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Some folks go into psychology and psychiatry to find out what’s wrong with them. Not all, by any means, but there are examples.
Too many words of agreement to write! I went through twenty psychiatrists to get to a really good one for my mom.
Someday I’ll get a podium so I can yell at the rest of them. :)
I’m sitting here realizing that this is still too emotional for me to speak coherently on. I guess all I can do is what I did, and tell people that there is hope. But I really understand the hot emotions on all sides of this issue.
I once saw a “group home” someone thought would be good for my mom. It was so terrible, and I was so upset I pounded a hole in the dashboard of my car! The pain in families dealing with this is horrific.
While SOS’ explanation is sufficient, if you require further information, I would recommend Clayton Cramer’s book, My Brother Ron
for a more complete history of the deinstitutionalization movement and the consequences thereof. I think it explains the history of mental health care in the US very well, as well as highlighting the problems SOS points out.
The kindle version is $1.49 but please use the link from the Ricochet main page if you choose to buy.
My Brother Ron is a wonderful book for anyone wanting to understand how we got where we are on institutionalization v noninstitutionalization and the parts about his family must have been tough for Cramer to write about.
Martial Resources? OK, have you taken one of the pills you hand out? Have you changed someones prescription several times?
Your own experience is all the resources I need if you stop making pretty pictures.
I agree with both Bryan and Marci. My experience began in the late 1960s and I saw the problems with commitment laws that were too loose and terrible facilities. I supported reform and then saw the pendulum swing so it became almost impossible to get treatment for the severely mentally ill.
I’m not sure what you are expecting from people. That medications react somewhat differently in different people, is an unsurprising fact, that in no way invalidates their usefulness.
It is impossible for any doctor or psychiatrist to know with certainty which drugs or combination of them will solve a given persons problems. They have to be tried. There is nothing barbaric about the process.
Is your suggestion that the severely mentally ill and society at large are better off without attempts to treat their problems medically?
Interesting article on this topic just went up on NRO
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/377920/americas-mentally-ill-have-nowhere-go-patrick-brennan
On a related note while the US prison population has increased greatly over the past 30 years it is (as a % of total population) about where prisons plus mental hospitals were in the 1960s.
You really are pretty insulting. I have spent 22 years working with these populations, trying to care for people as best we can without the resources that we have. I resent your implication.
I know the medications help people when they are given correctly. But they are not always administered correctly.
At one point, my mother was at Bournwood Hospital, a very upscale private mental hospital. (The other hospitals were full, so, thankfully, she ended up there.) But even there, conditions were not good. She was so neglected, it was really appalling. But the worst thing was that she visibly overmedicated. She could not lift her head off the pillow. It was frightening. When I saw her doctor, he said, “Yeah, we’ll have a look.” Seriously? Postsurgical patients are not treated that way.
I understand the public’s desire to see reinstitutionalization. But I hope no one is deluding themselves thinking this is a fantastic thing. Human nature being what it is, if you put ten people and a warden in a locked-ward situation, you get a prison.
When I visited my mother at Danvers State Hospital, the other patients would grab me and say, “Please get me out of here.” Locked-ward institutions are not good. If the community would stay involved and visit these places, maybe they could work. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
If you follow the link I posted, it is clear I am not for warehousing people in big central hospitals. I want to give brief stays to stabilize acute crisis, and then have services in the community. It is what we do.
We serve 4000 people a year in the County Jail. As incarceration rates go down, the numbers we serve stay steady. If we had more staff we would serve more.
We still lock up the Mentally Ill. We just use Jail.
Thank You for verifying my well meaning charlatan label.
Do you want the Police bringing you people who you force to take drugs?
Would you act peculiar if the police dragged you off to a cage?
Is your argument that no one is severely mentally impaired, or that such conditions never make them a danger to all around them?
I’m having a hard time understanding your position if you don’t believe one of those two things.
I worked in the system and did my best too. That is not the point. The point is different tiers of rights for an arbitrarily decided
condition and abuse of power. You must know mentally ill people are severely oppressed, how is that improved by having less rights?
As a Ricochet member you must also be aware of the culture of government over-reach in the age of Obama. How could I not not harshly insult and criticize the culture of cretins handing out pills and wishing to incarcerate?
Frank, What I said, that is my argument, I have no idea what you are talking about.
You have dismissed the entire notion of forcing the insane to take medication that would mitigate their insanity.
I must assume that you either don’t believe the insane exist, or that you don’t believe they are ever dangerous.
If neither of those statements describe you, you cannot reasonably oppose the premise of forcing the insane to take medication. If you are concerned with abuses and over reach, your focus should be there, not against the very concept of forcing treatment in such cases.
