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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 prot

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 should bring back asylums and then not seriously consider what asylums were at the time. Women who tried to fight for their right to vote were put in asylums and raped.

imgabe 3y ago
> 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?
- pierat 3y ago
  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 be treated against the will of the person. And it's easier to dismiss a 'sick' person since they're obviously out of their mind. So yes, this is something you definitely will have if the asylum system is recreated and/or reformed. Person making different lifestyle choices others don't like? Committed, with no real say or due process.
  - imgabe 3y ago
    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 violence on the streets and living in squalor. These are actual problems that are really happening and you're saying we shouldn't do anything to address them because of hypothetical problems you that you think might happen and that we could easily be aware of and prevent?
    - pierat 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - imgabe 3y ago
        I’m not the one who’s missing the point here. I know people have in the past been institutionalized for bad reasons. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to institutionalize other people who can be genuinely helped. I’m saying we should not institutionalize people for bad reasons and do institutionalize people for good reasons. You seem to think that because some bad cases exist, we should never do any of the good ones, because for some reason you think human beings are fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between the two? Like we couldn’t make reasonable rules and follow them? If that’s the case why have any society at all if you think humans are incapable of creating and following just rules?
        EatingWithForks 3y ago
        You cannot merely wave aside that your proposed solution is a solution that also already evidenced to have caused mental illness on a broad, demographic-specific scale, in the name of solving mental illness! That's patently ridiculous.
        imgabe 3y ago
        Which of the following statements are you advocating for: 1. There is never any reason to involuntarily commit someone 2. There are valid reasons, but there is no known diagnostic that can detect them. 3. There are valid reasons, and we can detect them, but there is no way to prevent people from involuntarily committing people for other reasons, even if we make laws and conduct audits to ensure that only valid reasons and approved diagnostics are used. 4. Something else? You just think the mentally ill are better off living in homeless camps?
        EatingWithForks 3y ago
        You are not addressing my concerns and are mostly creating straw men to avoid that I am pointing out the historical, real, already evidenced harms of the proposed solution.
  - golemiprague 3y ago
    [dead]
- mlyle 3y ago
  > 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? I think we all do see such a middle ground, but think that it's really difficult to hit from a due process point of view. This is a parallel track, from the criminal justice system, to take away peoples' autonomy and rights to choose what happens to their bodies. E.g. maybe we should be focusing on putting real treatment in jails (which tends to be pretty barbaric and ineffective at this point) and using the normal criminal justice system.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  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.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    You cannot interpret people's meaning however you want. If someone wants to "bring back asylums" it's entirely possible (and from the context here, very likely) that they want to bring "back" a version of asylums that never technically existed, but nevertheless both this new thing and the old thing are in the "asylums" category.
    - EatingWithForks 3y ago
      If you want to "bring back" something that never existed, you have to address what the thing actually was that you want to bring back-- and more importantly emphasize what will actually be different. You cannot merely lie about what that thing was you're bringing back, or handwave that its different now because the year is different. There is ample evidence that government officials will sexually assault people, traffic children, forcibly sterilize women, and starve/torture/kill/enslave men that they are responsible for in current day.
      - phendrenad2 3y ago
        No two things at different points in time are identical, so it's technically impossible to bring back something that did exist. I mean, while we're stuck on semantics, let's just do the full thing, no?
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    It's rather obtuse to suggest anyone is arguing to take a Delorian back to 1955 and bring back asylums completely intact with nurse Ratched. Yeah, how about full-service gas stations and Doowop hits too?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- harimau777 3y ago
  What sort of protections do you advocate putting in place to prevent that?
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    The medical community already has well-developed ethics and treatment rules.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      The medical community also had ethics and treatment rules when asylums where common and they didn't seem to help much. Even if the doctors themselves are moral, what prevents politicians from putting their thumb on the scale? We are already seeing them override physicians on gender affirming care. What prevents politicians of finding a small number of immoral doctors who are willing to rubber stamp whatever they want?
