One of Ronald Reagan’s gifts to California was a homelessness problem. He closed down the state’s asylums and never built the community based netowrk that was supposed to care for the mentally ill. The homeless caused an increse in petty crimes, which meant you needed more police and jails.
It worked so well he took it national when he was elected President.
I’m British and we have our fair share of crazy homeless people. However, I was absolutely shocked when I visited San Francisco at the levels of crazy I saw wandering the streets. It was unbelievable and would just straight up not happen in the UK, these people would be in a hospital or care home.
This is how it begins. Trump and his idiot sidekick fascist moron Mike Johnson will try to do a 1939 round 2 against all the gays, transgenders, stoners and while they’re at it the jews again because fuck people.
As an American Jew, I think one of the big reasons why the right is so pro-Israel is because it gives them a place to ship people like me to. They will ignore that I was born in the US, have never been to Israel, have no plans to go there, and that my ancestors didn’t even come from there. (Eventually, if you go far enough back, they might, but my attempts to trace my ancestry hit a dead end in Poland.)
The right love that they could just round up all the Jews in America, stick them on a plane, and dump us in Israel to “dispose” of us.
They weren’t “shoved”, zionism was thought up and promoted by Jewish people. Widespread antisemitism in Europe was indeed a major reason for it, but still.
Yesterday, browsing wikipedia, stumbled on articles that talked about this very thing, on how Russia took advantage of mental health systems. They started to classify nonconforming, rebels as mentally ill. A frequently used diagnosis was sluggish schizophrenia. Anyone who was socially awkward, thought differently got this diagnosis. Cuz if someone is questioning our government, they must be sick in the head
They used this heavily for decades to discredit political rivals, forcible confinement, lock them away, work camps. Think gulag archipelago.
I get it, mental institutions are responsible for some of the most egregious human rights violations of the 20th century.
But that’s an argument to REFORM those institutions, not ELIMINATE them.
We should learn from the lessons of the past and, at the same time, make sure people get the mental health care they need.
If they can be successfully treated and released? Fantastic. If they need to be held for the rest of their lives? It’s better than allowing them to roam the streets posing a danger to themselves and others.
I’ve worked in both Community Living Housing and one of the Last Institutions in Canada (Which I recently learned has closed as well). And I got FAR more training and resources to do my job at the Institution, and the residents had far more supports and programming. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, we need to reopen institutions, and just have better systems in place to prevent abuse
I guess my point is that governments dont have infinite amounts of money. With traditional institutions all of the money that gets budgeted all goes towards one complex where it can be used to its fullest, which allows for better funding for staff training and better community programming for the residents, as well as specialty staff (MDC had dedicated dr’s for the residents, providing them faster access to a doctor than the rest of us would get). Funding issues aside, community living is great for medium to high functioning individuals, but can be AWFUL for lower functioning ones. In an institution, a high needs low functioning individual can get more socializing in because they can have 1 staff dedicated to them while the others can just generally overlook the other residents. With community living, as the staff is spread out, this can lead to high needs individuals to be locked up in a household on their own, as there isnt the staffing to be able to let them share a place with others or to visit the community (where they would be a danger to themselves and the community). And lastly, since the staff is spread out, there are FAR more instances where theres only a single staff in the household, which personally I think actuallY INCREASES the chance of abuse
I’m sure you know more than me, which should be easy since I don’t know much. My mom was a community liver all my life. Bureaucracy is a fucker for sure, but I wonder if this is also a grass is greener thing? Maybe your institution was good because it was the only one? Community Living is fucked because it follows the path of all Canadian agencies? My mom certainly had nothing good to say about the nuns who ran the show in her youth.
She didn’t have many good things to say about upper management in CL either though.
I think community living is amazing for medium and high functioning individuals, if you can be guided into being safe for yourself and around others reasonably easily by a staff member? Community Living gives you a more “Normal” life. Low functioning individuals however that pose a danger to themselves and others end up far more isolated with community living than they’d be in an institution. MDC, the institution I worked at had just as horrific a history as most of the other institutions did, I think though, after working there, that was more due to the times than it was due to it being an institution, as, like I said, as of 10 years ago, there was two weeks of training before staff was even allowed to start working on any of the wings, meanwhile with community living I was kind of just thrown into the fire and had to figure things out as I went. Positives with community living mentioned though, I DO have to once again point out we live in a capitalist society, and Community Living requires more funding spread out, which is harder to pry from the government, than an institution gets, which means it inevitably ends up getting less funding for its residents.
Counterpoint: Mentally ill people have the same rights as everyone else and therefore can’t be locked up without a criminal conviction, no matter how annoying their symptoms may be.
Then we need a national version of the Baker act to commit them for their own welfare. Just because they haven’t harmed anyone else (yet) doesn’t mean allowing them to roam loose isn’t actively harming them themselves.
How about before we look into finding ways of permanently locking away mentally ill or neurodivergent people, who are already relegated as second class citizens, we find ways of shifting our civic budgetary concerns away from bloated PD coffers and into mental health and advocacy programs instead?
Yeah, no thanks. The moment you lock away groups of people “for their own good” is the moment the majority of the voting public dehumanizes them and only ever perpetuates an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality in regards to policy.
There is a real storm coming across all of the world in regards to our collective mental health crisis and we’re doing a very good job of ignoring it or thinking that reactionary policy that historically has shown to be terrible on most accounts is the best way to confront it.
This is going to play out much the same way as our climate crisis unless we start truly examining, at a policy level, why our contemporary institutions are failing us collectively.
You really should have a solid financial plan in place if you want to become mentally ill in america. Its not up to my tax dollars to subsidize your choices!
Having it classified as a mental institution should give him some huge tax breaks and government funding as well. He has certainly proved he has mental illness.
They flat out don’t understand how federal laws are enforced. Most of the shitty anti-welfare or anti-handout “ideas” they have would not save money. I always ask these chucklefucks if they would still support those ideas if they cost more than they saved. They can never answer that question.
At first I thought this might be a good thing, but then I realized “wait a minute. If Trump wants it, it must be horrible and fucked up in some way.” So I read the comments.