3 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. Places that

by 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.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      The nature of mental illness makes it very difficult to keep the serious cases in consistent care. Even with my own fairly mild (on a scale to psychotic) anxiety attacks I didn’t really want to go into new and challenging situations like seeing a doctor. And I had family, job, healthcare.

by 8jef 3y ago

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.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    The nature of mental illness makes it very difficult to keep the serious cases in consistent care. Even with my own fairly mild (on a scale to psychotic) anxiety attacks I didn’t really want to go into new and challenging situations like seeing a doctor. And I had family, job, healthcare.