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Sorry to be harsh, but these hypothetical (and nearby) concerns are not important enough compared to the daily atrocities I see in downtown LA. There’s egregious harm happening now. Also it’s not uncommon to discourage procedures for minors until they are able to lawfully consent. So your example is muddy.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  I think when you look at history it doesn't predict the future, but it tells you what is possible. What we had is possible, it did happen. Why? What was the system of alignments and incentives that led to that being the case, and how are we different now? I do think that if you want to bring back asylums, a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat, you must have an answer. Talking about taxation in America is a political death sentence. Privatization of public services is still extremely rampant. How are you going to get well run asylums if you can't tax or you have a for-profit model? If you want nice things, we have to be getting less corrupt as a country, not more corrupt, and we are most definitely getting more corrupt. I absolutely do not want asylums as long as we are inching towards literal oligarchy, and we definitely are inching closer to it than farther away. Our supreme court justices openly take bribes, and our representatives think it's ethically okay to trade stocks. Our politicians are choosing to carve up districts to keep themselves in power, and some want to absolve the idea of voting altogether and just choose federal candidates from state legislatures. Asylums are running when we can't even walk. The post office was in the process of being dismantled to create pretext to steal an election and you think we can run an asylum? Do you really want an asylum in the context of Ron DeSantis's Florida and GOP rhetoric against trans people? That seems like a bad mix. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
  - bobsmooth 3y ago
    >a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat Asylums are where people are treated, as opposed to the streets where they're a threat to themselves and everyone around them.
heavyset_go 3y ago
Florida has laws on the books that let anyone go to a judge to get an order for forced treatment of someone else for claimed mental illness or addiction, like the Baker Act and the Marchman Act. With the Marchman Act, non-compliance with treatment can have legal consequences, as well. From here[1]: > What happens if the respondent isn’t compliant with the treatment order? > It’s up to the judge but the idea is that non-compliance with a court order equates to contempt of court and is punishable by jail time. This is where the “teeth” or consequences are introduced for someone refusing to comply with the treatment plan. However, we have found that many counties do not enforce treatment orders with jail time. [1] https://marchmanactflorida.com/faq/ https://marchmanactflorida.com/faq/
soligern 3y ago
Things can improve. We can learn from past mistakes and do it better. Have a high bar for entry, have stringent regulations that involve inspections every week etc. The solution is not to just throw up your hands and refuse to do anything about a clear problem and hope it goes away because we failed in the past.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  We can't even bother inspecting our current critical inpatient mental crisis facilities. You cannot seriously claim we should be bringing back an evidently widely abused institution because we can regulate it, when we already have widely abused institutions that are not regulated. We had, in our most respected medical facilities, numerous women subjected to extremely painful ovarian harvesting with no pain relief and it turns out a nurse was stealing pain medication from the patients for YEARS. You cannot seriously suggest bringing back yet another widely abused institution when our current institutions already abuse people to a horrific, systemic extent, as if it will solve anything.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    Absolutely this. The burden of proof here is on people proposing some kind of happy regulated system to prove that we are in any way as a society capable of building those systems. And it's not just that mental health and inpatient care in the US is under-regulated, under-funded, and abusable -- our society still has debates about mental health and still suffers from widespread stigmatization of people with mental health issues. We have not shaken off the social attitudes and beliefs that led to the original widespread abuse within asylums. If someone is proposing forced asylums you have got to grapple with the fact that Florida legislature considers being transgender a mental disorder and that Florida is fully willing to try and weaponize social services and child protective services to attack families with transgender members. You can't just gloss over that, you have to understand how a state like Florida will immediately try to weaponize an expanded system of forced asylums. "We'll just have strong standards that prevent abuse" -- how? A nontrivial number of states right now are actively trying to use medical standards to oppress or eliminate a minority group. I'm sure Texas is going to have great standards on when the State can lock someone in an asylum. /s
novok 3y ago
Asylums are prison type 2, and I am already subjected to the possibility of prison for crimes. Most arguments against asylums is an argument against criminal prosecution, police and prisons in general. Make the standards the same then and only subject to committing an actual crime in the first place?
- danShumway 3y ago
  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 legal system that allow for better rehabilitation of prisoners, particularly better rehabilitation for prisoners who suffer from mental disabilities or illnesses. Prisoners should have more access to mental health services, and prisons should be focused on treating and caring for prisoners who are struggling with mental health issues. And of course, prosecution already exists today, so prison reform changes nothing about prosecution, it would merely improve conditions for people forced into that system who have mental disabilities. Call it what it is -- prison, and then lets make prisons better. Sure, I'm on board. But wait. Is that what people are calling for, even in this thread? People here are advocating that the government should have the ability to forcibly commit someone to an asylum. Well, wait a second, don't they already have that ability? What ability are workers currently lacking? They can forcibly commit someone to a prison once they've committed a crime and have been prosecuted. That system already exists, we have sentencing for crimes. So what do they want? The fact that people are talking primarily about needing the ability to forcibly commit people indicates that they don't believe that police or judges or the legal system has that ability right now. They are arguing that current abilities to imprison people are not enough. They believe the State should have more power to forcibly imprison people than it currently does and that under certain situations the State should have the ability to expand prison sentences, possibly even indefinitely. Otherwise they'd just be talking about prison reform and this wouldn't be a debate at all. Nobody is against prison reform[0]. ---- [0]: Well, okay, many many people are against prison reform, but nobody who is worth paying attention to when they talk about justice or human rights or care for the mentally ill is against prison reform.
languageserver 3y ago
> You could simply be protesting while black or female, do you have any sources for the occurrence of such events in the latter part of the 20th century?

