Posted on 04/23/2007 6:20:59 AM PDT by RKV
I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.
...
The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases.
Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for even a few days: A stranger with a law degree will show up at the hearing and paint you as a fascist. So it's far too much to expect anything resembling a decisive approach to those whose level of threat remains at the verbal level.
Given the excesses of the past--husbands committing troublesome wives, involuntary sterilization of those judged defective--extreme caution is warranted. But like drunk drivers, we sway from one side of the legal road to the other and find the sensible center lane elusive.
Unless we confront the unpleasant fact that the brains of a small percentage of our citizens incubate dark, disturbed thoughts that can blossom into vicious behavior, we can look forward to repeats of last week's outrage.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
A society that takes a libertarian point-of-view toward the mentally ill also has to take a libertarian point-of-view toward armed self-defense. That’s where the equation is breaking down.
And what pray tell is the libertarian view of armed self-defense in your understanding? My sense is that you have it backwards, and are just looking for a cheap shot.
It was as much a money decision on the right as a social engineering decision on the left. No one is clean on this one.
So many street people are the mentally ill. When the states closed their hospitals to “integrate” the mentally ill into society the ill neither integrated nor was their state of living improved. We simply stopped paying attention to them.
It is time to update and bring back the hospitals.
Shame on the state governments at the time, dumping the unfortunates so as to have the money to spend on other things.
This is an excellent article. It sums up the bizarre combination of fashionable leftist thought (the “insane” are just reacting to the injustices of capitalism) and conservative money-saving that led to the mentally ill (now referred to as “homeless”) camping all over our cities. The money-saving approach was very short-sighted: with the resulting crime, lost income, and health-care costs, closing the mental health hospitals was probably one of the most costly cost-cutting strategies ever taken.
I think it also had a very destabilizing effect on our society. People were afraid to say that somebody was simply crazy and dangerous, and we began tolerating behavior that was more and more horrible every day. I don’t think it’s ever been documented, and maybe it couldn’t be, but I think the rising level of violence in our society in the last 40 years had a lot to do with the sudden infusion of mentally ill people into it. AMong the left, such as the professorial class, this resulted in a tendency to consider extreme behavior as just another kind of self-expression (unless you happened to be the unfortunate victim of somebody’s self-expression).
And as for people in general, it deprived them of objective social standards for what was acceptable in society: if they said the homeless woman who lived on a heating grate and threw feces at them and assaulted them unless they crossed the street had no right to be doing that because it was not proper behavior in civilized society, a judge would come along and say that it was just fine because there was no such thing as proper social behavior. Eventually, everything became just fine and the voice of reason got smaller and smaller.
Another example of defining deviancy down.
You are welcome. This is a difficult topic - as many different interests intersect in ways that occlude the public safety issue. I am old enough to remember when homeless people were rarely seen on the streets (and I suspect they their actual numbers were quite a bit lower as well). Now days that’s pretty much what an indigent mentally ill person has to look forward to.
As we used to say in New York when we saw encampments of reeking, raving “homeless” people in the subway, “Ah, community based mental health care...”
Oh nevermind. I thought this was the thread 2 of Will FR embrace socialism...
I don't want President Hillary Clinton to have an easier time of committing her political opponents to mental institutions based on "clear evidence of incorrect thinking", and unfortunately, that's exactly where the article's recommendations would lead - no matter how well-intentioned the author might be. It was a standard tactic in the Soviet Union. Better to know that there are going to be occasional Fruit Loops walking around, and to have a self-reliant citizenry prepared to deal with them as necessary.
Good comments and good article.
In Texas, we used to have what I thought was a perfect marriage of the state hospitals, and state prisons. Much of the furniture, clothing, and food for the state hospitals was produced by inmates.
Then attorneys for the criminals who grew the food, made the furniture, and sewed the clothes started crying foul.
It was wrong to make the prison inmates produce these goods.
Instead, the inmates should be able to watch tv, and lift weights, and do what they pleased. More money was needed to sustain the MH system since the contributions from the prison system disappeared.
Soon, the mentally ill were living behind shops on Guadalupe street in Austin, under overpasses, and bridges. IMHO, it was a complete disaster and gutting of the system.
It’s just gone downhill from there as far as I’m concerned. There was something that worked, for the most part, and lawyers, legislators, and accountants broke it totally.
It’s obviously a little more complicated than my brief synopsis, but I can remember driving around and taking clients who were not assigned to me to go get their TB shots because their lazy case managers said, “If they want
TB treatment, they need to get their own rides down to TDH.”
With 22 active TB patients running around our small town, I thought it was in the community’s best interest to get them down for their shots.
Kellerman’s article is spot on. A voice of reality based reason, which is nice in the area of mental health.
i saw this earlier this morning in my print edition, and he’s right.
i remember the community movement to release the mentally ill to the streets. it was much-discussed at the time in the university town i lived in.
most of the homeless are mentally ill, if not, drug and alcohol users.
why doesn’t bill gates and warren buffet put some money on this? why do all our billionaires go liberal?
This reminds me of the situation with illegal immigration, in that the costs of a political decision just get moved around, they don’t go away. I know that it is hard to put a dollar value on some things, but I know I place a pretty high value on my life (and those of my family), and that’s what it’s come down to.
don’t.
i added warren!
If you think this is a problem of occasional fruit loops, you have never lived in a big city. Do you really think a civilized society should be a place where the normal citizens have to walk around armed all the time so they can pop the nuts who attack them?
Of course you have to have safeguards, review processes, etc., as the author mentions. But if your government has gotten so corrupt that it’s committing you to a mental hospital for thought crimes, that’s a separate issue; the point is to make sure that your government doesn’t get to that stage, not to deny the mentally ill the health care they need.
I work in San Francisco every day. Fruit Loop Central. The vast majority of the so-called homeless are non-violent, and would slink home to mooch off of Aunt Martha if the city stopped paying them to hang around and make the desired political statement against the "evils of global capitalism".
Civilized societies have proven remarkably good at stepping on human rights when they needed to make the trains run on time. At this point in American history, I don't see how handing government more power to imprison people against their will would not end up leading to more abuses than good results.
The billionaires go liberal because they want the rest of us to pay for their charities. They pay 15% on capital gains and we pay 28% on income, plus they don’t pay social security taxes. Liberalism is good for billionaires and the poor, and bad for everyone else in the middle.
Kellerman is a famed anti-gun researcher (or at least his bogus “homes with guns are xx times more likely to suffer murder” study that the anti-gunners love.)
But this is all he says on guns:
“At the very least, in a better world, time spent on psychiatric watch could’ve been used to justify placing the Virginia killer on a no-buy gun list. I’m not naïve enough to believe that illegal firearms aren’t within reach for anyone who really wants them, but just as loud dogs deter burglars and crime rates drop during harsh weather, sometimes making life difficult for a would-be criminal is enough.”
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