13 ms·

> 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 s

• 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.
    • DropInIn 3y ago
      For some us states I have zero doubt they'd make such things eligible criteria for placement in a facility, regardless of thier presence in the dsm. Just look at what's happening right now with them violating hippa to attack women trying to survive miscarriages...
    • harimau777 3y ago
      I have ZERO doubt that the Ron DeSantis' of the world would try to lock up LGBTQ people. It's honestly hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking that people like him would try to do it.
      • soligern 3y ago
        I’ll reluctantly back you up on this one. There are definitely people in power right now that would definitely lock up LGBTQ/Black/Women (honestly white males too) under false pretenses. Still, we have to do something about the homeless problem. These handful of people ruin millions of peoples lives.
      • bobsmooth 3y ago
        Did Trump do it? Is Ron worse than Trump?
        • danShumway 3y ago
          On LGBTQ issues, yes. Ron is unquestionably worse than Trump. It's part of his current campaign strategy to call out that Trump is "weak" on LGBTQ "issues." Trump and DeSantis are individuals and their political views can't be reduced to a single scale running from "good" to "bad". They have different approaches to politics and they have different areas that they care about and they approach their political goals using different strategies. They're both bad candidates, but they're bad in sometimes different ways. And there are many, many issues where DeSantis is better than Trump (although that's not saying much, and it's not saying that DeSantis is good on those issues). LGBTQ+ discrimination in specific though is an area where DeSantis is worse.
        • harimau777 3y ago
          This is just the personal impression that I get, but I think that most progressives feel that Ron is worse than Trump. The one exception is that Ron seems to be worse at politics than Trump so I could see some people viewing him as less of a threat.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • abenga 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? Are you asking whether rights people enjoyed for decades can be rolled back? You can't think of a single instance of that happening?
      • imgabe 3y ago
        Lots of things can happen, I’m talking about addressing problems that are happening and not letting hypothetical fearmongering get in the way of doing that. What’s the point here? We should never do anything if even one person can come up with some possible hypothetical scenario where it turns out badly?
        • abenga 3y ago
          The point is _right now, as we speak_ there is a concerted effort to roll back rights and freedoms women and gay people have enjoyed for years; you should not give people doing this more tools to harm people.
          • imgabe 3y ago
            There is also right now an epidemic of homeless people harassing, assaulting, and even murdering people and generally making major cities nearly unlivable. So when you create a false dichotomy between "treat mentally ill people who might murder you" or "lock up gay people", YOU are in fact giving tools to the people who want to lock up gay people. However much your average, non-gay person supports rights for gay people, I guarantee you they support not getting murdered more. So when you force a choice between "maybe, hypothetically, gay people get locked up" and "you might get murdered", people are going to choose the "don't get murdered" side. People, really, really don't like being murdered. Instead, how about we don't force that choice on people? How about we offer the option "don't lock up gay people" and also, "don't let mentally ill people murder anyone"? Call me a crazy idealist if you must, but I really think we just might be able to do both things.
            • 3y ago
    • boppo1 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? Yes. A young woman was recently locked up for 90 days for terminating a pregnancy because she did not have access to legal abortion. There are people who basically want 'white sharia'. I'm sick of the civic rainbow-religion. Get those flags and the moral authoritarianism out of my face. But let us not forget there really are people who think two guys shouldn't be able to hold hands in public or fool around in private.
  • 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.