imgabe 3y ago

> 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?

pierat 3y ago
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 be treated against the will of the person. And it's easier to dismiss a 'sick' person since they're obviously out of their mind. So yes, this is something you definitely will have if the asylum system is recreated and/or reformed. Person making different lifestyle choices others don't like? Committed, with no real say or due process.
- imgabe 3y ago
  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 violence on the streets and living in squalor. These are actual problems that are really happening and you're saying we shouldn't do anything to address them because of hypothetical problems you that you think might happen and that we could easily be aware of and prevent?
  - pierat 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - imgabe 3y ago
      I’m not the one who’s missing the point here. I know people have in the past been institutionalized for bad reasons. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to institutionalize other people who can be genuinely helped. I’m saying we should not institutionalize people for bad reasons and do institutionalize people for good reasons. You seem to think that because some bad cases exist, we should never do any of the good ones, because for some reason you think human beings are fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between the two? Like we couldn’t make reasonable rules and follow them? If that’s the case why have any society at all if you think humans are incapable of creating and following just rules?
      - EatingWithForks 3y ago
        You cannot merely wave aside that your proposed solution is a solution that also already evidenced to have caused mental illness on a broad, demographic-specific scale, in the name of solving mental illness! That's patently ridiculous.
        imgabe 3y ago
        Which of the following statements are you advocating for: 1. There is never any reason to involuntarily commit someone 2. There are valid reasons, but there is no known diagnostic that can detect them. 3. There are valid reasons, and we can detect them, but there is no way to prevent people from involuntarily committing people for other reasons, even if we make laws and conduct audits to ensure that only valid reasons and approved diagnostics are used. 4. Something else? You just think the mentally ill are better off living in homeless camps?
        EatingWithForks 3y ago
        You are not addressing my concerns and are mostly creating straw men to avoid that I am pointing out the historical, real, already evidenced harms of the proposed solution.
- golemiprague 3y ago
  [dead]
mlyle 3y ago
> 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? I think we all do see such a middle ground, but think that it's really difficult to hit from a due process point of view. This is a parallel track, from the criminal justice system, to take away peoples' autonomy and rights to choose what happens to their bodies. E.g. maybe we should be focusing on putting real treatment in jails (which tends to be pretty barbaric and ineffective at this point) and using the normal criminal justice system.
EatingWithForks 3y ago
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.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  You cannot interpret people's meaning however you want. If someone wants to "bring back asylums" it's entirely possible (and from the context here, very likely) that they want to bring "back" a version of asylums that never technically existed, but nevertheless both this new thing and the old thing are in the "asylums" category.
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    If you want to "bring back" something that never existed, you have to address what the thing actually was that you want to bring back-- and more importantly emphasize what will actually be different. You cannot merely lie about what that thing was you're bringing back, or handwave that its different now because the year is different. There is ample evidence that government officials will sexually assault people, traffic children, forcibly sterilize women, and starve/torture/kill/enslave men that they are responsible for in current day.
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      No two things at different points in time are identical, so it's technically impossible to bring back something that did exist. I mean, while we're stuck on semantics, let's just do the full thing, no?
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  It's rather obtuse to suggest anyone is arguing to take a Delorian back to 1955 and bring back asylums completely intact with nurse Ratched. Yeah, how about full-service gas stations and Doowop hits too?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
harimau777 3y ago
What sort of protections do you advocate putting in place to prevent that?
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  The medical community already has well-developed ethics and treatment rules.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    The medical community also had ethics and treatment rules when asylums where common and they didn't seem to help much. Even if the doctors themselves are moral, what prevents politicians from putting their thumb on the scale? We are already seeing them override physicians on gender affirming care. What prevents politicians of finding a small number of immoral doctors who are willing to rubber stamp whatever they want?
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      Sorry to be harsh, but these hypothetical (and nearby) concerns are not important enough compared to the daily atrocities I see in downtown LA. There’s egregious harm happening now. Also it’s not uncommon to discourage procedures for minors until they are able to lawfully consent. So your example is muddy.
hayst4ck 3y ago
I think when you look at history it doesn't predict the future, but it tells you what is possible. What we had is possible, it did happen. Why? What was the system of alignments and incentives that led to that being the case, and how are we different now? I do think that if you want to bring back asylums, a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat, you must have an answer. Talking about taxation in America is a political death sentence. Privatization of public services is still extremely rampant. How are you going to get well run asylums if you can't tax or you have a for-profit model? If you want nice things, we have to be getting less corrupt as a country, not more corrupt, and we are most definitely getting more corrupt. I absolutely do not want asylums as long as we are inching towards literal oligarchy, and we definitely are inching closer to it than farther away. Our supreme court justices openly take bribes, and our representatives think it's ethically okay to trade stocks. Our politicians are choosing to carve up districts to keep themselves in power, and some want to absolve the idea of voting altogether and just choose federal candidates from state legislatures. Asylums are running when we can't even walk. The post office was in the process of being dismantled to create pretext to steal an election and you think we can run an asylum? Do you really want an asylum in the context of Ron DeSantis's Florida and GOP rhetoric against trans people? That seems like a bad mix. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  >a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat Asylums are where people are treated, as opposed to the streets where they're a threat to themselves and everyone around them.

