Why isn't family REQUIRED to care for them?
It's too easy to load up government with this.
Our country didn't start out this way ... families and churches cared for this - not the government. Yes, I know, it might be an inconvenience to the family ... we are a narcissistic society and irresponsible as well.
Our country didn’t start out this way ... families and churches cared for this - not the government. Yes, I know, it might be an inconvenience to the family ... we are a narcissistic society and irresponsible as well
Are you kidding? Have you ever had a severely mentally ill person in your family? In the past they were killed or tortured or like today in prison. Our compassionate forefathers saw a need and developed Town Farms and Insane asylems to help these poor souls live so that they would not molest general society or be molested.
The current system is much more expensive with the patients either being ignored OR the have 24 hour personal care attendents sometimes even two at a time. Mental health care for the seriously ill is a tragic and growing industy.
What happens when the family doesnt want anything to do with them? Then what? Leave em out on the street to cause havoc? Is that the way to do it?
As someone who's family with such a member WHAT EXACTLY do you suggest we do in the case of a mentally disturbed family member who can't understand that they are ill, given that the state makes it virtually impossible to have them involuntarily committed for treatment?
For the same reason my friend who has breast cancer feels that everyone else should pay for her treatments. Basically, "It's expensive."
People don't want to give up their creature comforts, by and large, and want other people to shoulder the cost. It's easier to imagine some greedy evil corporate bazillionaire than some regular joe who's got his own problems. It amazes me how people have become less and less self-reliant over the years.
It can be best summed up by a Simpsons quote, "Get someone else to do it."
nmh, I know that you speak sincerely. But you have, obviously, never faced this problem personally.
The families, despite their best efforts, CANNOT care for the severely mentally ill. These people will not accept help. They don’t think they need it.
We currently have a family member who feels on top of the world. He’s manic. He’s paranoid. He’s carrying a gun. We know it, and law enforcement knows it. He calls, but he doesn’t stay in one place for long.
Why is he out, you ask?
Because he’s just sane enough to fool the system. He told the last mental health pro who evaluated him that the gun was to shoot squirrels. He can calm himself enough to make minimal sense for a few minutes at a time. He’s learned to keep his mouth shut.
He won’t go for voluntary treatment. He gets violent and profane when it’s suggested.
He can’t be involuntarily committed till he’s judged a threat to himself or others. By that time, it may be too late.
And we, the family, will be blamed. Meanwhile, I keep my doors locked.
Careful judging till you’ve walked in the moccasins.
Never underestimate the ability of an insane person to tear apart their own families. The reason that so many of the insane are wandering the streets is that their families had no choice but to kick them out.
It is not a free choice, they are near collapse, physically, emotionally, and financially. Often the mentally ill person is either nearly catatonic from drugs and depression, so must be cared for continually, fed, and cleaned, yet unable to respond. Or else they reject their drugs because of the painful side effects, and are incoherent, menacing, intensely paranoid and lash out unpredictably causing damage and injury to themselves and others.
When out on the street, they have nothing, and quickly fall victim to others or victimize some innocent person. If they are known to be mentally ill, or it is quickly determined, after arrest, at first they will be put in a County facility with a maximum stay of two weeks. Then they will be turned loose again.
Most State facilities operate at or above full capacity, so unless they are uncontrollable, they are arrested and put in prison. Only as a last resort are they put in a State asylum, where they are daily drugged so much that they sleep almost continually. After some months of this, they are so damaged and weak that they are just being held until they die.
This is why the courts eventually decided that even if they could live on the streets, it was a “better” life, though they were offensive to the population as a whole. This forced the States to release them, and they soon discovered it saved a lot of money, so they now support doing this as well.
The only significant improvement since then has been to take those who are not insane, but who just have “diminished mental function”, the retarded either naturally, chemically, or by accident, and put them in group homes, where just one or a few caregivers would be able to give them a reasonable life. Some of the earlier stage mentally ill are also in this situation, but it doesn’t last too long, because their minds deteriorate.
But the rest of the insane are boned. And despite periodic calls for society to do *something*, *anything* to improve the situation, the bottom line is that we want to, but just have no clue as to how.
Everybody wants to help them, but nobody has any ideas.
“Why is it ALWAYS up to the STATE to fix this problem?
Why isn’t family REQUIRED to care for them?
It’s too easy to load up government with this.
Our country didn’t start out this way ... families and churches cared for this - not the government. Yes, I know, it might be an inconvenience to the family ... we are a narcissistic society and irresponsible as well.”
Boy, it’s easy to tell when folks have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
Look into the history of what used to happen to the seriously mentally ill. It wasn’t nice lovable families and churches taking care of them and everybody living happily ever after.
The reforms that emptied state mental hospitals didn't mean we actually stopped paying for the costs of taking care of people with mental illnesses.
In large part, we just ended up taking care of a lot of mentally ill people through the prison system- American prisons are perhaps the largest provider of mental health services in the country.
I'll leave it to the reader to figure out whether this approach has been an improvement when it comes to cost and treatment of the mentally ill.
Why isn't family REQUIRED to care for them?
Most families are wholly incapable, physically, economically and medically, to deal with a paranoid schizophrenic or someone with serious bi-polar disorder or other serious mental health issues.
How do you take care of someone who won’t take their medicine?
Also the legal climate has changed.
If you so much as grab someone nowadays that you share a household with, even to keep them from hurting themselves, that is Domestic Violence and if the Police are called they take YOU away.
There have been cases (at least one that I know of, and more such incidents that I have read about online) that even such a thing as a husband trying to take the car keys away from his wife who has been drinking and calling 911 so that the cops would help him get her under control got him arrested for Domestic Violence.
What was he supposed to do? Answers he got afterwards was to ask her for the car keys before she started drinking, or call 911 but don’t touch her.
Don’t believe me? Ask a therapist, a cop, or an attorney.
My guess is big money donations for the "homeless" are drying up. So liberals need job security - with benefits - so it's up to the "state" to take care of the problem. ( The "problem" being unemployed liberals.)
Conservatives usually back off on these issues mistakenly believing dems are the "caring" ones. But just like with welfare reform - where we spotted the perverse incentives, conservatives should craft the debate on this subject.