared incompetent (even if the victims are still living independently with no apparent problems), and then takes over all their financial resources and complete control over their healthcare. The end result is the elderly person or couple is forced into a nursing home against their will; their family will be barred from visiting or corresponding with them; and the guardian walks away with a percentage of their net worth (with the reminder going to the cost of the nursing home). In states that are popular destinations for retirees like Nevada, the court system sees families who oppose this fraud/practice as evidence in favor of it happening, with judges & guardians often arguing that it shows the next of kin(s) are only concerned with money and that's why they don't want their (up until now healthy and independent) retired parent going into a bottom barrel nursing home. > What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse. What they want, is a way for socially undesirables (an intentionally vague and flexible category) removed from society in a way that avoids the guilty emotions invoked by executing them. 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. The cruelty towards these people was the goal itself. People were warehoused in feces without clothing instead of employing enough staff to change people & do the laundry often enough. I have been to the house of Pennhurst's head psychologist from the "bad years." When he went into a nursing home a contractor bought his Federalist era farm to use it as his own-home and found that the doctor had gone insane from the guilt that his career had given him; he lived his last decades off the grid with no heating, electricity or running water; had a hole in the decaying roof that he had dragged a 19th century clawfoot tub under to collect water, and filtered the rainwater through old bedsheets and used that for cooking/drinking. The farm, with brush & grass 3ft thick grew over everything; the barn filled with a massive dragon's hoard pile of intellectual books (many of which I got to keep as souvenirs), while the hidden loft had been turned into some kind of computer & photography studio with restraints, camera arrays and so on. I forget whose case it was, but sometime after Kaczynski was sent to ADX Florence, there was a criminal who was sentenced to join him there. The judge remarked at sentencing that they were to be sent "where people's souls go to die" or something to that effect. That. Was the real purpose of our state Asylums.

wk_end 3y ago

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

8jef 3y ago

> 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. Places that lock up people against their will with little recourse are called prisons these days. To be fair, prisons always existed, it's just that now, the're primarily used for putting away folks suffering from mental illnesses and dependency to substances.

janalsncm 3y ago
When my grandma had Alzheimer’s we put her in a nursing home and took away her legal ability to leave. And what is Alzheimer’s but a really bad, invariably terminal mental illness? To call a mental hospital a “prison” is to rhetorically group it with an extremely violent, cold, and otherwise unpleasant institution. But a mental hospital doesn’t have to be.
- bitwize 3y ago
  And prisons don't have to be. Think of the resorts rich white collar criminals get put away in.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Sure, but the difference is compassion. Unfortunately, many people have little compassion for those sent to prison, so they don't particularly care what kind of conditions prisoners face. It's terrible, but that's just how many humans are. I think most people wouldn't find it hard to show compassion toward an Alzheimer's patient, and want them to be in a safe place with good conditions and good medical care. Why is it so hard to extend that compassion to a wide variety of mental illnesses? We've come a long way from the late 60s in our understanding of mental illness (when many abuse-riddled mental institutions in California started being forced to release their patients and eventually shut down). The stigma around mental illness has not completely evaporated today, but we've made a lot of progress. I think it's fairly safe to say that if we opened a bunch of mental institutions tomorrow, we could come up with and enforce a humane set of standards on them, and that the abuses of the past would largely be, well, a thing of the past. No system is ever perfect, of course, but I think we'd do a lot better than back then, and we'd overall have a better situation than we do today.

soligern 3y ago

For that one example of abuse, there are a thousand cases where a mentally ill person didn’t assault someone on the street or break into their vehicle. I’m all for preventing abuse but there must be a way for asylums to exist with high bars for entry and stringent regulation to keep the abuse at bay. The current situation in untenable- 50 seriously mentally ill people can ruin entire cities for the millions that live in them.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I do still have empathy for the people themselves too. It is certainly not fun to have serious un/poorly treated mental illness and being thrown on the streets to fend for yourself. Most aren’t attacking people, they’re just suffering in their own hell. Being in a controlled environment where they’ll have to take appropriate medication and treatment would be much better for themselves

novok 3y ago

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.

sneak 3y ago
The nonconsensual nature of them is the airtight argument against them, generally.

david38 3y ago

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 large numbers of mentally ill people who are given a bottle of pills and just released to fend for themselves. This became common after the development of certain medications and the government felt it was a lot cheaper than institutionalizing them.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831467

1000bestlives 3y ago

It's so weird how people get taken advantage of when they abdicate their responsibility to themselves.

Exoristos 3y ago

Do you have the actual source?

deleted 3y ago

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