heavyset_go 3y ago

Florida has laws on the books that let anyone go to a judge to get an order for forced treatment of someone else for claimed mental illness or addiction, like the Baker Act and the Marchman Act. With the Marchman Act, non-compliance with treatment can have legal consequences, as well. From here[1]: > What happens if the respondent isn’t compliant with the treatment order? > It’s up to the judge but the idea is that non-compliance with a court order equates to contempt of court and is punishable by jail time. This is where the “teeth” or consequences are introduced for someone refusing to comply with the treatment plan. However, we have found that many counties do not enforce treatment orders with jail time. [1] https://marchmanactflorida.com/faq/ https://marchmanactflorida.com/faq/

soligern 3y ago

Things can improve. We can learn from past mistakes and do it better. Have a high bar for entry, have stringent regulations that involve inspections every week etc. The solution is not to just throw up your hands and refuse to do anything about a clear problem and hope it goes away because we failed in the past.

EatingWithForks 3y ago
We can't even bother inspecting our current critical inpatient mental crisis facilities. You cannot seriously claim we should be bringing back an evidently widely abused institution because we can regulate it, when we already have widely abused institutions that are not regulated. We had, in our most respected medical facilities, numerous women subjected to extremely painful ovarian harvesting with no pain relief and it turns out a nurse was stealing pain medication from the patients for YEARS. You cannot seriously suggest bringing back yet another widely abused institution when our current institutions already abuse people to a horrific, systemic extent, as if it will solve anything.
- danShumway 3y ago
  Absolutely this. The burden of proof here is on people proposing some kind of happy regulated system to prove that we are in any way as a society capable of building those systems. And it's not just that mental health and inpatient care in the US is under-regulated, under-funded, and abusable -- our society still has debates about mental health and still suffers from widespread stigmatization of people with mental health issues. We have not shaken off the social attitudes and beliefs that led to the original widespread abuse within asylums. If someone is proposing forced asylums you have got to grapple with the fact that Florida legislature considers being transgender a mental disorder and that Florida is fully willing to try and weaponize social services and child protective services to attack families with transgender members. You can't just gloss over that, you have to understand how a state like Florida will immediately try to weaponize an expanded system of forced asylums. "We'll just have strong standards that prevent abuse" -- how? A nontrivial number of states right now are actively trying to use medical standards to oppress or eliminate a minority group. I'm sure Texas is going to have great standards on when the State can lock someone in an asylum. /s

novok 3y ago

Asylums are prison type 2, and I am already subjected to the possibility of prison for crimes. Most arguments against asylums is an argument against criminal prosecution, police and prisons in general. Make the standards the same then and only subject to committing an actual crime in the first place?

danShumway 3y ago
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 legal system that allow for better rehabilitation of prisoners, particularly better rehabilitation for prisoners who suffer from mental disabilities or illnesses. Prisoners should have more access to mental health services, and prisons should be focused on treating and caring for prisoners who are struggling with mental health issues. And of course, prosecution already exists today, so prison reform changes nothing about prosecution, it would merely improve conditions for people forced into that system who have mental disabilities. Call it what it is -- prison, and then lets make prisons better. Sure, I'm on board. But wait. Is that what people are calling for, even in this thread? People here are advocating that the government should have the ability to forcibly commit someone to an asylum. Well, wait a second, don't they already have that ability? What ability are workers currently lacking? They can forcibly commit someone to a prison once they've committed a crime and have been prosecuted. That system already exists, we have sentencing for crimes. So what do they want? The fact that people are talking primarily about needing the ability to forcibly commit people indicates that they don't believe that police or judges or the legal system has that ability right now. They are arguing that current abilities to imprison people are not enough. They believe the State should have more power to forcibly imprison people than it currently does and that under certain situations the State should have the ability to expand prison sentences, possibly even indefinitely. Otherwise they'd just be talking about prison reform and this wouldn't be a debate at all. Nobody is against prison reform[0]. ---- [0]: Well, okay, many many people are against prison reform, but nobody who is worth paying attention to when they talk about justice or human rights or care for the mentally ill is against prison reform.

languageserver 3y ago

> You could simply be protesting while black or female, do you have any sources for the occurrence of such events in the latter part of the 20th century?