Hydrogia,
Please respond to a good faith question. If you don’t have resources please tell us. If you want to ask a further question, ask it without being snide. If you have a story to tell of how someone has suffered by bad treatment, please tell us. This is the Ricochet way of debate.
So, we don’t lock them up. We don’t force the medication. Do we wait for them to kill someone and then execute them? Do we make the police go into a situation where it is shoot or be shot? Do we just tell the relatives, “Hey, he’s your responsibility. If you don’t control him, we’ll prosecute you and people can sue you for the damage done?” Do we just let them kill people? “Sorry about your sister, but Hydrogia was off his meds again. We wouldn’t want to interfere with his rights.”
While I am very favorable with libertarian arguments, part of it is that rights convey responsibilities. Some of these folks, by definition, are not responsible for their actions. If one is incapable of being responsible for one’s actions, it is hard to argue they should have full rights.
What is your solution?
Hydrogia,
I wrote #48 before I read your current comments.
There definitely needs to be a balance. What do you suggest for people who are a harm to themselves and others? What guidelines do you suggest for making those decisions?
I am for liberty and freedom. But when someone is no longer a rational actor (i.e. they are hearing voices that tell them to kill themselves or others, or they sleep in the woods because they are too paranoid for treatment), I do not think it is right or proper to do nothing. It is not oppression to move someone from under a bridge to a safe place where he can get food and shelter.
You appear to have one version of how things work that is all about forced medication.I can tell you that forced medication is rare, and used only in extreme circumstances in GA. We do not do it in our SU. Maybe 4 people a year of the people we see (75ish a month) refuse meds at all. They get better in the 3-6 days we have them. They don’t stay locked up forever.
So, where do you get off calling me names? My staff do damn fine work in a hard situation. They work for less monthly than they could make in the private sector because they believe in the mission. None of use are “charlatans”.
So why support less rights for your patients?
My solution is equal rights. Mental illness is not an indicator of criminality.
Wake up sheeple.
Your solution appears to be to ignore the hard cases. This makes debates easier as you don’t have to consider them, but is problematic in the real world.
Because we have differing opinions does not make us “sheeple.” Isn’t that a term used by disaffected teenagers with Ché t-shirts?
None of us are arguing that any and all mental illness qualifies a person for the special treatment that should be reserved for those who are truly dangerous to themselves or others. We are speaking of things done on a case by case basis. Some cases of mental illness do lead to criminality. The highly publicized multiple-murder cases are the tip of the iceberg. You’ll never hear about 99% of the incidents unless they are local. “Local Woman Found on College Campus with Knife” might be all that the police blotter on page D4 of the paper says, because her husband is very prominent and the police know her and know that she got off her meds again. They take her home and file a report. Her husband gets her to take her meds, takes her to the doctor the next day, and life goes on quietly until the next time.
As such, Pelosi-Barber also protects Democratic lobbies that are currently feeding from the federal trough and want to continue doing so. That includes federally funded lawyers who fight to keep the seriously mental ill out of treatment, as well as to a huge array of Samhsa-funded anti-psychiatry groups, such as the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, that oppose treatment for those most sick.
Thank you for a great article. As a former police officer I have been on calls involving paranoid schizophrenic individuals. One of the calls was a disturbance and when we entered the motel room we found out that we were dealing with a homicide. Our suspect had stabbed his roommate to death. A mental health agency found our suspect housing and nothing else. No follow up on meds or treatment. I’ll be contacting my representative. Thanks again for the article.
Hydrogia,
Let’s try this a different way. There are approximately 300,000 incidents of drunk driving per day in the U.S. Yet only about 30 drunk driving related deaths per day.
As you can see, it is an incredibly low percentage of drunk drivers that end up causing fatal crashes. Clearly Drunk driving isn’t an indicator of dangerous driving…right?
Are we violating peoples rights when tell them they can’t drive drunk? The correlation between mental illness and violence is small, but substantially larger then the correlation between drunk driving and fatal crashes.
Is society allowed no preventative measures, or when a persons faculties are by definition impaired, may it take steps to protect people?
I’m suddenly wanting to see The Ruling Class again for some reason.
Hydrogia,
Why use the derogatory term “sheeple”? It can be used toward you to. Do you really think your ideas are original? Maybe you need to wake up and have some answers to give to a mother of a dead daughter because your ideas of “freedom” were followed. Remember respect goes both ways. I am beginning to feel that you don’t want to honestly engage the argument but name call. This is common and boring.
I have not advocated treating people with mental illness as criminals. In fact, far from it. However, I do not think it is humane to let someone who’s rational mind is not working to suffer a great deal of misery, and to cause their loved ones to suffer a great deal of misery, because “freedom”.
Someone in the throes of mental illness is not “Free”.