Posted on 08/22/2019 9:20:59 AM PDT by bitt
It wasn’t a well-studied policy statement, but President Trump wasn’t wrong when he told reporters that closing mental asylums en masse in the 1960s went too far — and that a humane society needs institutions to shelter and care for those who are instead populating our streets.
“If you look at the ’60s and ’70s, so many of these institutions were closed,” the president said last weekend. “And the people were just allowed to go onto the streets. And that was a terrible thing for our country. … But a lot of our conversation has to do with the fact that we have to open up institutions. We can’t let these people be on the streets.”
There was, indeed, a time when that was well understood. By the 19th century, there was a nationwide system of asylums that ensured a place for those who couldn’t care for themselves and whose families couldn’t care for them.
By 1940, 450,000 patients were institutionalized in public mental hospitals nationwide. Though the care given to the mentally ill was far from perfect, it aspired to be therapeutic — albeit lacking the antipsychotic medications so crucial today in treating schizophrenics, such as my great-uncle, or manic-depressives, who then as now constituted the other major group of the severely disturbed.
Yet beginning in the 1960s, horror stories from the most poorly run asylums became fodder for a liberal movement that asserted that mental illness was a “myth,” setting the stage for the massive de-institutionalization drive that has left too many of the troubled to fend for themselves. The federal government has played a role, limiting the use of Medicaid funds for those housed in large institutions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Personal Care homes exploded all across America and a lot of people had jobs that required nothing more than baby sitting adults.
Yes, there were serious mental problems that perhaps (only because I don't know) should have been institutionalized.
MY inner pain was seeing magnificent red brick buildings being razed and some othe functional building put in it;s place.
Those red brick buildings had a character all their own that I instinctively knew were now on the list of extinct things in human life that humans caused.
And this ties in with homelessness. Isn’t it true, that we aren’t allowed to enforce vagrancy laws or laws against panhandling? Haven’t there been some court cases on these subjects?
Putting homeless people in asylums might solve the problem of street people. But mass shootings aren’t carried out by street people. We need more than new buildings and employees. We need laws allowing for nutjobs to be taken from private homes and put into asylums for the rest of their lives. Trying to get those laws through the mess of liberal Democrats, libertarian Republicans and penny-pinching Koch money recipients will be well-nigh impossible.
Too bad so many of the mentally ill are seeking the Democrat nomination of the Democrat party and others are holding press conferences on the steps of the Capitol.
Too bad so many of the mentally ill are seeking the Democrat nomination of the Democrat party and others are holding press conferences on the steps of the Capitol.
We don't need "more" background checks, we need better data available for existing background checks.
This also means establishing a threshold for reporting, so that seeking mental health treatment is not an automatic disqualifier.
I dunno, do we have enough capacity to hospitalize all the Liberals?
The Dems want to leave room to house their political enemies.
How much does it cost to keep one of those nut jobs in society? Everytime I hear someone huff and puff about it costing $40,000 per year to keep someone in a state pen and we could send them to an Ivy League college for that money, I am reminded of another credible study which says they cost society $250,000 per year when they are out.
BTW, the $40,000 is considerable lower in some parts of the country where they are forced to make do with electric fans rather than central air conditioning or use gym equipment donated by the local school district and repaired by the inmates rather than bought new state of the art.
I agree 1,000 percent. Medical and education personnel need to be required to report aberrant behavior to law enforcement with a required investigation with the possible addition of the person to the FBI database as a person to be denied the purchase of a firearms. Any future attempt triggers another investigation by local law enforcement. The steps incorporating the judiciary need to be worked out. Perhaps the initial investigation triggers a court ordered person of interest designation in the FBI database. The individual can always petition the court get their right restored.
Inpatient wards for Democrats.
One flew over the cookoo’s nest?
How many will be put in crazy wards due to political beliefs, due to folks like Joe Kennedy doing what he did to his daughter Rose?
imho a lot of mental illness can be mitigated by dietary changes — especially by knocking out all sugar. and replacing sugar calories with fat calories
That would be about the same time it was well understood that men can't be women, even if they "feel like it", that homosexuality wasn't "the same love" as marriage, that nobody worried their kid would be kicked out of school because he said the g-word (that's "gun" for you in Rio Linda). So good luck ever getting the politics out of the way long enough to actually, you know, help those with mental illness -- because they're just too good of an issue to exploit.
Something must be done. The question is, what should be done.
We do not have the infrastructure to make all these people “patients” , and I hope we do not want to just warehouse them like many were in many of the institutions closed in the sixties.
Part of me likes the idea, but it is also ripe for abuse.
I think it would effective to get many homeless people off the street. Better for them. Better for us.
But it wouldn’t do much to stop violence. I don’t think we want a system where anyone can get forced into the nut house because their neighbor says, “Oh, he’s a lunatic. He’s going to snap any day now.” That’s really going to get out of hand very fast.
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