“a book about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the destructive effects on our society that it has caused. I keep getting told that no one is interested in the topic.”
It’s more like they’re saying, “Nyahnyahnyahnyah...I can’t hear you!!!!”
“Normalizing” people is another mantra of the Left that just doesn’t work AND that no one in power wants to dismantle. “Heavens, we can’t imply that they’re *gulp* abnormal!” Same old story in about every subject area.
Cuckoo’s Nest did more to harm us than any other single book that I can think of (with the exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and to turn America on it’s head. And the crazies and untreated addicts and alcoholics (as usual, the ones the looney left says they bleed for) suffer the most. Schizophrenics shivering in their winter coats on the streets of LA are NOT having fun and enjoying life. They used to be protected ... now many of them are prey.
You know our good buddy Sheriff Dupnik, after he got done blaming Sarah Palin, mentioned this issue.
Mental illness and the mainstream media.
ping
You are so right....I was working for Medicaid in the seventies when the institutions were being emptied without any workable plan for these people. Some of them had been institutionalized since childhood and suddenly they’re turned out. Nursing homes were supposed to take them but quickly found out they were not equipped to handle that level of need....so, the nursing homes began to discharge them...where?....to the streets...and voila...we have what we have now!
The mental health system in this country is totally screwed up but I have the belief that our rulers do not want us to have good mental heatlh....if we do...then we will get wise to them....and that is now happening. If you let drugs destroy people and families and you allow mentally ill people to continue without adequate treatment...then you are too wrapped up in your own needs to pay much attention to Washington. I hope you will find a good historian type to publish your book. One that wants the truth to be known. Good luck!
This another in a long list of failed brainless liberal schemes they now want to blame on "evil" conservatives. Liberals never seem to pay a political price for their failures and stupidity.
It’s not society’s problem. This case is just like the Virginia Tech shooter. In that case the parents simply dumped their child in college knowing he was mentally ill and did nothing to report it which would have probably stopped that tragedy. This case is starting to look the same. Society is not the problem except in the general sense that the society has promoted and condoned bad parenting.
Our “mental health professionals” are too busy normalizing sodomy and pedophilia to bother with psychos who shoot up schools and shopping centers. I would venture that 99.9% of them are registered Dems or worse.
Thanks for posting this. I will be getting his book. The left in this country are the ones who insisted that the criminally insane and nutters be left on the streets and thrown out of hospitals.
Many, many of these mentally ill people are not capable of taking care of themselves, and the hands of others, including their parents, are tied. Once the adult "child" reaches legal age, the parents have no rights at all. I worked with a lady a few years ago who had a schizophrenic son. She took him to his regular psychiatric appointments, but was never allowed to talk with the psychiatrist, to tell him what she saw or what she thought about how his meds were or were not working, because he was an adult. Never mind that the definition of schizophrenia includes loss of touch with reality; the psych went by the young man's self-assessment of how he was doing, only. His visits, BTW, took about 5 minutes.
One hallmark of schizophrenia is a lack of insight into their condition. Schizophrenics think that they are fine and that their thought processes make perfect sense; it's the rest of us who are crazy. Yet they are let loose to take care of themselves, while sometimes totally lacking the ability to do so. Stopping their medications is a very common occurrence; they don't think they need them, because they are doing just fine (even though the rest of us may think the individual is crazy as a bedbug). Some can do very well, inside a sheltered institutional setting. They do very poorly outside of that.
As the author points out, mental hospitals had a bad reputation. Is what we have done to these people any better? Many, many mentally ill individuals have been killed on the street, been abused and victimized, been killed by law enforcement to prevent their harming others, and have committed murder and other crimes. What has happened to the mentally ill since "deinstitutionalization" is as much a shame and disgrace as anything that was done to anyone in any mental institution.
Deinstitutionalization is wrong on so many levels. It is not beneficial to either the ill person or society. BY FAR, the people who suffer most because of it are the mentally ill people. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous to anyone but perhaps themselves. The mentally ill should not, as a rule, be feared nor treated as though they’re dangerous. They need to be loved and cared for. Allowing them to wander the streets disconnected with reality and unable to manage their own personal affairs does them no favors.
One of the things that I did not like from Reagan is he cut the final funding to these hospitals. The flood of crazys has been unrelenting ever since.
The mentally ill are treatable. Sociopaths aren’t.
Maybe now is a good time to retry getting your book published. I said on another thread how it’s interesting
that the parents haven’t come forward to apologize for
their son’s behavior, which is usually the good and heartfelt thing to do. But, I think they have been told
to keep it quite, to not mention all the problems that
they have had trying to get help for their son. The Mental
Health issues are a big problem in our society. The ACLU
comes in and tells these nuts they can get out, nothing
wrong with them, its everybody else...
I was introduced to someone’s boyfriend last summer; the guy could easily become one of those written about in this book. He had a story about being in the Army and being sent to Korea. Since he was doing intelligence, he was locked up in a cage while on duty; off duty, shady Koreans followed him around and would have killed him for spying, except that he had friends who protected him. He now gets a disability pension from the Army—I wonder why (I ask rhetorically)? Someone who is that delusional should be confined in a hospital. Talking to him, I got a strong feeling that the best place to be is somewhere far away from him—he’s creepy.
I have a friend whose mother is schizophrenic and has been taking drugs that poorly control it for years. This woman, whom I’ve known for most of my life, however, is not dangerous. She lives alone but my friend checks on her and talks to her every day.