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S15 EP153: Hour 3 - Johnathan Hamby, Lindsay Clancy, and Why America Must Reopen the Mental Hospitals

Episode length: 37m

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Erick closes the show with the most personal monologue of the day, previewing his Atlanta Journal-Constitution column on Johnathan Hamby, the psychotic man who stabbed a stranger to death on the Atlanta Beltline, arguing that deinstitutionalization was cruelty dressed up as compassion. He walks listeners from his hometown of Jackson, Louisiana, where the state mental hospital's steam whistle set the town clock, to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, once the largest mental institution in the world with 12,000 patients, and asks what is actually more humane: a bed, three meals, and enforced treatment, or a bridge in Atlanta. Callers Linda, Susan, Sharon, Pat, Lynn, Tony, and Kathleen close out the Lindsay Clancy conversation with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the timed errand entered into evidence, and the over-medication of patients by non-medical prescribers.

Topics:

  • Johnathan Hamby, the Atlanta Beltline stabbing, and Erick's Atlanta Journal Constitution piece on how we failed him, plus anosognosia and why you cannot force a schizophrenic man to accept treatment he does not believe he needs
  • Growing up in Jackson, Louisiana, in the shadow of the state mental hospital, Dixon Correctional Institute, and the case for reopening Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia
  • The death penalty, abortion on demand, and euthanasia: Erick's argument that a society that stopped punishing the willful taking of life has itself stopped valuing life, with Genesis and the fare gate jumpers in Los Angeles as evidence
  • Lindsay Clancy callers: retired pediatric nurse Linda on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and DFCS calls, ABC News reporting that Clancy timed her husband Patrick's errand, and retired clinical psychologist Kathleen on non-medical therapists stacking psychiatric medications
  • Defending Patrick Clancy against the online mob, and Erick's mass psychosis thread: COVID isolation, doom scrolling, screens rotting brains, and why breaking bread with an actual human being is the fix
  • Erick's cooking videos, touching grass, and why real-world friends beat social media friends
Host:
Erick Erickson